The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (68 page)

He did not address substantive problems with the strike. He had only one suggestion for brokering peace: “There’s no way of cleaning ourselves up short of playing the Game . . . I’ve told you and I’ll tell you again, without the Game, it’s a problem.”

The Game had not been played for months. Only Ortiz responded positively to Chavez’s suggestion. Richard led the opposition. He did not need to yell and curse people out, he said; he relieved his frustrations by smacking golf balls. “Are we just concerned about you or are we concerned about the whole board?” Cesar asked.

“I don’t know, they’re free to go play golf, too, if they want,” Richard said, eliciting laughter that broke the tension for a few seconds. Cesar was not amused. Only the Game would help, he insisted. “Some people are afraid of being told things that they’re guilty of,” he said. “Some are willing to take it for the goddamn cause and some are not.

“Fucking meeting of the executive board,” Chavez concluded. “I’m going to bring the growers here and sell fucking tickets to raise money for the strike. Five dollars a ticket to every grower who comes and observes an executive board meeting.”

Chavez had no coherent strike strategy. Disengaged from action on the ground, he made little effort to absorb important details, a skill at which he normally excelled. Ganz recited facts and figures about each company: number of machines and crews at work, boxes processed per hour, percentage loss in production. Chavez repeatedly asked which companies were on strike. He showed little concept of the relative size of companies or the degree of union support. When Chavez said the union had won elections at all but a handful of Salinas growers, board members immediately corrected him. The union had less than half under contract. “You’re kidding!”
¹⁸
Chavez said. “According to me, [speaking] on the East Coast, we have 90 percent.”

Chavez saw no end game for the strike, which was draining the union’s treasury. He pushed to shift resources to a boycott. “I want to go on the boycott!” Chavez told the board. “I love the boycott.
¹⁹
Let me go on the boycott.” Try it for three years, the others responded. The man who had built his union walking into barrios in the San Joaquin Valley and talking to workers one by one now felt more comfortable among the volunteers and boycott supporters.

Confident he would prevail, Chavez told his staff in La Paz to prepare for a boycott. “Funds are almost totally depleted,” he said. “The strike has lost its punch.
²⁰
It’s just not effective anymore.” He said strikers were prepared to go out on the boycott, although vegetable workers had never endorsed that plan. “Everybody’s unanimous that it has to be done,” he said. “The question is when, how soon.”

Chavez’s decision met with anything but unanimous approval. First, the executive board balked. Ganz, in charge of the strike again once the harvest moved north into the Salinas Valley, argued they could win in the fields. Most board members agreed. They expressed doubts about boycotting lettuce, which had never been as successful as grapes. The heyday of the boycott had been before the passage of the ALRA. Since then, boycotts had helped pressure companies to negotiate, but they had supplemented, not substituted for, action on the ground.

Chavez had expected to face a more compliant board. He had replaced Eliseo Medina and Mack Lyons with two stalwart supporters—David Martinez, an intense young man who had dropped out of law school to join the boycott staff, and Ortiz, who had known Chavez for several decades. Neither man was likely to prove an independent thinker. “Lone rangers
²¹
just aren’t going to make it anymore,” Chavez said, stressing the importance of unity. “Following the team concept is very critical in the union now.”

When the board did not readily support his plan to phase out the strike in favor of a boycott, Chavez redirected his anger toward a favorite target—Dolores Huerta. They had been sparring partners since the earliest days of the union, but the fights had grown more personal and more intense. Like an old married couple, they knew each other’s trigger points. Chavez could count on Huerta’s loyalty; he was confident she would not leave, no matter how much abuse he heaped upon her. Her identity was completely tied to the union. Staff in La Paz became accustomed to late-night screaming matches in Chavez’s office, which often spilled over into board meetings. There was little if any boundary between the private and professional, particularly since Huerta was Chavez’s de facto sister-in-law. When he had pulled Huerta out of Sacramento as the union lobbyist in the midst of a key battle over the ALRA, she had angrily brought her case to the executive board and demanded a public explanation of why Chavez had taken unilateral action.

“You talk to Richard
²²
and find out why you were taken off,” Chavez retorted. “Don’t blame me. I had nothing to do with it.”

“I am blaming you!” said Huerta, seven months pregnant with the couple’s fourth child.

“Look, Richard wants you to stay home, you’re going to have a baby, and goddamn it that’s why I did it!” Cesar said, angry and patronizing at once. “I did it because he wanted me to do it. He was going out of his mind there in Delano.”

When Chavez was under pressure, Huerta became what she called the “whipping girl,”
²³
a role she leaned into just as Chavez leaned into the physical suffering of his fasts and marches. At the June 1979 board meeting, frustrated with the lack of progress in the Salinas strike and the board’s reticence to shift resources to a boycott, Chavez exploded at Huerta for failing to turn in a few hundred dollars’ worth of receipts, an omission she disputed.

“Don’t you fucking lie! Why do you lie?”
²⁴
Chavez yelled at her. He questioned his brother about a missing receipt, and Richard joined the fray: “I’m fucking sick and tired of being harassed!”

“You’re upset because she’s screaming,” Cesar taunted Richard, before turning back to Huerta: “You’re the goddamn stupidest bitch I’ve seen in my whole life! . . . You’re crazy. I can’t deal with you on business . . . I don’t want you on the board.”

“You have my resignation,” Huerta said as she walked out.

Board members sat in uncomfortable silence, waiting for the tirade to pass.

Chavez had demonstrated that one way or another, with time, he could get his way with the board even on the thorniest question. He proceeded with boycott plans.

In the Salinas fields, the talk was very different. Ganz had resumed daily meetings with the strike coordinators at each company. They pushed to expand the strike to all ranches with expired contracts, so that growers would have greater difficulty recruiting scabs. Aware that Chavez wanted to curtail the strike, Ganz improvised a “pre-strike” mode. Workers staged slowdowns and work stoppages. Rumors of an imminent full-scale strike brought growers back to the negotiating table.

On June 11, the eve of renewed negotiations, thousands of workers rushed the Salinas fields, wreaking havoc.
²⁵
More than seventy-five people were arrested and several workers hospitalized with stab wounds. Ganz and the strike leaders had instigated the violence in a preplanned, calculated attack, an effort to show strength.

Chavez chastised Ganz for rushing the fields without prior approval, in defiance of an agreement made after the death of Rufino Contreras. Chavez expressed particular annoyance about not having known about the action in advance, a function of his distance from the strike. “People get killed, Marshall, when you do that. You have to understand that. I don’t want to be responsible for putting people in the field. Especially when I know nothing about it. It hit me like a ton of bricks . . . The risk to our people is very great . . . Especially if I don’t know. I need to know. Don’t you agree with that?”

After a long silence, Ganz agreed. “I think it was a mistake.”
²⁶

The effort to demonstrate the union’s strength had backfired, Chavez said. The head of the vegetable growers association had turned to Chavez and said, “‘Cesar, we just want you to know that terrorism and escalating terrorism are not going to work.’”

Growers were baffled by the union’s mixed signals. Initially Chavez wanted to negotiate, then he triggered a strike with outrageous demands. Now he wanted to negotiate, and his chief lieutenant staged wildcat actions across the Salinas Valley. Growers speculated about power struggles. They thought Chavez wanted a perpetual strike to justify a boycott operation, which would turn into a presidential campaign for Edward Kennedy or Jerry Brown. The union’s “outlandish demands” and erratic behavior were to blame for the growers’ confusion, Ganz told Chavez: “I think a case can be made that they’re as puzzled about what we want as maybe we are about what they want.”

Richard Chavez agreed. The Salinas workers were clear: they wanted to use the strike to negotiate a contract, not launch a boycott. “It’s our problem,” Richard said. “Not the people’s problem. Don’t blame the people for this one . . . We made a mistake.”

Cesar grew more adamant about ending the strike, taking control, and proving his course of action correct. “I think we should just stop screwing around and double guessing and we should go on the boycott,” he said. “We’re not going to beat them on the strike.” He was convinced growers would not negotiate without a boycott. He pointed to his track record to bolster his case. “My gut feeling
²⁷
with me has been really good, most of the times in my life. My gut feeling is the employers don’t want to negotiate a contract.”

The union’s semiannual convention approached. The board decided to hold a one-day meeting in Salinas on August 12 to show support for the strikers. Chavez proceeded as if the decision to boycott had been made. “On Aug. 13, 1979, hundreds of lettuce strikers will leave California and go to the cities of America to tell the story of their struggle and to seek support for the boycott of Chiquita bananas
²⁸
and non-union iceberg lettuce,” he wrote, soliciting ads for the convention booklet.

The workers proceeded as if the convention would approve a resolution for a general strike against all the vegetable companies. Two marches began the week before the convention, heading toward Salinas from the north and south. They presaged the impending collision.

Chavez began a twelve-day march from San Francisco south through San Jose, hoping to draw the union’s traditional supporters. On the sixth day, he began to fast. The walk only occasionally attracted more than a dozen marchers, including a handful of boycotters recruited for the exercise. At one point, on the outskirts of San Jose, they all suddenly fell down. A minor earthquake had rattled the ground. The others looked around in bewilderment; Chavez was already up and walking ahead, unfazed.

The marchers
²⁹
neared Decoto, the town where Ross had sent Chavez in 1953 on his first organizing assignment. Chavez turned to Scott Washburn and sent him ahead to drum up a crowd. Chavez did not want to return to the scene of his first solo triumph and walk through empty streets with a half dozen people. Washburn turned out a good crowd, and Chavez spoke from the roof of a car, reminiscing about his first house meeting campaign more than twenty-five years earlier.

The second march began in San Ardo, at the southern end of the Salinas Valley. Dozens, then hundreds of workers marched through the rich agricultural lands. As they passed fields, many workers walked out spontaneously and joined the march. “
Esta huelga está ganada
” (this strike is won), chanted Cleofas Guzman, a lechuguero from Sun Harvest who helped lead the march. The crowd swelled to thousands as they neared Salinas.

On August 11, the marchers joined forces, ten thousand strong, and rallied outside Sherwood Elementary School, next door to the UFW office. Chavez entered the rally with Gov. Jerry Brown, now a national celebrity whose recent African safari with girlfriend Linda Ronstadt had landed the couple on the cover of
Newsweek
and
People
magazines. Speeches by labor leaders and political supporters ran so long that the governor missed his flight. He stayed to cheer on the strikers: “Viva la raza. Viva
Cesar Chavez. Go out and win. The victory is yours.”

Hours later, Chavez briefed the executive board, in preparation for a meeting with leaders of the strike. He intended to explain to workers that the union had run out of money and must switch to a boycott. He would ask the strike leaders to recruit members to send on the boycott. Rarely had he so misjudged his audience.

In high spirits from the rally, the strike captains and members of the negotiating committee filed into the room and stood around the seated board members. Chavez updated them on negotiations with Meyer Tomatoes, which appeared close to agreement. His first surprise came when a worker asked who would sign off on the deal if members of the negotiating committee were all busy at the convention. Ganz explained the committee had agreed to review the first contracts, which would set precedents. Chavez made clear he felt the decision was his prerogative.

Warning that the discussion they were about to have should be kept confidential, Chavez launched into his pitch: “The union is broke,”
³⁰
he told the two dozen workers. “We’ve spent $2.8 million. We’ve spent all our money on this strike. If we extend the strike and we don’t win soon, then we have a big problem for the union. It’s going to be hard. No, actually, it’s impossible.” They must go on the boycott, he said.

One by one, respectfully, workers disagreed. They told Chavez their colleagues expected a general strike. They repeated what Chavez had always said he wanted to hear: strikers were willing to sacrifice to win strong contracts for all workers, not just themselves, and they were committed to continue sacrificing for as long as it took. “We have to make a decision we will have to live with forever,” said Chava Bustamante, who took the lead in the discussion.