When Cesar Chavez decided in 1962 to pursue the
impossible dream of organizing California's farmworkers, he knew
firsthand the difficult plight of those working in the fields. Chavez's
family had moved to California and become farmworkers in 1937, after
financial difficulties caused them to lose their Arizona ranch.
Eleven-year-old Cesar was soon exposed to the sight of farmworkers
bathing in and drinking from irrigation ditches and living on river
banks or under bridges. He saw that a typical farmworker "home" was a
shack built of cardboard cartons and linoleum scraps or a tent made of
gunny sacks. For farmworkers living in labor camps, plumbing facilities
were inadequate or nonexistent; often, fifty to a hundred families
shared one faucet. Years later, Chavez recalled that the camps' toilets
were "always horrible, so miserable you couldn't go there." Although
farmworkers spent their days in fields rich with fruit and vegetables,
they lived in constant hunger. Most survived on beans, fried dough,
dandelion greens, and potatoes. Working as stoop laborers in 100-degree
heat was hard enough, but growers also forced farmworkers to use the
short-handle hoe. This backbreaking tool damaged the health of Chavez
and generations of farmworkers, leading him to conclude at an early age
that growers "don't give a damn" about farmworkers as human beings but
instead see them "as implements." The combination of brutal working
conditions, unsanitary living conditions, poor diet, and grinding
poverty explained why farmworkers had short life expectancies, with
many dying before age fifty.
1
Against this harsh backdrop, Cesar Chavez launched a
movement that made history, leaving an indelible mark on the 1960s and
1970s. This book describes how Chavez and the farmworkers movement
developed ideas, tactics, and strategies that proved so compelling, so
original, and ultimately so successful that they continue to set the
course for America's progressive campaigns—and will likely do so for
decades to come. Chavez and the United Farm Workers also developed a
generation of progressive leaders who are reshaping the American labor
movement, building the nation's immigrant rights movement, revitalizing
grassroots democracy, and are at the forefront of the struggle to
transform national politics in twenty-first-century America.
2
While tens of thousands attended civil rights and
antiwar marches in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the UFW that became the
organizational home for a generation of young people eager to devote
their lives to a righteous cause. Chavez's charismatic leadership and
the long history of injustices perpetrated against farmworkers led many
individuals with little or no activist experience to quit jobs, drop
out of college, or delay career plans so that they could join others in
working hundred-hour weeks for $5 a week plus room and board. Many of
those who worked with the UFW from 1965 to 1980 underwent life-changing
experiences. Contrary to conventional wisdom about activists from that
era later becoming stockbrokers, an astonishing number of UFW alumni
went on to devote their lives to winning social and economic justice
for working people, particularly Latino immigrants.
The Delano grape strike, launched in the fall of
1965, proved to be a historic turning point for Chavez, California
farmworkers, and America's future progressive movements. Before the
strike, Chavez himself was largely unknown, and Americans paid little
attention to the wages and working conditions of those who picked their
fruit and vegetables. But on March 17, 1966, Chavez began a
three-hundred-mile march, along with strikers and supporters, from the
Central California town of Delano to the state capitol building in
Sacramento. News photos of a limping and bleeding Chavez completing his
pilgrimage on Easter Sunday captivated the nation. America not only
learned about a strike against grape growers but also had its first
glimpse of a man who would become the nation's most honored Latino.
Chavez and the farmworkers movement soon transcended
their fight for justice in California's fields and came to embody the
era's struggles against racism and poverty. Idealistic young activists
seeking to work full time for social change flocked to La Causa (the
cause) and joined with Latino and Filipino workers in creating a
stirring national campaign for economic justice. During its heyday, the
UFW was known for its nationwide grape, wine, and vegetable boycotts,
for colorful mass marches, for chants of "huelga!" (strike!)
throughout the fields of rural California, for its black and red Aztec
eagle flag, and, most of all, for the determined and uncompromising
leadership of Cesar Chavez. His framing of the farmworkers struggle in
spiritual rather than simply economic terms, as a new national civil
rights movement, fit perfectly with the times. Chavez was unlike any
other labor leader of his time, and his personal commitment to
voluntary poverty struck a chord among the young clergy and college
students rebelling against rampant materialism.
Establishing a farmworkers union seemed to be an
impossible dream, but Chavez and the UFW developed a range of new
strategies and tactics for its fulfillment. He began by engaging in the
most painstaking organizing campaign ever directed at Mexican immigrant
farmworkers, seeking supporters one on one and house to house. Knowing
that farmworkers could not win this fight on their own, Chavez then
broke from labor tradition and recruited young outsiders looking to
make a difference in the world. The result was an unlikely alliance of
Latino and Filipino farmworkers, migrant ministers and progressive
priests, and former college students of various ethnicities. Chavez
helped to forge La Causa into the most powerful farmworker movement in
American history.
By 1972, the UFW had contracts with 150 growers and
an estimated membership of fifty to sixty thousand, of which thirty
thousand were year-round workers while others worked only during the
harvest season.
3
For the first time in the
long, tortured history of California agricultural labor, those who
picked the nation's fruits and vegetables had rest breaks, safe
drinking water, and toilets; and they earned wages that enabled them to
settle down and perhaps even to buy modest homes rather than migrating
to follow the crops. In addition to bringing historically high wages,
benefits, and improved working conditions, the UFW also heightened
farmworkers' self-esteem. A group that had long been looked down on as
powerless had forced America's largest growers to the bargaining table
and now demanded respect.
In 1975, ten years after the Delano grape strike
began, California enacted the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the
first legislation of its kind in the country. After more than seventy
years of struggle, the state's farmworkers had finally won a remarkable
victory, securing many of the same labor protections that industrial
and factory workers had won in the 1930s. Passage of the act was a
remarkable victory for Chavez, the farmworkers movement, and the
millions of Americans and Canadians who supported the boycotts and La
Causa. Following the enactment of this legislation, union elections
were quickly scheduled on more than six hundred farms, and the UFW won
nearly all of them.
In 1979, the union engaged in a massive lettuce
strike, supported by more than twenty-five thousand farmworkers
marching for justice, and won another huge victory. By the start of
1980, the fastest UFW lettuce pickers could earn as much as $20 an
hour, a wage close to that of unionized manufacturing workers. UFW
members had paid vacations, paid overtime, unemployment benefits, and
health insurance for their families—benefits long denied agricultural
workers. A group that had begun with Cesar Chavez holding house
meetings and collecting $3.50 in monthly dues stood poised to become
California's most powerful union and a leading statewide vehicle for
economic justice and progressive reforms. And since Chavez had never
lost sight of farmworker problems in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Oregon,
and Washington, many saw the success in California spreading to other
states, triggering a powerful new national movement for greater social
and economic fairness.
But the 1979 victory in the lettuce fields proved to
be the high point of the UFW's success. Instead of sparking a
nationwide campaign for a national farmworkers union, the UFW soon
began a steady decline. Most of the key figures who had built the union
left the organization between 1977 and 1981. By 2006, the UFW had no
table grape contracts, and membership had fallen as low as seven
thousand, compared to the high of sixty thousand in 1972. Sadly, some
believe that wages and working conditions for farmworkers today lag
farther behind those of other workers than they did in 1965, when the
Delano grape strike began.
The UFW's steep decline has not erased the name of
Cesar Chavez from public consciousness. To the contrary, Chavez remains
America's most famous Latino. He holds a permanent place in many U.S.
history books; schools, parks, roads, and community centers across the
country bear his name. California has established a state holiday to
celebrate Chavez, and a campaign is growing to create a national
holiday in his honor. But his accomplishments have become frozen in the
past. While Chavez is credited for inspiring generations of Latinos, he
is viewed as an icon of a bygone era, whose legacy—the building of the
UFW—has been wrongly defined (and limited) by the union's steep
membership decline since 1981. But measuring Chavez's ongoing legacy on
the basis of UFW membership is both misleading and inaccurate. This
framing ignores the extent to which UFW alumni brought the ideas,
tactics, and strategies of the farmworkers movement to subsequent
progressive campaigns. The story of how these ideas are profoundly
influencing America's movements for social and economic justice has not
been told.
This book seeks to tell that story. I argue that,
from the reshaping of the American labor movement to the building of
state and national Latino political power, from the growing national
struggle for immigrant rights to the transformation of California
politics, and ultimately to the push to improve social conditions and
life opportunities for tens of millions of Americans, the imprint of
Cesar Chavez and the UFW is inescapable.
In 1960, two years before Chavez's efforts began, the
powerful AFL-CIO launched a heavily funded effort to organize
farmworkers. This effort relied on conventional union organizing
tactics. The campaign went nowhere. In contrast, nearly all of labor's
successful organizing campaigns since the 1960s have relied on the
grassroots activist–style approach pioneered by the UFW. In fact,
Chavez and the UFW originated or revived so many strategies and tactics
now utilized by progressive movements and campaigns that it is hard to
imagine how activists succeeded without such tools:
• Conducting consumer boycotts and corporate campaigns
• Building alliances between the religious community and labor unions
• Framing issues of economic justice in moral and spiritual terms, and engaging in activities such as spiritual fasts
• Encouraging civic participation among union members
• Emphasizing voter outreach and election day activities
• Building coalitions of labor, community groups, and students
• Generating media attention
• Using innovative forms of communication, such as "human billboards"
• Integrating cultural activities such as street theater into organizing efforts
In detailing the link between the UFW's ideas,
tactics, and strategies and current progressive movements, the second
major focus of this book will emerge: how UFW alumni have played
pivotal roles in building and winning campaigns for social and economic
justice for more than four decades. One would be hard-pressed to think
of a progressive organization of the 1960s that produced more activists
who went on to full-time careers working for social change or that had
such a significant impact on America's social justice struggles. If
there were a post–World War II Hall of Fame for activists in America,
UFW veterans would dominate the inductees.
The long-term impact of the UFW's recruitment,
training, and leadership development of a generation of young activists
has long been overlooked. Mentors such as Fred Ross Sr., Gilbert
Padilla, Marshall Ganz, and Cesar Chavez himself treated organizing as
a profession, with a set of skills that had to be correctly
implemented. A good heart was not enough; young people required
training, on-the-job experience, and intensive feedback to nurture
their talents. But the demands of the struggle were intense, and the
UFW imposed a "sink or swim" philosophy, granting young organizers a
degree of independence and flexibility unheard of in today's labor and
social change organizations. These new organizers quickly learned how
to build a broad coalition of community support, to recruit volunteers,
and to mobilize activists for protests and rallies. Not all succeeded,
and some of the best nearly quit before figuring out how to get the job
done. But when UFW alumni with this remarkable training moved on to
future jobs, they took the skills and strategies that brought
unprecedented success to the farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s with
them.
From 1965 to 1979, the United Farm Workers of America
was the nation's leading organizer training school. The union drew some
activists caught up in the spirit of the '60s, but many joined in the
early '70s, when signs of changing times were already evident. The
synergy between new and veteran activists built the skill level of the
former, enabling the UFW's talent pool to grow almost exponentially.
Organizing for the UFW was both physically and mentally exhausting, but
this rigor instilled activists with the confidence that they could win
progressive campaigns, regardless of the apparent odds.
Cesar Chavez's organizing prowess has been eclipsed
by his other accomplishments, but he started the movement by knocking
on doors and holding house meetings, where he would ask people to pay
$3.50 in monthly membership dues. He understood the frustrations and
challenges of grassroots organizing, having walked into houses for
meetings only to find the home vacant and the host family missing. His
determined spirit infused the farmworkers movement, inspiring others to
continue his work.
Today, the ongoing legacy of Cesar Chavez and the UFW
has moved from the lettuce fields of rural California to the hospitals,
luxury hotels, and office towers of urban America. This is where UFW
veterans created the "Justice for Janitors" campaigns, where the UFW's
influence is felt in the struggle to unionize hospital and hotel
workers. This legacy is found in the massive immigrant rights marches
of 2006, in organized labor's effective voter outreach efforts on
election day, and in increased civic participation among immigrants and
union members in a broad array of progressive movements and campaigns.
The UFW grape and vegetable boycotts are long over, but their success
spawned similar campaigns against Salvadoran coffee during El
Salvador's bloody civil war, against South African apartheid, against
the sale of infant formula in developing nations, and against the
global corporations that now own America's luxury hotels.
Although the UFW had always practiced "social
movement" unionism, it was not until 1996 that the AFL-CIO officially
embraced the idea that labor unions should join with community groups
in seeking broader social goals. The Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) and UNITE HERE are the two unions most responsible for
this shift, and these are also the unions most influenced by UFW alumni.
5
In 2005, these unions broke from the AFL-CIO to form Change to Win,
designed to be a more activist-oriented labor federation that would
prioritize organizing. In 2006, Change to Win supported UNITE HERE's
national Hotel Workers Rising campaign, which began transforming hotel
work into the type of well-paid, middle-class jobs long held by
unionized autoworkers and steelworkers. UFW President Arturo Rodriguez
gave the keynote speech at the campaign's national kick-off, and the
fighting spirit of the farmworkers was evoked throughout the event.
Cesar Chavez sought to build a union, rather than
remain a community organizer, because he saw unionization as the best
strategy for improving living conditions for blue-collar Latino
immigrants. The pursuit of this strategy for Latino empowerment did not
end with his death or the UFW's decline. Chavez and the farmworkers
movement overcame skeptics to prove that Mexican immigrants could be
unionized, and organized labor in the twenty-first century continues to
build on this tradition.
While Cesar Chavez and the UFW are often credited
with bringing national attention to the problems of Mexican Americans,
their ongoing impact on rising Latino political empowerment remains
underappreciated. This contemporary legacy is evidenced by
significantly greater rates of Latino voting in California, a sharp
rise in the number of Latino legislators in that state, and the
creation of a powerful voter outreach apparatus, which laid the
groundwork for the election of Los Angeles's first Latino mayor in
2005. The UFW grassroots electoral model has expanded from California
to other states with sizable Latino populations, dramatically
increasing Latino voter turnout in both Colorado and Arizona during the
2006 midterm elections.
The millions of immigrant rights protesters who took
to the streets in 2006 understood this connection between the
farmworkers movement and the ongoing drive for Latino empowerment.
These marchers needed no prompting before spontaneously adopting the
UFW chant "sì se puede!" (yes, we can!) in cities across
America. As huge throngs of Latino immigrant parents chanted, sang, and
marched with their kids, it was clear that the UFW's tradition of
nonviolent protests had helped legitimize the tactic and had bolstered
undocumented Mexican immigrants' willingness to take to the streets to
assert their rights. When Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign
adopted the "Yes we can!" rallying cry, it highlighted how the UFW's
chant has extended beyond Latinos to become an almost universal call
for social and economic justice.
The opening chapter of this book focuses on the
consumer boycott, a strategy that brought most of the volunteers into
the movement and proved instrumental to the UFW's success. Chavez and
the UFW reinvented this nineteenth-century strategy, and the union's
grape boycott became the most successful consumer boycott in American
history. The building of the boycott is the story of a mass movement, a
phenomenon often dreamed of but seldom realized. Running a nationwide
boycott with virtually no funds required recruiting a huge influx of
volunteers, giving the era's young people, clergy, women, and Latino
immigrants an entrèe into the labor movement.
Chapter 2 discusses how the UFW's boycott model was
subsequently adopted and enhanced by other labor and progressive
movements. These range from the high-profile J. P. Stevens textile
boycott in the 1970s to the eight-year boycott of Campbell's Soup
launched by the UFW-inspired Farm Labor Organizing Committee in 1979 to
the 1989 boycott of Salvadoran coffee led by the activist group
Neighbor to Neighbor, which helped bring a ceasefire in that nation's
civil war. The chapter also illustrates how UNITE HERE's Hotel Workers
Rising campaign has developed the UFW boycott model for effective use
by social movements in the Internet age.
The building of a clergy-labor alliance and the use
of the spiritual fast are the subjects of chapter 3. Photos of
farmworker marches and rallies typically show supporters in religious
garb, but many forget that when Chavez began organizing farmworkers in
1962, strong relationships between labor and the religious community
had not existed for more than two decades. Chavez and the farmworkers
had to build this relationship, overcoming indifference and even
hostility from local churches. The UFW was the only workers' struggle
to secure strong church backing until a coal strike in 1989. Today,
many unions create alliances with local clergy as a matter of standard
procedure, yet few credit Chavez and the UFW for rebuilding this
critical alliance. One reason the UFW eventually won the committed
involvement of so many members of the clergy was because the union
framed many of its campaigns in religious or spiritual terms. Chapter 3
discusses two critical examples: the three-hundred-mile "pilgrimage"
from Delano to Sacramento in 1966, and Chavez's twenty-five-day
spiritual fast in 1968.
Both tactics galvanized broad support for La
Causa among the religious community in part by fusing traditional
Catholic religious symbols with protest activities. While Chavez did
not "invent" the spiritual fast—the Bible describes how Jesus fasted
for forty days—he engaged in the most prominent American fast of the
century and inspired others to use the tactic in future progressive
campaigns.
Chapter 4 presents a case study of how the UFW's
legacy influenced a 2006 union organizing effort by SEIU's Justice for
Janitors in Miami, Florida. The "Yes We Cane" campaign at the
University of Miami—its very name was a clever, English-language
takeoff on Cesar Chavez's classic "sì se puede!" motto—included
almost the full range of innovative UFW strategies. The organizing
drive replicated the UFW's model of a clergy-worker-student alliance,
included a spiritual fast, and involved such key former UFW figures as
Dolores Huerta, SEIU international vice president Eliseo Medina, and
the Reverend Wayne "Chris" Hartmire. The campaign's chief architect was
Stephen Lerner, the SEIU Building Services leader, who had been trained
as an organizer while working on the UFW boycott in New York.
Chapter 5 describes the UFW's leading role in
battling the use of pesticides in the fields during the 1960s and its
transformation of a local fight over spraying into a national campaign
to ban DDT and other hazardous chemicals. The UFW became the first
union to address environmental safety through labor contract provisions
and pioneered strategies that forced growers to be more safety
conscious. The chapter also discusses the UFW's efforts to secure
support from mainstream environmental groups, which met with only mixed
success. Nonetheless, the UFW's pesticide campaign was an early example
of what emerged as the environmental justice movement, which targets
the disproportionate health risks imposed on low-income people and
communities of color.
Chapter 6 discusses the UFW's approach to political
organizing and electoral work. During the 1960s and 1970s, the need to
fend off political attacks from growers led the UFW to create a
powerful vehicle for outreach to low-income and Latino voters. This
grassroots electoral operation relied on door-to-door personal
contacts, precinct organization, volunteer recruitment, and leadership
development. The UFW brought a community organizing analysis to its
electoral and legislative campaigns at a time when other American labor
unions bypassed "people power," relying instead on campaign donations
to favored politicians. In later years, UFW veterans would apply this
electoral model to local and congressional races, including San
Francisco mayoral races and the campaign of first-time candidate Nancy
Pelosi, who became the first woman Speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives in 2007. In the Pelosi campaign and others, UFW alumni
enhanced the UFW grassroots electoral model, paving the way for its
widespread future adoption by progressive campaigns.
One of the most positive political stories of the
1990s was the rise in Latino voting and political clout in Los Angeles,
and throughout much of California. Chapter 7 explores the role of UFW
alumnus Miguel Contreras as the leading architect of this electoral
transformation. Contreras had learned how to run grassroots election
campaigns from the UFW and through later campaigns that involved former
UFW staffers Marshall Ganz and Jessica Govea. After he became head of
the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor in 1996, Contreras began to
implement the UFW electoral model. Working in concert with UFW veteran
Eliseo Medina and others, Contreras built a Latino voter outreach
machine that transformed Los Angeles into a union stronghold. He also
played a central role in creating the electoral infrastructure that
elected Antonio Villaraigosa as Los Angeles's first Latino mayor in
2005 and that significantly strengthened the position of the Democratic
Party statewide. Although most accounts attribute rising Latino voter
turnout to a "hostile political environment" created by California's
anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994, this chapter examines
statistical data from California and other states with large numbers of
Latinos showing that electoral outreach by organized labor deserves far
greater credit. Further, as Eliseo Medina and other UFW veterans have
helped expand the group's grassroots electoral model to other states
such as Arizona and Colorado, it has the potential to alter the future
political landscape of the United States.
The ongoing struggle for immigrant rights is the
focus of chapter 8. This chapter first addresses the often
misunderstood stance of the UFW toward the rights of undocumented
immigrants. Chavez and the union opposed strikebreakers of all races
and backgrounds, including those who were undocumented; but the UFW's
first constitution made no distinction between members who were
undocumented and those who were legal immigrants, and Chavez strongly
and publicly opposed the growers' exploitation of undocumented workers.
The chapter also analyzes the crucial role of UFW alumni in campaigns
that helped to build the national immigrant rights movement, including
Fred Ross Jr., in the Active Citizenship Campaign, an Industrial Areas
Foundation–sponsored effort uniting labor unions and the religious
community to help immigrants apply for citizenship, demand expedited
processing of citizenship applications, and turn newly naturalized
Latino immigrants into registered, active voters. Another UFW veteran,
Eliseo Medina, brought SEIU's resources into the ACC and was also a
central figure in pressuring the AFL-CIO to shift its longstanding
opposition to immigrant rights to a stance favoring legalization for
the undocumented. Organized labor's membership and resources greatly
expanded the immigrant rights movement, and the labor-sponsored
Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride in 2003 proved to be a key stepping-stone
to the massive protests of 2006.
Chapter 9 describes this public emergence of a
powerful national immigrant rights movement and the dramatic increase
in Latino voting in the November 2006 election. The tens of thousands
of marchers in more than two hundred American cities chanting the UFW's
rally cry "sì se puede!" demonstrated the deep connection
immigrants felt between their actions and those of Cesar Chavez and the
farmworkers movement. Eliseo Medina spent 2006 as the chief
congressional negotiator for the immigrant rights movement, and his
vision has guided much of the labor movement's approach to immigration
reform since the late 1990s.
Chapter 10 examines the decline of the UFW, which
began in 1977, just as its fortunes appeared brightest. Chavez's
actions played a major role in the exodus of most of the UFW's key
organizers, attorneys, and worker leaders between 1977 and 1981. As UFW
alumni went on to promote social justice beyond the fields, the UFW
began a steady decline that has continued for more than two decades.
While most books describing the UFW's current weakness blame hostile
Republican politicians, it was the union's loss of the talented
activists who had built it that led to its inability to secure
contracts in the 1980s and beyond.
Chapter 11 includes a chart of UFW alumni who went on
to work for social justice and profiles of several individuals whose
life histories collectively offer a broader understanding of the
quality of people who worked for the UFW in its heyday. Many UFW
veterans stayed in the labor movement, while others organized
low-income people in communities across America. Some made important
cultural contributions, including Luis Valdez, whose Teatro Campesino
brought a mythic brand of Chicano culture to the forefront of the UFW
organizing drives and helped to politicize an emerging Chicano art
world. This chapter describes people who dropped out of high school,
quit their religious orders, left farm labor to become professional
organizers, or otherwise redirected their lives to work with the UFW.
The chapter also discusses how UFW alumni built the group Neighbor to
Neighbor in the 1980s, which itself became an important training ground
for young activists, who have continued to struggle for justice in the
twenty-first century.
The concluding chapter explores a question that
underlies this book: why haven't more incubators for young activist
talent emerged since the UFW's peak? To put it another way, what
options exist today for training potential activists in organizing,
leadership, and developing strategies for social justice movements? Is
volunteering full time for the modern equivalent of $5 a week plus room
and board no longer viable in an era of increased living costs and
crushing debt from student loans? Was there something about Cesar
Chavez's charismatic leadership that made the UFW special, an attribute
that cannot be replicated in an era where progressive activists seek
nonhierarchical leadership and consensus decision-making? I have
pondered these questions for many years, regretting that so many
idealistic young activists who want to make a difference in the world
have never found an organizational home for their talents. This chapter
examines the factors that enabled the UFW to attract and retain so many
committed young people and to turn them into lifetime activists for
social and economic justice.
Today, out of the national spotlight, the struggle
for justice in the twenty-first century has been building and is
emerging in a new form. It is inspired and enriched by the innovative
tradition of the UFW and led in part by a generation of leaders who
were trained or influenced by Chavez and the farmworkers movement. It
has been nearly half a century since Cesar Chavez and a band of
seventy-five supporters began their pilgrimage from Delano, but the
UFW's legacy remains a powerful force. In fact, the spirit of "sì se puede!"
has never been stronger and still provides the clearest roadmap for
achieving greater social and economic justice in the United States.
