The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (78 page)

Cesar spoke of the richness of his mother’s legacy, not in dollars but in inspiration. “She had the gift of faith, that gift of knowing what is truly important in this life.” He looked up from the yellow-lined sheets of paper with his handwritten speech and added spontaneously, “And that’s quite a gift.” Then he resumed his stilted reading.

“Death comes to all of us, and we do not get to choose the time or the circumstances of our dying. The hardest thing of all is to die rightly. Juana Chavez died rightly. She served her God and her neighbor.”

At the cemetery, Cesar lingered as he carefully spread his handful of dirt the entire length of his mother’s casket. He stood alone for a long time, tan jacket over his white pinstriped shirt and black vest, watching as the long line of mourners passed, each throwing in dirt. His sister Rita, following her mother’s wishes, wore a gray checked suit. Juana Chavez was buried alongside her husband under a headstone inscribed with an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe and a one-word epitaph: mother.

By the following fall, another seminal figure in Chavez’s life was near death. Fred Ross died on September 27, 1992, at the age of eighty-two. On Sunday, October 4, his family buried Ross’s ashes
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under a tree on Mount Tamalpais near his home in Marin County, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They reminisced and cried and sang some of his favorite songs, including “The Ballad of Joe Hill.” Fred Ross Jr. told his nephew that the spirit of the boy’s grandfather would never die, just like Joe Hill. The family sat down to plan a memorial service.

“Because you were so close to him and he so loved you, we would like you to honor him by giving the eulogy,” Fred Ross Jr. wrote to Chavez. He enclosed the program they had planned, listing all the speakers.

Chavez might be forgiven his failure to respond promptly to the request. The list of names must have evoked complex feelings: Chris Hartmire, Jerry Cohen, Jessica Govea, Luis Valdez, Jim Drake, once so central to the movement in its moments of triumph. Chavez had sacrificed each of them in relentless pursuit of his vision. Now his top aides were largely relatives and hangers-on.

Chavez had no choice but to deliver the eulogy for his mentor. He wrote out seven pages of notes
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in pencil, tracing their friendship from the first encounter in San Jose. He wrote of his wonder when hundreds of people showed up at the first big CSO meeting. Cesar had gone home that night, he said, and told Helen, “What happened tonight is pure magic—and I’m going to learn it, come what may. I will not stop until I learn how to organize.” To end the eulogy, he copied excerpts from letters that Ross had written in 1962 when Chavez began organizing in Delano, scared and alone.

The afternoon of the Ross memorial,
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guests milled about in the courtyard of the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, many seeing one another for the first time in decades. There were hugs, tearful reunions, and some awkward greetings. Doug Adair, who once edited
El Malcriado
and now farmed dates in the Coachella Valley, shook hands with Paul Chavez, who had become one of his father’s top aides. Liza Hirsch, thrown out of the union in 1978, arrived with Eliseo Medina, who was rising in the ranks of the Service Employees International Union. Larry Tramutt had changed his name to Tramutola and started a consulting business. Mario Bustamante came with his wife, Gretchen Laue, whom he met when she worked on the 1979 lettuce strike, and their three young children. Jerry Brown had just run for president a third time and came in cowboy boots, jeans, and a black jacket with his campaign’s 800 number on the back. Marshall Ganz, who had graduated from Harvard after a twenty-eight-year leave of absence, talked with Tom Dalzell, who worked as an attorney for the electrical workers union. They shook their heads at the strangeness of the scene.

Jerry Cohen, master of ceremonies, opened with one of his favorite Fred Ross axioms: a good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire. Looking around the room, Cohen noted, “Even in death, Fred is a great organizer.”

“We met in the trenches,” Luis Valdez said, recalling the 1966 DiGiorgio campaign where Fred Ross became his teacher. Ross taught Valdez to bring people together, to be disciplined, and to follow through. Just months before Ross died, Valdez had approached him with the idea of making a movie about Chavez’s early success organizing Oxnard farmworkers in the CSO. Ross had been enthusiastic, and the two men went to La Paz to talk with Chavez. He said he wanted the union to be remembered, not him, and vetoed the idea. He could not bring himself to cede control of his image.

At the Ross memorial, Valdez led the Teatro Campesino in songs from the DiGiorgio campaign. Everyone rose to their feet, locked arms, and swayed to “Solidaridad Pa’ Siempre.”

Speaker after speaker obliquely echoed Cohen’s observation that Ross had brought them back together. Jim Drake, characteristically blunt, alluded most directly to the bitterness and anger of many who had been cast out of the union. Drake thanked Ross for reuniting them and paraphrased a line he attributed to the author Toni Morrison: we must lay down our sword and shield and come back to the family.

After a half dozen speeches, Cohen introduced the man who had torn the family apart. Chavez had a terrible cold, and his congestion made the speech more painful. He was so hoarse he could barely talk and punctuated the eulogy with coughs. His affection for Ross came through nonetheless. He ended with a typical Ross story about their last time together, true to the spirit of the visit if not the facts. Ross was as sharp as ever, Chavez said, and outwalked his visitors. “I shall miss him very much,” Chavez concluded, and the audience rose to its feet in applause.

Chavez went to many funerals
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in the 1990s. He would call his brother Richard, who had built himself a house just a mile from La Paz, and drag him off to a rosary or vigil or mass. When Cesar was home, his days no longer filled up with meetings and calls. His office had no lines of people waiting for an audience. To Richard’s surprise, Cesar took a week off and the two brothers went to Mexico. Cesar delighted in his grandchildren,
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many of whom lived at La Paz or nearby. He hiked the hills of La Paz with them, introduced them to jazz, and called the little ones his “skididobopideboppopbo.” Some grandchildren spent more time with him than his own children had when they were young. Christmas and Easter were big family holidays at La Paz. On March 31, 1993, his sixty-sixth birthday, Chavez cooked an Indian feast
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for his extended family. Ten days later, he joined the children in the annual Easter egg hunt.

One particularly dark cloud hovered over La Paz: a trial that threatened to bankrupt the UFW. The Bruce Church company, one of the largest lettuce growers in California, had never signed a contract after the 1979 strike. The issue was not financial. Bruce Church offered to top wages in the UFW’s other contracts. The primary disagreement centered on who could determine whether workers were in “good standing.” The company insisted that paying dues should be the only criterion. The UFW wanted the right to discipline or fire workers who did not comply with other union requirements, such as attending meetings or protest rallies. The two sides had fought bitterly for more than a decade, before the ALRB, in the courts, and in the press.

Though the grape boycott had never gained traction in the 1980s, the UFW had more success targeting stores that sold Red Coach lettuce, Bruce Church’s top-of-the-line produce. When Chavez spent more than $1 million targeting Lucky stores with the high-tech boycott, the supermarket chain—which bought 10 percent of Bruce Church’s lettuce—agreed to buy its produce elsewhere. Other stores followed.

Bruce Church sued, charging the UFW made libelous statements and illegally threatened supermarkets not to carry Red Coach lettuce. Bruce Church had substantial land in Arizona, which banned secondary boycotts, so the company filed suit in Yuma in 1984. Four years later, a jury returned a $5.4 million verdict against the UFW, concluding the union had used false and deceptive publicity to discourage consumers from buying Red Coach lettuce and had threatened stores that sold the lettuce. An appeals court found the underlying Arizona anti-boycott law was flawed and threw the verdict out. The case was remanded for a new trial on narrower grounds, and Chavez returned to court in 1993.

The union had assets of less than $2 million, and a loss could be crippling. Chavez had recruited Huerta to come back and help prepare the union’s defense, tracking down witnesses who could bolster some of the union’s claims, such as allegations that Bruce Church workers were sexually harassed. Chavez fasted for several days before he was due in court.

He was sworn in as a witness
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in the Yuma courtroom the afternoon of April 21 and grilled for several hours. He returned to court the next morning for a second day on the stand. James Clark, one of the Bruce Church attorneys, questioned Chavez from 9:30 a.m. to noon and again from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. The testimony did not go well. Clark hammered home the points that had won the case for the company the first time: Had the union not threatened to ruin the reputation of stores if they carried Red Coach lettuce? How could the union accuse Bruce Church of condoning child labor, sexual harassment, and pesticide poisoning without offering examples? How could the union accuse supermarkets of supporting those abuses by buying Bruce Church produce?

Chavez was forced to acknowledge that the union had sent out mailings claiming Bruce Church had bargained in bad faith—even though that finding was overruled on appeal, and the union had actually been found guilty of the same charge.

Clark entered into evidence flyers with headlines such as “Alpha Beta Stores and Child Abuse,” the UFW’s effort to link supermarkets to unsubstantiated assertions about Bruce Church. Clark quizzed Chavez about his 1983 memo on the high-tech boycott, which had been strategically leaked to supermarket executives to warn them about the damage they faced if they did not stop buying Bruce Church lettuce.

Chavez tried to wriggle out of earlier assertions that the boycott had caused Lucky stores to remove Red Coach lettuce. He had claimed victory to motivate the troops, Chavez said, but he could not say for certain why Lucky had stopped buying Bruce Church lettuce.

Clark was incredulous. “Mr. Chavez, let me just ask you one more time, did you ever, before this date, testify that it was not your opinion and the opinion of the union that the cause of Lucky stopping to purchase lettuce from Bruce Church was your fault?”

“Yes, we said that,” Chavez replied.

“This is the first time you ever took a position different from that?” Clark pressed.

“No, what I said was, Lucky said it wasn’t because of us.”

The Yuma courthouse where Chavez testified was about ten miles from the homestead where he had grown up in his grandfather’s house along the Gila North Main canal. The crumbling ruins of the Chavez home and the fields his father once farmed were now owned by the Bruce Church company.

Chavez returned at the end of his second day in court to the small San Luis, Arizona, home of Doña Maria Hau, a former farmworker and longtime UFW supporter. She had given up her bedroom so that the UFW leader could be comfortable. He broke his fast with a light supper and retired to his room around 10:00 p.m.

Chavez was usually an early riser. When he did not appear by 9:00 a.m., UFW secretary-treasurer David Martinez entered the bedroom.
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Chavez was lying on his back in bed, fully clothed, union and court documents scattered about. Martinez tried to waken him, and realized Chavez was dead. When the paramedics arrived, a book on Native American art lay on his chest, upside down.
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Cesar Chavez was sixty-six years old. Given his genes, he had often confidently predicted a long life. “If I don’t get hit by a car or a bullet, I will live to be at least 100 and active through 95,” he once said. “Death is nothing.
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I already took care of the fear. You cannot lead if you’re afraid. And you cannot lead if you’re not in front.” In the end, he barely outlived his mother.

His body was flown in a chartered plane to Bakersfield, where Helen Chavez and her children waited on the tarmac. The news spread quickly. Marion Moses, working with a coffee cooperative in El Salvador, found an urgent message to call the Kern County coroner, who needed to speak with Chavez’s personal physician. Luis Valdez, traveling in an entourage with the Mexican president, confirmed the news on a portable radio-telephone, and began to cry. He headed back to La Paz to help choreograph the funeral. At Helen’s request, LeRoy Chatfield and Chris Hartmire returned to La Paz to help make arrangements.

Chavez’s family commissioned an autopsy and said he died of natural causes. The evidence was inconclusive, but the circumstances of his death were consistent with an arrhythmia that could have been triggered by an electrolyte imbalance brought on by his fast.

Cesar had left two instructions about his funeral. He wanted the service at Forty Acres, and he wanted his brother Richard to build a simple pine coffin. Richard got specifications from the mortuary and went to work. The coffin took him thirty-eight hours to build.
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Almost everyone came back to Delano. Chavez’s body lay in state at Forty Acres, dressed in a white guayabera shirt, turquoise rosary beads in his hand. On the inside of the pine coffin lid was the red-white-and-black UFW flag. Tens of thousands of mourners streamed past from 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 28, when the doors opened, through the all-night vigil.