Helen Chavez and Dolores Huerta were not the only women in the early FWA. Those who rounded out the chewing-gum chorus included Helen’s sister Petra, Rachael Orendain, Gloria Terronez, Esther Uranday, and Josefina Hernandez. All but Petra were married to men who were FWA organizers or activists, and the women’s style of participation was much closer to Helen’s than to Dolores’s. They managed their families, freeing up their husbands’ time; they organized and ran the community barbecues, which were a major source of funds for the FWA and an important organizing tool; they talked up the association among other farm worker women. The participation of so many mothers and wives gave the FWA moral weight, signifying that the association was not just another hit-and-run organizing attempt. Although the FWA demanded a sacrifice—there were dues to pay and meetings to attend—joining up became the right thing to do.
It helped that men of God also came to the FWA’s aid—not primarily from the Catholic Church, whose Central Valley parishes were almost completely dominated by growers and their families, but rather from the small outpost of Protestantism, the Californian Migrant Ministry, which itself was supported by, among others, the Alinsky-linked Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation. The CMM director in 1961, Chris Hartmire, was chiefly responsible for the long-lasting, intimate relationship between the ministry and Chavez, with whom Hartmire was closely associated until 1988. Five years younger than Chavez, Hartmire was a product of the affluent Philadelphia suburbs. His dad made a good living working for DuPont while his mother stayed home raising the children. Although Hartmire regularly attended Sunday school, actively participated in church youth groups, and went to Presbyterian summer camps, he never felt any particular religious calling. He got a scholarship to Princeton, where he majored in engineering, but it was while working at a summer camp for poor kids from New York City, Trenton and Newark, that he “got hooked on working with people.”23
After three years in the Navy, he enrolled in Union Theological Seminary and worked in the East Harlem Protestant Parish, which by the late 1950s had become a laboratory for Protestants who were trying to rethink their mission to the poor. Always a good student, he did well in biblical studies (“he came to know the Bible like a Baptist,” said one admirer), but his most important intellectual sustenance came from the prison diary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the upper-class Lutheran minister who in World War II Germany had attempted to help Jews escape the Holocaust and joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.24 Thrown in jail in 1944 when the plot was uncovered, Bonhoeffer based his resistance—so atypical of the mild German Protestant response to fascism—on his belief that Christians had to learn to live in reality, and respond to the evil conditions of the world. He knew that political action was fraught with moral difficulties: even helping Jews escape required killing other Germans. Contemporary Christianity did not provide much moral guidance in such decisions, so Bonhoeffer resurrected an idea he found in the sermons of the first politically inclined Lutheran, Martin himself, who spoke in defense of “bravely sinning.” To fight evil in the world, one might have to sin, and one had to be brave enough to accept that, Luther argued.
Even though the intensity of the contradiction between a strict religious morality, which sees human action only in terms of its own immediate intrinsic meaning, and the political world, which requires some calculation of ends and means, diminished greatly between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries as religious sensibility weakened, it was still alive for Bonhoeffer as he sat in Hitler’s jail. And it was still intense for the young Chris Hartmire, who as a seminary student sought to mesh his intimate devotion to the New Testament’s other-worldly ethics with his own overwhelming impulse toward action in the world. Bonhoeffer, who was executed shortly before the Allies liberated Germany, became Hartmire’s chief hero and intellectual inspiration. Over the next twenty-eight years, as Hartmire threw himself into the difficult choices involved in giving full support to a union involved in a necessarily messy struggle to establish itself in the California fields, his respect for Bonhoeffer grew, and he came to rely on the idea of “bravely sinning.”
In 1961, however, when at the age of twenty-nine he was about to start on the main journey of his life, the choices did not seem so fraught with moral danger—although they were difficult and tricky enough. After he got his feet on the ground, Hartmire could see that the Migrant Ministry’s change from “cookies for poor farm worker kids to community organizing” had led the organization into a new fix. How could people like him—well-meaning middle-class white clergymen—organize poor communities? Hartmire didn’t share Alinsky’s optimism, and even arrogance, about the role of the outside organizer. The Migrant Ministers wanted to change the nature of power in the Central Valley, but they didn’t think they were the people for the job.
We were there in the fields, and we saw all these horrible things happening. And nothing changed. Vacation Bible schools didn’t change it. Movies for braceros in English didn’t change it. Our churches and our community organizations didn’t change it, not substantially. And then Chavez came along and offered this practical way to bring about this change that we all in our hearts wanted but we didn’t know how to do. And we would have mucked it up if we had tried. It was almost like a relief, like thank God we can support this guy and his efforts and contribute to the change we all know has to come about.25
The support started slowly. In the early 1960s, the CMM had a budget of about $100,000 a year. It bought the FWA its first mimeograph machine and Cesar some meals and gas. When Migrant Ministers were assigned to be trained by Chavez, they worked as his assistants. Although Chavez pointedly never took money from the CMM for his own salary, the Migrant Ministry would sometimes pay the salary of other FWA organizers. This began in late 1964, when Chavez went directly to Hartmire and asked him to hire Gilbert Padilla. Next, Jim Drake and another CMM staffer, David Havens, began to function as FWA staff working under Chavez’s direction, an arrangement later formalized into a system of “worker priests.” At one time in the mid-sixties there were twenty-six of these worker priests, most of them with little religious background at all, working under the UFW’s direction.
Meanwhile, the CMM’s own organizers began to work “the other side of the street,” raising money and awareness in the affluent Anglo churches. The Migrant Ministry, Hartmire asserted, had two tasks, “to help low income people deal with their own problems in organizations of their own; and to provide continuous interpretation of the needs and actions of the low income people to established citizens (churchmen and others) so they may understand and respond humanely.”26
Part of what made Hartmire so happy about this formula was the particular presence of Chavez. Religious folks could trust him. He was a trained community organizer, and he was also an authentically religious person. The progressive middle-class church would have little trouble understanding and appreciating his organizing efforts. Church activists put up with Alinsky’s vulgar style because he seemed to have an organizing theory that worked, and they suspected that their own Christian ethics were not completely adequate for dealing with the political world. But Alinsky was not an appealing figure. Hartmire called him a “loudmouth bitcher and complainer.”27 How different was Chavez’s style: just as calculating and skilled as Alinsky, but also deeply spiritual. Telling the world about Cesar Chavez, explaining his efforts at organizing farm workers to “established citizens,” would be an easy, welcome task. For Hartmire, Cesar Chavez was the answer to a prayer, and he gave Chavez nearly unconditional support, rarely questioning his judgment and never meddling in internal FWA affairs. “The Church is the one group that isn’t expecting anything from us,” Chavez later told the writer John Gregory Dunne. “They’re not doing any politicking among us. All the other groups, the unions, the civil-rights groups, they all want something in return for their support. Not the Church.”28
Although the FWA was a family affair, there was always a first family: Chavez, Helen, Richard, Manuel . . . and Dolores Huerta. Dolores would seem to be out of place in the early years, as she was a Chavez by neither blood nor marriage. Close to Cesar, she nonetheless held a position similar to that of Gilbert Padilla: a cherished associate with whom Chavez had worked for ten years before he founded the FWA. But even at the beginning, Dolores got closer to the Chavez family than Gilbert. Padilla was married, and his first wife was dubious