But joining them would not be easy. Chavez called Padilla in Porterville. “The world’s coming to an end, Gilbert; the Filipinos are out on strike. Come on down.” When Padilla arrived, Cesar still seemed unsure about what to do. He asked Gilbert to go over to Filipino Hall to see what was happening. Padilla walked in on an enthusiastic meeting of a few hundred people. Five languages were flying around—Tagalog, Ilocano, Viscayan, English, and Spanish. The AWOC chief, Al Green, was there, but seemed to have very little to do with the strike. Larry Itliong chaired the meeting, and although there was a lot of talk about the wage demands, Padilla heard little mention of the issue of union recognition. Padilla had a friendly conversation with a few Mexican members of AWOC, and later, when Chavez, still hesitant, asked, “Well, what do we do?” Gilbert, caught up in the excitement of the mass meeting, had no doubts: “We are going to strike.”18
Itliong was friendly but somewhat standoffish in his first conversation with Padilla. He didn’t take the NFWA seriously. If its members really wanted to help, they could all join AWOC, he said. After that, Bill Esher wrote up a leaflet calling AWOC the “union of the north” (a reference to its Stockton headquarters, which implied that NFWA was the authentic Delano-area farm worker organization) listing the demands of the strike and the growers being struck. It ended with an injunction: “The Farm Worker Association asks of all Mexicans: HONOR THIS STRIKE. DON’T BE STRIKEBREAKERS.” Chavez issued a press release that said, in part, “Now is when every worker, without regard to race, color, or nationality, should support the strike and must under no circumstances work on those ranches that have been struck.” A special edition of El Malcriado gave unconditional support to the AWOC strike.19
Meanwhile, dozens of Filipino pickets walked in front of the packing sheds and cold-storage facilities alongside the railroad tracks that run through the center of Delano. On the working-class west side the talk at bars and cafés was dominated by strike stories: the foreman who shot at an evicted Filipino because he wasn’t leaving his camp fast enough; police cars patrolling in front of Filipino Hall; the vulnerability of the wooden packing sheds to fire; late-night actions against water pumps. The NFWA was essentially on the sidelines. Padilla, Huerta, and Esher were anxious to be at the center of the battle. Chavez was cautious. Some Mexican farm workers were crossing the picket lines, but at one ranch, a young woman led her Mexican crew out in support of the strike. Chavez called an executive board meeting for September 14 to decide what to do.20
The meeting saw Chavez at his strategic best. At the very least the NFWA had to continue to support the AWOC strike, he said. If not, the Filipinos would blame the Mexicans for what was surely an upcoming defeat. The inevitable mutual recrimination would destroy all possibility for Mexican-Filipino cooperation. AWOC would be more damaged than the NFWA, but both groups would have a hard time organizing after such a major loss. No one at the meeting disagreed with that. The question was whether to go beyond support for the AWOC strike, and exactly how to do it. Itliong’s suggestion that the NFWA dissolve itself into AWOC was unacceptable, and yet he had offered no other way for the association to become more involved. No half measures came to mind. If the NFWA wanted to go beyond a statement of solidarity, it would have to call its own strike. Chavez acknowledged that if the question were put to a vote at a mass meeting, people would decide to extend the strike to their own ranches. But he also argued that the enthusiasm would soon pass, the growers would hold firm, and most people would go back to work. In many ways the most prudent course was not to call a mass meeting and not to commit the NFWA any further. But that meant watching AWOC lose, and suffering all the consequences.
Chavez concluded that the NFWA had to enter the strike, despite his own assessment that the workers were not powerful enough to win. Was the organization, then, walking into a disaster? Cesar answered his own question: maybe, but not necessarily. If it could effectively involve outside supporters in the strike, it might overcome the unfavorable local balance of forces. He pointed out that Padilla and the Migrant Ministry had done just that in the rent strike. A vast mobilization of outside support might even turn this more conventional battle into a winner. It was a gamble, a long shot, Chavez argued, but what other choice did they have? They should join the strike, not be discouraged by expected early setbacks, and try to make the strike last long enough so that the power of their supporters could be felt locally. They must not strike and run.
Such a notion was much in the air in the late summer of 1965. Over the previous few years, the civil rights movement had mobilized liberal supporters in the North in an effort to overcome the seemingly all-powerful local forces supporting segregation in the South. That strategy had had its ups and downs, with SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Council disagreeing about its ultimate effectiveness, but it had just scored a spectacular national victory with the Selma march and the subsequent passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Chavez specifically cited those gains, and the strategy behind them, at the meeting, as he had been thinking about the applicability of civil rights strategy to the farm worker movement for some time. Six months earlier he had told a meeting of Mexican American leaders, according to one of the people at the meeting, Bert Corona, “that the reason the farm workers’ organizing drive could win in the days ahead was because they could ally themselves with a new feature in American social and political activity—the movement for civil rights, the movement of the youth, and the movement of the poor.”21
And who better than Chavez to see that the strategy of the civil rights movement could be used by his newly developing National Farm Workers Association? His Community Service Organization had been essentially a Mexican American civil rights group—it was no great stretch to think of the NFWA more as a continuation of the Mexican American civil rights struggle than as a conventional effort to organize a union. Not that the two conceptions of the NFWA could be easily separated, even theoretically. As the organization’s leaders often argued, one of the reasons that wages and working conditions were so bad was because farm workers were not covered by the same laws as all other Americans. Legally they were second-class workers, only recently granted workers’ compensation (owing primarily to the lobbying efforts of Dolores Huerta, coupled with the voter registration campaigns of the CSO and the NFWA), still lacking unemployment insurance, not covered by organizing rights under the National Labor Relations Act, with separate and unequal coverage by Social Security, child labor, and minimum-wage laws. In its first two years, the NFWA had placed considerable emphasis on political action (forging temporary alliances with liberal Democratic politicians and participating in Sacramento legislative hearings) to change this second-class status. Righting those wrongs was surely as much a civil rights battle as it was a union fight. As Chavez had been arguing for some time, this conception of the NFWA not only made good sense in the fields, it made perfect sense in terms of the overall political situation in the country. Who was more popular with the general public, civil rights leaders or union officials?
Once Chavez came to believe that joining the strike was the least worst choice, he urged the others to make that choice with full energy and enthusiasm. They were not hard to convince. Here was another mark of his political agility: he proposed to make a virtue of necessity. The Filipino strike and the enthusiasm of the workers was a great opportunity, he concluded, because the NFWA could transform this local struggle into a statewide and regional fight. Chavez was not clear on how that might be done, but he mentioned, almost as an aside, that they would have a better chance if they fought nonviolently: the strikers should not use the guns, sticks, and chains that had been taken to hand in almost all earlier farm worker battles.
A mass meeting was called for September 16, Mexican Independence Day—two days hence. People would be ready to celebrate, and speakers could evoke the radical traditions of Mexican nationalism when urging workers to join the strike. But only an experienced crew could arrange for such a meeting in two days’ time, as they would have to rush through all the