The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (76 page)

In 1973, Chavez asked Coretta Scott King for permission to name the fund after her late husband. The nickel-an-hour MLK contribution became standard in UFW contracts. MLK would offer services for all farmworkers, but those under contract, who were sacrificing from their paychecks, would be the primary beneficiaries.

For the next decade, the MLK fund operated service centers, health clinics, and day care centers. Much of the money went unspent, accumulating interest. In the fall of 1983, Celestino Aguilar and Cesar Chavez spoke to the MLK board about the potential of investing in real estate. Soon the fund was investing millions of dollars in Aguilar’s projects.

As the union lost contracts, MLK’s income came primarily from interest on investments. By 1986, contributions from workers’ salaries fell significantly below the one-third threshold required for the fund to quality as a public charity. On the advice of counsel, the MLK fund became a private foundation. The joint employer-union board was dissolved. Federal tax law required that the foundation spend its interest income each year.

By 1989, the Martin Luther King Jr. fund was a private foundation with $8 million
²⁵
in principal, effectively accountable to no one but Cesar Chavez. Each year, MLK doled out between $600,000 and $700,000 to other UFW-related enterprises. Money earned by a generation of farmworkers, who had been told their sacrifice would provide services for all farmworkers, had become a subsidy for a growing bureaucracy increasingly removed from the fields.

Chapter 39

The Last Fast

We built this union twice.
⁴
We are now trying to build the union one more time.

As the union’s twenty-fifth anniversary approached in 1987, Chavez obsessed over the smallest details of the celebration. Chris Hartmire was in charge of the festivities, and the minister grew annoyed at Chavez’s intense interest and penchant to overrule decisions at the last minute. The celebration took on outsized importance for the movement’s leader, who would turn sixty years old on Founder’s Day. Hartmire found Chavez’s focus disturbingly self-important.

“Come Join Us, Again, in Delano,”
¹
began the invitation sent to 140,000 people, an appeal to history and nostalgia. Like all the union’s fund-raising letters, the mail was targeted. Attorneys received a letter that stressed how important lawyers had been to the UFW’s success, while the appeal to politicians featured a support committee of elected officials. Religious leaders, environmentalists, Hollywood celebrities, and former volunteers each received a separate pitch. All were invited to join the “Eagle Club”—$5,000 bought Gold Eagle status and a full-page ad in the glossy seventy-six-page Commemorative Journal; smaller contributors were listed as Silver, Bronze, and Black Eagle sponsors.

On May 23, 1987, thousands paid the $25 admission fee to enter a large tent erected on the grounds of Forty Acres. Fred Ross chatted with Jacques Levy. Dozens of guests stopped by Juana Chavez’s chair to pay respects to the family matriarch. Relatives of the five union martyrs
²
planted trees in their honor as five bunches of red balloons were released into the sky. Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino drew cheers as they played familiar huelga songs. ETG sold anniversary shirts and hats, wineglasses, and commemorative programs. Mariachis played all evening as the crowd ate barbecue and danced until midnight.

The cast of religious and labor luminaries was noticeably thinner than in earlier years. There was little in the UFW’s recent past to celebrate. The union had won elections or fought off decertifications at thirty-two ranches in the past five years—and lost at thirty-nine. Chavez vowed to intensify the grape boycott and force growers back to the negotiating table. He summoned visions of the historic 1970 contract signing with John Giumarra that had taken place in the room where they partied: “We’re predicting
³
that growers will again come to this hall and sign sooner than they think.”

Newspaper stories pegged to the anniversary painted a starkly different picture. “Twenty-five years after raising the plight of California’s farmworkers to an international concern, Cesar Chavez has all but left the fields,” began a story in the
San Diego
Union-Tribune
. “Having fought so fervently to win collective-bargaining rights and the nation’s first agricultural labor law, Chavez’s United Farm Workers union now is nearly dormant, with past victories in wages and improvements in working conditions rapidly fading.”

Reporters visited agricultural valleys around the state and found no sign of the UFW. Farmworkers had never seen union representatives. CRLA, Chavez’s old adversary, held seminars to educate workers about minimum wage, overtime, and their rights to bathrooms and work breaks. Recent federal legislation had enabled undocumented immigrants to legalize their status, and growers had set up a $1 million program to help their workers qualify. “If I were Cesar Chavez and I had a law like this, under the amnesty I would try to get all my people back,” said Imperial Valley grower John Vessey. “And he’s doing nothing. He’s off on some tangent regarding pesticides and the grape boycott that is going to put his workers out of work.”

Chavez’s response defiantly acknowledged the decline in the union’s membership: “We built this union twice. We are now trying to build the union one more time.”

The last word in the
Union-Tribune
series went to Eliseo Medina, who was organizing immigrant janitors in San Diego for the Service Employees International Union. “Organizing is always going to mean risks,” Medina said. “The UFW was willing to take them in the early days. They need to go back to organizing.
⁵
That’s what they did best. There’s a void, and if the UFW doesn’t fill it, somebody else is going to step in.”

Some months later, Chavez stopped by a fiftieth-birthday party in San Diego for the movement entities’ longtime counsel, Frank Denison. Chavez stayed only a few minutes. Manuel Chavez told Denison
⁶
that Cesar left when he saw Medina; he would not stay in the same room.

What Vesey called a “pesticide tangent” had become the center of the union’s boycott, educational campaign, and fund-raising efforts. Decades before the organic food movement, Chavez argued that all pesticides were dangerous to farmworkers and consumers. He had expressed concern about pesticides in the earliest negotiations, and the 1970 UFW contracts banned the use of DDT—more than two years before the federal government outlawed the chemical. Pesticides had been a secondary issue for the union during the height of its organizing years. But in the mid-1980s, as he searched for a new villain, Chavez seized on pesticides as a way to again raise the national consciousness about farmworkers. Environmental disasters such as Love Canal, federal Superfund sites, and suspicions about ties between chemicals and disease had increased public awareness. Pesticides drifted from field to field, Chavez pointed out, and seeped into the ground, the water, the fruit, and the workers’ clothes and skin. “We maintain that there are no safe pesticides,”
⁷
he said in a stump speech, “because the sole purpose of a pesticide is to kill living things.”

Marion Moses, who had played an early and important role in Delano as Chavez’s nurse and confidant, had graduated from medical school, specialized in occupational health, and returned to work for the UFW. Pesticides became her cause, and she helped Chavez identify five organophosphates to target in his campaign. Volunteers were given fund-raising scripts
⁸
to use for phone-banking to solicit donations. The UFW raised more than $100,000
⁹
to build its own pesticide lab, and Moses obtained thousands of dollars of donated equipment. The facility never opened.

Back in the summer of 1983, parents in the small San Joaquin Valley city of McFarland had become alarmed about an unusual number of childhood cancers. They met with local and state officials and demanded an investigation. Cancer clusters had become an emotional debate around the United States, fueled by high-profile media stories. Experts differed widely on the dangers but agreed that proving a cause-and-effect correlation was difficult. In the fall of 1986, county officials announced McFarland was safe, a conclusion that pleased no one. Chavez saw an opportunity to humanize the pesticide issue and ratchet up the boycott.

Cancer was complicated, he said, but the suffering of small children was easy to understand. “These cancer clusters
¹⁰
come because of the unregulated use of cancer-causing pesticides,” Chavez said. The union prepared a seventeen-minute video called
The Wrath of Grapes
, narrated by actor Mike Farrell. The film featured some of the young victims, including five-year-old Felipe Franco, born without arms and legs. The pictures of Felipe were taken from a television broadcast and used without his parents’ permission. Grape growers, outraged by Chavez’s assertions and concerned about the economic impact, encouraged parents to protest the use of their children’s images. Several parents sued the UFW and demanded the union stop showing the film. “Chavez has been exploiting our children
¹¹
to raise money for his troubled union,” Connie Rosales, one of the mothers, wrote to universities where Chavez was scheduled to speak. “Although we respect the right of anyone to speculate, the UFW had crossed the line of speculation into exploitation.”

Chavez asserted the union’s First Amendment right to show the video and intensified his rhetoric. “The use of pesticides and the misuse of pesticides is the cause of all the problems in McFarland, and there is no other cause,”
¹²
Chavez said. Fred Ross conducted a house meeting campaign in McFarland, and Chavez addressed a community meeting. “The growers are using the pesticides to kill our people,” he said. In nearby Earlimart, more cases of childhood cancer surfaced. At a press conference with several affected families, Chavez compared their plight to that of the canaries sent to die in the coal mines: “Farmworkers and their children are society’s canaries.”

Boycotting grapes to win contracts for farmworkers in the 1960s had been a clear and convincing message; the pesticide issue never resonated the same way. Chavez struggled to persuade consumers that if they stopped buying grapes, growers would stop using dangerous chemicals. He reassigned top staff to key cities. “I am sure that you agree with me that unless we assign everyone to the boycott
¹³
and raise the money we could fail on the eve of some big successes,” he wrote to the executive board members. Soon he called them back and announced the boycott would focus on specific supermarket chains. He asked shoppers to sign petitions calling on the stores not to carry grapes because of pesticides. He violated anti-picketing injunctions in Los Angeles to get arrested. He flew families of the cancer victims to New York to appear with him on television and radio programs.

“Our workers and their children are being poisoned in the killing fields
¹⁴
of California’s table grape industry,” Chavez said at an Earth Day rally in New York City.

The lawsuit against
The Wrath of Grapes
was dismissed, but parents continued to allege that the union exploited grieving families for financial gain. When UFW members showed up with flags and joined the funeral procession for a fourteen-year-old cancer victim, her furious mother confronted Dolores Huerta
¹⁵
and ordered them to leave. Parents, desperate for answers, argued that the UFW’s focus on grapes took away attention from other potential carcinogens, such as pesticides in cotton fields or nitrates in the water.

Chavez dismissed the parents’ criticism. “We know where it’s coming from—from the growers,” he told NPR reporter Scott Simon. Simon asked for proof. Furthermore, he pressed, why not take the children out of the film if their parents objected? Chavez bristled and refused to comment further. “I don’t want you to do a job on me,” he warned. Simon tried to ask questions about Chavez’s leadership and inquired about Synanon and the Game. Chavez denied they had played the Game and denounced Simon as unprofessional. “I don’t appreciate the interview
¹⁶
at all. It’s really, really disgusting to have you do that,” Chavez said as he walked out and slammed the door. Simon and his crew were told to leave La Paz and informed that the union would sue if NPR aired a piece on Chavez. The threat did not stop the broadcast.

With the boycott failing to get traction, Chavez upped the ante. He resorted to his most dramatic move, a lengthy public fast. He chose a room at the Filipino retirement village on the grounds of Forty Acres and began his third major fast at midnight on July 16, 1988. He was sixty-one years old. The union had just thirty-one contracts.
¹⁷

“A powerful urge has been raging within me for several months,” Chavez said in a statement on the third day of the fast. “I have been struggling against it. Toward the end of last week this urge became insistent. I resisted again but my efforts were in vain.” He cited the panoply of issues affecting farmworkers that he had fought for decades, from the lack of fair elections to the dangers of pesticides. “This fast is first and foremost personal. It is something I feel compelled to do.
¹⁸
It is directed at myself. It is a fast for the purification of my own body, mind and soul.” He also criticized those he said had not done enough to help him, including farmworkers. “The fast is also an act of penance for those in positions of moral authority . . . who know that they could or should do more, who have become bystanders and thus collaborators with an industry that does not care about its workers.”