Chavez succeeded in convening the first meeting of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), in Fresno in September 1962. At the meeting, composed mainly of former CSO members, the delegates adopted the black eagle logo as their symbol and red, white, and black as the official colors of the new union. They also adopted a dues structure that required each member to pay $3.50 per month. The initial death benefit insurance for members mirrored those of Mexican mutualistas familiar to many of the delegates. The delegates also selected officers, including Sanger resident, Jesus Martínez, as president; Hanford resident, Tony Orendain, as secretary-treasurer; Cesar Chavez as director general; and six others, including Gilbert Padilla, as board members.
Chavez dedicated the first year to building the organization CSO-style by holding meetings in the homes of Mexican farm workers and conducting registration drives and get-out-the-vote campaigns throughout the valley. Padilla participated in these activities and earned the trust of many local residents by organizing against police brutality and substandard public housing. He recalled that, although they brought many new members into the NFWA, neither the structure of governance nor the appointments worked out as well as Chavez and he had hoped. The work obligations of some officers and lack of shared commitment led to breakdowns in service. Chavez also found his role too vague and, ultimately, unsatisfying. As a result, he reshuffled the governing structure in 1964, taking over as president, a position that granted him the control he sought from the start. Orendain remained secretary-treasurer, and Chavez elevated Padilla to vice president. Chavez also recruited Dolores Huerta to return to the Central Valley to become a second vice president.44
The activities of other nonaffiliated activists operating in the San Joaquin Valley gave Chavez confidence that he had allies. Although rural poverty had become a distinguishing feature of life for most farm workers in California, the high rates of residency and the relatively weak influence of the bracero program in the valley provided farm worker activists a more stable local population with whom to work. Church groups set up operations in many of these farm worker settlements, often conducting relief work rather than organizing residents for political protest. Like the CSO, however, these groups contained members who wanted to go beyond the role of assisting field workers to form self-help organizations that approximated unions. The emergence of civil rights groups, such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the 1950s, also influenced the thinking of these religion-oriented groups. The audacious challenges by black civil rights organizations to Jim Crow laws and discrimination in the American South inspired many local activists to pursue a similar transformation in the rural West.
The California Migrant Ministry figured prominently among the religious organizations committed to serving rural communities. As a program within the Division of Home Missions of the National Council of Churches of Christ, the ministry had grown accustomed to working with immigrant populations. Like other organizations during the 1960s, including the CSO, the California Migrant Ministry felt the influence of youthful affiliates who had come of age after World War II and questioned the boundaries of what traditional community organizations could and should do.
The ministry’s selection of Wayne “Chris” Hartmire as director, a twenty-nine-year-old father of three and a Presbyterian minister, demonstrated its willingness to embrace the leadership of a new generation. Hartmire sought to build on the work of a previous director who had secured a grant from the Schwartzhaupt Foundation to learn from CSO organizers’ attempts to build new chapters in rural California. Upon his arrival, Hartmire met with Chavez, who recommended that he spend a month in Stockton working with Gilbert Padilla and Dolores Huerta to become familiar with the needs of the community. “I quickly became a CSO enthusiast,” Hartmire remembered, attending all of the CSO conventions, including the fateful Calexico convention in 1962. “In retrospect,” he remembered, “I … wondered whether Cesar wanted a ‘yes’ vote.” Hartmire believed Chavez had already reached the conclusion that most of his CSO peers did not have the stomach for organizing farm workers and wanted an excuse to start his own organization.45
Hartmire took the lessons from Stockton and the CSO and immediately applied them to social work in the Central Valley. He recruited Jim Drake, a young New Yorker fresh out of Union Theological Seminary, to anchor the new rural projects for the ministry. Drake had finished his course work in December 1961, and his wife, Susan, had just given birth to their son, Matthew. As Jim remembers it, he pursued a place on Hartmire’s staff “out of desperation” because he needed a job to be able to feed his family. At their first meeting, Hartmire quizzed him about what he knew of organizing. He lied to get the job. Immediately following their meeting Drake drove to the nearest public library to educate himself. He remembered, “In the card file was one book on organizing published by the United Nations. I stole it.”46 This would not be Drake’s last act of improvisation to propel the movement forward.
In spite of their relative lack of experience and knowledge, the two embarked on organizing farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley from 1962 to 1964. Hartmire instructed Drake to move to rural California and consult with Cesar Chavez on how to get started. For Chavez, Drake’s arrival provided a set of wheels and the ministry’s gasoline money to take him around the valley and make local connections that would contribute to the formation of a new farm workers union. Drake benefited too, learning the lay of the land and meeting Gilbert Padilla in the process. Padilla was generous with information and gave Drake a history lesson on organizing.47
Padilla recommended Porterville, a small town thirty miles from Delano in the heart of grape country, where a county-owned labor camp known as Woodville housed three hundred families. Drake and another ministry representative, David Havens, followed Padilla’s advice and used a small amount of money raised by Hartmire to rent an office behind the local barbershop for the Farm Workers Organization. Drake got the attention of residents by purchasing a large tank, filling it with gasoline, and inviting farm workers to pay a $2 annual fee for the privilege of purchasing fuel for $.20 per gallon—far below the going rate. Given workers’ dependence on automobiles for transportation to local jobs, the plan worked, and the office flourished. News of their organization spread to the neighboring town of Farmerville near Visalia and attracted residents of another labor camp, Linnell, to participate in the program. The fueling station provided Drake and Havens an important base of operation, and the two began to run CSO-style house meetings with local farm workers to explore their needs.
Meanwhile, Padilla worked on behalf of the NFWA, using the last months of his grant to conduct a survey of farm workers’ complaints. He began by recruiting members of Central Valley CSO chapters in Corcoran, Huron, and Selma who vowed to stay in the organization until Chavez set up his new union. “I had those guys organized doing the survey,” Padilla recalled.48 When the money ran out, he stayed on as a field laborer but soon picked up another grant through Ross to run a women’s educational project in Hanford that included attention to reproductive rights and child care.49 Drake and Havens shared an interest in making contraceptives available to women farm workers. According to Padilla, Havens harbored the misconception that because most women farm workers belonged to the Catholic Church, they would be resistant to their message. “They go [to church] to look for their soul[s],” Padilla told Havens, “They don’t pay attention to the priest!” To prove his point, Padilla accompanied Havens to the Woodville camp, where they quickly distributed a box of free contraceptives to four or five women who became their primary distributors to the rest of the residents.
The trips into the camp revealed the extent of the housing crisis among farm workers. “The labor camp was a very disgusting site,” Padilla recalled. The houses amounted to windowless, two-bedroom tin shacks built in 1937 for dust bowl migrants that had been handed down several generations to the current residents. During the hot summer months, residents would place on the roof wet rugs recovered from the local dump in a futile attempt to get some relief from the heat. Padilla found that women resented having to share communal toilets and showers, where they encountered many single men who sat outside the facilities in an attempt to catch a glimpse of them naked. The conditions appalled Padilla, who encouraged Drake to join him in an effort to