Introduction
[The role of the] organizer [is to] work with the people where they are, not where you are, or where you think they ought to be.
FRED ROSS
“Book Outline (Bell Town and Casa Blanca),” from his unpublished autobiography, Fred Ross Papers, Stanford University Library
An organizer is an outsider in many cases—there’s nothing wrong in that. But then he assumes a sort of special position in that program. If you organize a good group, pretty soon you find yourself hoping, “I wish I had a vote in this outfit.”
CESAR CHAVEZ
“What Is an Organizer?,” in Cesar Chavez, An Organizer’s Tale
I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
UPTON SINCLAIR
The Jungle
BEFORE PUBLISHING HIS PROVOCATIVE NOVEL, The Jungle, on the meatpacking industry in 1906, Upton Sinclair embedded himself in the Chicago stockyards as a worker and an investigative reporter. Dedicated to the plight of immigrant workers, he sought to produce sympathy for the less fortunate producers of meat products from those who consumed the fruits of their labor. Like so many issues involving food, his was a cultural problem as much as a political one. How do you communicate the experience of working-class, Lithuanian immigrant laborers in a way that moves middle-class, English-speaking consumers to care? More important, how do you get those consumers to pursue reforms that serve the interest of people other than themselves?
To his chagrin, Sinclair succeeded in meeting only the first challenge. The Jungle prompted progressive-era activism and reform—the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906—motivated primarily by the public’s horror over what went into the food and consequently into their bodies. The question of workers’ rights, as Sinclair and others discovered, required further activism up through the 1930s. During the Depression, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, but an executive order later excluded agricultural workers from the collective bargaining rights that went to industrial laborers. The task of extending these rights to farm workers would fall to a new generation of activists, most famously Cesar Chavez and the many people responsible for building the United Farm Workers Union in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Cesar Chavez created the most successful farm worker movement in United States history. Born into a farm worker family, Chavez fought his way out from under the tyranny of the fields to become a community organizer whose mission it was to convince poor people that they could achieve justice through collective action. Like Sinclair before him, Chavez entered a world not completely his own. Chavez too had to find a vehicle for explaining the need for justice to the public in a convincing manner that would move them to action. Although he used many strategies to achieve this goal—long marches, fasts, and the age-old tool of the strike—it was the boycott that had the greatest impact in reaching across the divide between farm workers and consumers.
This book examines the strategy and leadership that sustained the farm worker movement for nearly two decades, from the beginning of the 1960s until the end of the 1970s. During that period, the United States experienced unprecedented economic change. The country moved from being the dominant producer of goods on the world market to a country that imported more than it exported. Rather than relinquish their attachment to military spending or stake all of their hopes on a struggling automobile industry, U.S. lawmakers worked to expand the reach and profitability of U.S. growers by reducing restrictions against the trade of U.S. agricultural products. This shift in economic priorities brought new prestige to California agriculture; it also renewed the public’s attention to rural poverty. Chavez offered his solution to the problem by working toward an end to the exploitative guest worker program (known as the bracero program) and creating a union. By using community organizing efforts begun in the wake of World War II, he and his early allies forged a broad, new coalition of workers, students, social justice activists, and religious affiliates. Throughout the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the United Farm Workers won most of their battles by leveraging this diversity. Farm owners, on the other hand, remained committed to ethnic cliques and business models that made it difficult for them to communicate a common message.
Chavez achieved his early success through a combination of political savvy and attentiveness to workers’ concerns. As a former director of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a group of working-class citizens committed to electoral empowerment, he understood the capacity of organized citizens to accomplish tangible goals. Although he became frustrated by the nonpartisan and urban orientation of the CSO, the organization served as an important training ground that provided opportunities to cultivate support for a new farm workers union. This outreach, as his mentor Fred Ross had taught him, required a tremendous amount of patience and listening. Rather than push a solution upon communities in need, Ross encouraged members to meet, argue, and eventually come to collective decisions. Strategically deployed, such democratic methods gave participants a sense of ownership over the goals of the movement and inspired deeper investments among its adherents. Chavez urged organizers to be creative in their tactics, which enabled many volunteers to discover new methods for achieving their goals. The nimbleness and independence that Chavez encouraged among his organizers led to a union with deeper roots and more effective strategies than any of its predecessors had achieved.
The challenge of building an effective organization also requires decisive leadership. Chavez exhibited this attribute early on, offering a clear path for those who joined the cause. This began in his years as an organizer for the CSO, when he determined that the organization lacked the capacity and appropriate membership to address the particular needs of farm workers. His departure from the CSO in 1962 to start the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) was just one moment among many over two decades in which Chavez asserted his leadership in a way that propelled the dream of building a farm workers union forward. In making these decisions, Chavez not only assumed great risk for himself and his family but also jeopardized the security of his allies. When the NFWA evolved into the United Farm Workers union in 1966,1 his decisions—and the decisions of a small national executive board—threatened to compromise the jobs of thousands of workers and volunteers who sacrificed their time and their bodies in the pursuit of Chavez’s vision of justice. This awesome responsibility weighed heavily on him, but his propensity—in the beginning—to seek counsel from trusted advisors helped distribute this burden.
This book shows that the task of striking a balance between cultivating creativity among organizers and providing strong, timely leadership ultimately was a challenge too great for Chavez to sustain. After achieving the first collective bargaining agreements for farm workers in California in 1970, Chavez made a series of missteps that compromised the health of the union. Initially, his encouragement of debate among organizers produced inventive solutions to new problems that arose throughout the first half of the 1970s. Yet the failure to channel this ad hoc democracy into a permanent structure of governance eventually led to personal and systematic failure. As some of his closest advisors and friends testify, Chavez became increasingly invested in his power to dictate the strategies and priorities of the union as the decade wore on. His isolation in a communal living arrangement at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, augmented his infatuation with control over the organization and the individuals who composed it. According to advisors and staff members who worked alongside Chavez during this period, the living arrangements separated him from farm workers and union staff in the field at a time when he needed to incorporate more perspectives into solving an increasingly complex situation.2 Chavez’s physical and emotional distance contributed to an alarming lack of accountability to union members and allowed him to abandon the principles of democracy preached by his mentor and friend, Fred Ross. Ironically, Chavez abused power