FIGURE 3. Gilbert Padilla, 1966.
Padilla joined a growing team of rural recruits, including Julio and Fina Hernandez and Roger Terronez from Corcoran; Tony and Rachel Orendain and Gil Flores from Hanford; and a loquacious and fiery single mother from Stockton, Dolores Huerta.28 Huerta had never worked in the fields, but she maintained a strong connection to labor unions and farm workers through her family. Her father had worked in the coalmines in Dawson, New Mexico, where she was born, and had belonged to the United Mine Workers.29 When Dolores was an infant, labor unrest in the mines forced her father to seek alternative work harvesting beets in Wyoming, Nebraska, and California. The family eventually settled in Stockton, California, where her father worked in the asparagus fields among a predominantly Filipino workforce. In the 1940s, he participated in a strike on the Zuckerman asparagus farm alongside Huerta’s future friend and Filipino activist, Philip Veracruz.30
Huerta clashed with her father over his “chauvinist” behavior and considered her mother, Alicia Margaret St. John Chavez, a stronger influence in her life. During the Great Depression, Alicia divorced Huerta’s father and raised Dolores and her sister on $5 per week from wages earned at the Richmond-Chase canneries and a local restaurant. In 1937, Alicia participated in a strike of the canneries as a member of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, which forced her to depend entirely on her earnings at the restaurant.31 In 1941 she opened a successful lunch counter with her second husband, James Richards. A year later the couple purchased a hotel from Japanese American owners who had to sell when the government relocated all Japanese Americans to internment camps. Alicia relied on her children to staff the restaurant and clean the hotel, providing Dolores with an invaluable cultural experience that strengthened her confidence and ability to organize in any community. She recalled the unique composition of their neighborhood and clientele: “The ethnic community where we lived was all mixed. It was Japanese, Chinese. The only Jewish families that lived in Stockton were there in our neighborhood.… There was the Filipino pool hall, the Filipino dance hall. It was [a] very colorful, multi-ethnic scene.”32 When the Richards’ relationship soured and the couple divorced, Alicia lost the restaurant but held on to the hotel. Dolores continued to help her mother and became friends with many of the Filipino farm workers who were their primary patrons. Later her mother met and married Juan “Fernando” Silva, a former bracero, who conveyed to Dolores his deep feelings of bitterness over his treatment at the hands of growers.33 These influences made her sympathetic to Chavez’s appeals to join the local CSO, which she accepted in 1960. In time she too would be as important to the new movement as Padilla and Chavez.
The addition of rural chapters in the CSO and the new members’ success in bringing attention to the plight of farm workers compelled Chavez to call for the creation of a farm labor committee. According to Padilla, the decision should not have been controversial because the CSO already maintained committees on housing and education, although some members questioned whether Chavez’s new plan augured a more aggressive move toward labor organizing. Some members preferred to maintain a more nonpartisan image and believed that alignment with worker concerns would move the organization strongly to the left. Others objected to pursuing work that, they believed, duplicated AWOC’s efforts. Opponents of Chavez’s plan pointed out that AWOC, with funding from the AFL-CIO, had initiated the lettuce strike in Imperial Valley and made inroads in organizing Filipino workers in the Central Valley. Consequently, the CSO national committee chose to table the decision until the national convention in Calexico in March 1962, when they would discuss the matter in greater depth.34
In preparation for the conference, Chavez met with Padilla to share his plans. Padilla recalled, “[Cesar] said, ‘I am going to propose to the convention that every chapter should have a farm labor committee, and that we should start doing something for farm labor.… If they don’t approve this, I’m going to leave. I’m going to quit.’”35 Chavez also communicated his intentions to a number of members on the CSO board of directors, but no one took him seriously, given his successful recruitment of new members, his ability to get outside grants, and, most important, his dependence on the director position as the only source of funding for his family. “I didn’t believe him,” Padilla recalled, adding, “because he’s the one that built all the chapters.” Like Chavez, Padilla also supported an entire family on his CSO salary, partially covered by the grant from the Bishops’ Committee. Although the grant was set to expire in June, Padilla had hopes of applying for an extension and had already secured a promise from the local chapter to continue paying him.36
Chavez attended the Calexico meeting flanked by his new staff, including Padilla and Huerta, optimistic that a deal could be struck with his fellow board members. One of the founding members and his friend, Tony Rios, had been a member of the Electrical Union, and two other board members, Jay Rodriguez and Gil Anaya, had belonged to the Butchers Union and Steelworkers, respectively. In addition to these men, Chavez believed he could count on other board members who understood the power of a union and could see the value of his proposal. To his chagrin, however, they rebuffed Chavez. Those with union experience argued that AWOC’s failed strike in the lettuce fields demonstrated the difficulty of organizing farm workers and recommended that the CSO leave the task to them. Padilla also recalled that many members with professional backgrounds objected to doing farm labor organizing altogether, signaling the degree to which the CSO had become a more conservative organization since its beginning. “We had really professional guys up there, not like in the fifties when you had those grassroots people.” He added, “[The grassroots people] didn’t speak English, [and] were awkward [when] speaking, but they had lots of balls and guts.” In this case, neither union supporters nor professionals supported Chavez. At some point, Padilla recalled, the meeting turned “very nasty,” with Chavez’s opponents accusing him and his allies of betraying the original mission of the CSO. “I was attacked,” Padilla recalled, “but I wasn’t supposed to respond because I was staff.”37 Amid the insults, Chavez stood up and followed through on his threat to quit.
Chavez’s resignation scared Padilla, who understood that Chavez’s decision required him to leave the organization too. Padilla confronted Chavez outside the convention hall, but Chavez showed little remorse. “I quit! Fuck them! I’m not going to do it [any]more,” he told Padilla. Chavez’s response revealed his famous obstinacy and a willingness to risk everything to achieve his goals, two traits that would become the hallmarks of his leadership. In resigning from the CSO, however, Chavez considered the stakes quite low, given that they had not yet committed significant resources to the project. He also had great faith in his recruits to pursue their goals independent of the CSO. When Padilla asked Chavez, “What about me, what about us?,” Chavez responded with typical brevity and confidence: “Let’s go organize it ourselves.”38 Within three days of the meeting, Chavez left his post in Los Angeles for the small town of Delano, where his brother, Richard, and most of Helen’s family lived. Padilla moved back to Hanford to work at the dry cleaner and prepared members of the local CSO chapters in anticipation of Chavez’s call to action. On April 12, 1962, Chavez tendered his formal letter of resignation to the CSO from Delano and began making preparations for a new farm workers union.39
Chavez’s ambition to start a new union took time and encountered more than a few skeptics. Organizing a union required faith that the bracero program would soon end and that farm workers could attain the same collective bargaining rights granted to industrial workers under the National Labor Relations Act. Galarza’s activism created momentum for achieving the first goal, although the struggle against the program and the failure to sustain a labor movement among citizen workers made Galarza dubious of Chavez’s chances. He gave him counsel and wished him well but had already begun to turn his attention to urban issues. Saul Alinsky remained supportive of Chavez during his transition from the CSO, but he too advised Chavez against the venture and encouraged him to organize in cities for his Industrial Areas Foundation.40 Chavez’s mentor, Fred Ross, remained optimistic, however, and helped channel IAF money to Padilla as he made important inroads in the labor camps.41 Dolores Huerta moved from Stockton to Los Angeles to become a staff