The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (35 page)

At noon, the bishops met with Chavez and delivered the written agreement from Feick with the list of his twenty-five clients. Chavez excitedly summoned everyone he could round up for an afternoon meeting, keeping the purpose secret. They gathered in the big hall at Forty Acres. Chavez called for a mass. Midway through, he said he had an announcement. He read out loud the short letter: “The table grape growers listed below have authorized Philip J. Feick Jr., Western Employers Council, Bakersfield, California, to negotiate on their behalf with the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee for the purpose of affecting a labor agreement between the parties.” The room erupted in cheers. He read the list of growers, and each name elicited more cheers. The crowed lifted Chavez and carried him around the room.

At 7:00 p.m. he moved to Marshall Ganz’s office in the Pink House and settled in to share the news with boycotters who had been away from home for years, working for this moment. The first call went to Jessica Govea in Montreal. Chavez read the letter from Feick and then began to name the growers. Jasmine Vineyards . . . M. Caratan . . . Pandol and Sons . . . “Are you kidding?” Govea screamed. “Oh wow. Oh, this is like heaven
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. . . Oh my God . . . That’s amazing, how did that happen?”

“I don’t know, I think the boycott,” Chavez replied.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight!” Govea exclaimed.

“We recorded your impressions!” Chavez told her happily, as Jacques Levy handled the tape recorder to capture the historic calls. For three hours Chavez made calls, reading the same announcement over and over, each time with pure, undisguised delight, and then shared joy as the boycotters reacted. Chavez reminded them not to let up. The union was going to be tough on the growers in negotiations, he warned. In between, as he waited to catch the boycotters at home, Chavez celebrated with Monterey jack cheese, matzoh, and water. He and Larry Itliong took turns reading the Feick announcement, saving the best for last and eliciting squeals when they hit the key names—Zaninovich, Pandol, Caratan, Giumarra. “Beautiful, beautiful,” Eliseo Medina exclaimed over and over, on the phone in Chicago.

Chavez made one more call. He invited Fred Ross to come to Delano and sit in on negotiations. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as happy,”
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Ross’s son, Fred Jr., wrote to Chavez about his father’s reaction.

Bill Kircher arrived the next morning and reviewed with Chavez, Cohen, and Itliong their demands and strategy. Chavez told Kircher there were two nonnegotiable demands: the contract signing must be at Forty Acres, and the agreement must resolve a problem at Delano High School.

Tensions at the school
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were not new; the “huelga kids” had encountered hostility since the start of the strike. Administrators refused to register students who wore UFWOC buttons, and backed down only when the union threatened to picket the school. In 1969, students had staged a sit-down strike after Richard Chavez’s son Freddy, the senior class president, had been suspended for making “disrespectful” comments to faculty. In the spring of 1970, the conflict boiled over. On May 6, 1970, dozens of Mexican American students walked out of Delano High School to protest teachers’ use of racial slurs, the lack of Hispanic faculty, and the scant attention to the educational needs of farmworker children. Teachers called Mexicans “beaners,” students testified in affidavits, and told them that if they didn’t like school, they should go back to Mexico. For weeks students and parents picketed the school as well as businesses owned by school board members. Many students were disciplined, and a dozen seniors were denied the right to graduate. Among them were Cesar Chavez’s daughter Eloise and his niece Dorothy.

At the graduation ceremony on Friday, June 12, police guarded entrances to the school. They barred the sister of a student strike leader from entering, and a melee ensued. A dozen students were arrested and held in jail over the weekend. For weeks, angry charges and countercharges were leveled in exchanges on the streets, in the local newspapers, and in court.

When Chavez sat down to open formal negotiations between UFWOC and the growers at noon on July 18 at the Bakersfield Holiday Inn, he insisted that the school issue be part of any settlement. Kircher and Feick gave opening remarks, each voicing the same goal: total peace and an end to the hostilities. Each also acknowledged the difficulties in moving from an emotional, adversarial position to a working relationship. Kircher pleaded with the baffled growers to understand why expulsions at the high school, where one grower sat on the school board, were so important.

Several days of proposals and counterproposals, caucuses, and recesses followed. Dissatisfied with Kircher’s pressure on the union to end the boycott as a good-faith gesture, Chavez replaced him as chief negotiator with Dolores Huerta. She presented a list of sixteen demands, including a wage of $1.85 a hour the first year, 10¢ more than the other contracts signed so far. Feick responded that the growers viewed this as “uncalled for and vindictive” and told the bishops they were leaving. Feick expected the bishops would encourage the union to soften its deal and appeared surprised when they refused. Feick “over-played and over-bluffed,”
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Mahony noted.

The next morning, Feick reached out to Kircher to ask if there were flexibility in the union’s economic proposal. Kircher checked with Chavez and said yes. Feick had coffee with Mahony, who made clear they could not help get a better deal but would mediate if talks resumed. The bishops left town.

The union intensified the boycott against Giumarra in Los Angeles. Chatfield tried a new tack—he tested grapes for sugar content. Two days after the talks had broken down, Jacques Levy prepared a press release for the
Los Angeles Times
claiming Giumarra was shipping “green grapes,” with sugar content less than the 17 percent federal requirement.

That evening, Jerry Cohen returned home from a late meeting to find two urgent messages from John Giumarra Jr. He wanted to meet to negotiate, immediately. Chavez was en route home from San Rafael, north of San Francisco, where he had lent support to a strike by the typographical workers union. When he arrived in Delano, he responded to Cohen’s message to call at any hour. They called Giumarra back. He was leaving town soon and urged that they meet at once.

At 2:30 a.m. they gathered in room 44 of the Stardust Motel—the elder and younger John Giumarras, Chavez, Cohen, Levy, and Marion Moses, who massaged Chavez’s back. Chavez made another bold gamble: He told Giumarra he would only negotiate with all the growers at once. The Grape King said he would make arrangements. Within hours, they assembled in the auditorium at St. Mary’s School.

Now Chavez felt pressure as well. Farmworkers around the state, inspired by his success in the vineyards, were starting job actions on their own. Chavez had from time to time assured workers in the vegetable and melon fields that their turn would come once he concluded the grape strike. Now workers in Santa Paula, Salinas, and Stockton were walking out on strike and calling on Chavez for help. He told Huerta they needed to reach an agreement by the end of the day.

Cohen went through the remaining issues, working them out without great difficulty. Then he said they wanted a meeting with the grower on the school board. Giumarra told them to call directly. Chavez became angry.
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“That was one of the conditions we raised this morning,” he said. “We listened to your peculiar problems and we had only one . . . We cannot accept no for an answer . . . We want a resolution of this problem. I have kids who didn’t get their diplomas, who didn’t get credit for the work they did at school, and the roots come from the conflict of the strike . . . The day is gone when you can isolate a problem.”

He walked outside during the recess, visibly upset. He would not sign without resolving the school problem, he reiterated to his team. Cohen met privately with Giumarra and the situation was resolved: Louis Lucas, the youngest member of the growers’ team, said the school board member was a relative by marriage. He would meet with a small group to work things out. Cohen and John Giumarra Jr. met the next day to finalize contract language.

Two days later, on July 29, 1970, hundreds of workers and supporters crowded into the hall at Forty Acres and overflowed on the lawn outside. At the front of the room were the bishops, Chavez and a few of his team, and John Giumarra and his son. The elder Giumarra signed with a flourish, and threw up his hands for the camera in mock surrender. All the growers were there; Chavez had made that another condition. They were painfully aware of their status, the vanquished army capitulating in the citadel of the victors.

“You are a new union
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and you have tremendous responsibility,” said John Giumarra Jr., who spoke eloquently on behalf of the growers. The world’s eyes were on Delano, he said. “If it works well here, if this experiment in social justice, as they call it, or this revolution in agriculture, however you want to characterize it, if it works here it can work elsewhere. But if doesn’t work here, it won’t work anywhere.”

Chavez made a joke, saying they were surprised to see the growers didn’t have horns, and the growers were surprised to see the union leaders didn’t have tails. He, too, hailed the beginning of a new day and hope for millions of farmworkers. “We will not disappoint them,” he said.

Chavez said the contracts were a tribute to the success of nonviolent protest and thanked supporters around the world. He spoke of strikers who had lost homes and cars. “I think that in losing those worldly possessions they found themselves,” he said, “and they found that only through dedication, through serving mankind, in this case serving the poor and those who were struggling for justice, only in that way could they really find themselves.”

He was asked afterward why he had succeeded where others had failed, and Chavez gave credit to those far from Delano: “I think that we set an example for those who wanted to help us, that we said that we’re not going to abandon the fight, that we were going to stay with the struggle if it took a lifetime. And we meant it. And I think that this gave our friends around the country and around the world the encouragement that they needed to come to our aid.”

Part III

July 1970–June 1975

Chapter 19

A Very Different Strike

Jails are made for men who fight for their rights . . . They can jail us, but never the cause.

In Salinas, the Salad Bowl of the World, the differences began with the land. Unlike the torrid, bleak landscape of central California, the Salinas fields were cool and lush, nestled against the foothills and drawing moisture from the nearby ocean. Most everything grew in the Salinas Valley, a hundred-mile strip sandwiched between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia Mountains, beyond which lay the tourist meccas of the Monterey coast. Vegetables, tree fruit, and strawberries flourished in the temperate clime. But lettuce was the “green gold.”

Lettuce cutters were the elite of the fields, trios who harvested and packed in carefully choreographed movements. Their skill and speed commanded respect. The most successful growers depended on their
lechugueros
and recognized the workers’ power: if they withheld labor at crucial times, or picked and packed sloppily, the price of the produce plummeted. Many workers returned to the same company each season, but others jumped around. They worked piece rate and renegotiated wages frequently in response to changing conditions in the field. The militancy of the vegetable workers was clear to Chavez from the start. Unlike in Delano, where the union had to coax or threaten reluctant grape workers out of the fields, the lechugueros led the charge.

The Salinas growers were different, too. In the industry they were sometimes called “blue-blood farmers.” Many came from families of greater means than the immigrant ancestors of the Slav farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, who had scrabbled hard to buy their vineyards. With a few exceptions, the major vegetable growers rented fields or harvested crops grown by others. They planted row crops, tore them out, and moved on to new fields whenever necessary. They had little attachment to a particular piece of land.

Ninety percent of the lettuce produced in the United States, 2.28 billion heads of iceberg annually, came from California and Arizona. Growers planted, irrigated, thinned, and hoed the lettuce. Packers harvested and packed the produce in boxes. Shippers stored it in coolers until the lettuce was loaded onto boxcars or trucks. And sellers made deals to market the green gold. Most major companies packed, shipped, and sold. A few grew their own lettuce as well. The growers and shippers made deals with one another in fields, bars, and back offices. They were accustomed to adjusting quickly as circumstances changed. Their business depended on being mobile and nimble.

Chavez needed to modulate his tactics to suit the Salinas dynamic: militant workers and a more unified industry better positioned to outmaneuver the union. The Salinas growers worked closely with one another and acted through a central organization, the Grower-Shipper Association, that dated back to the 1930s. They had followed events in Delano and moved quickly to preempt Chavez, catching him by surprise.

A week before he sat down to sign the grape contracts, Chavez had sent telegrams to twenty-seven vegetable growers, announcing that the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee represented their workers and wished to negotiate contracts. The July 23, 1970, telegrams reached Salinas as the Grower-Shipper Association was in the midst of renegotiating contracts with the Teamsters Union, which represented their truck drivers. The day Chavez’s wires arrived, all the vegetable growers signed agreements authorizing the association to “feel out the Teamsters
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and explore the prospects of negotiating an agreement for agricultural workers.” The next day, a committee reported back that the Teamsters were interested, and twenty-nine companies signed recognition agreements. They worked through the weekend and finalized contracts on July 27.