The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (79 page)

They mourned a man who had changed their lives, treasuring private memories, often of moments more human than historic. Wendy Goepel would always remember the magic of taking Chavez to see Diego Rivera murals in Washington, D.C. Jerry Cohen went back to the room in the Stardust Motel where he and Chavez had met John Giumarra at two-thirty in the morning. Jim Rutkowski recalled waiting hours to brief Chavez before an important court appearance because he stopped en route to play handball with farmworkers; when he finally arrived, Chavez knowledgeably answered his lawyer’s questions, standing on his head. Eliseo Medina remembered the leader who had slept on the floor of a Chicago apartment and kept boycotters awake with his snores.

As the three-mile funeral procession
¹⁴
wound through the streets of Delano, Medina collected signatures on a UFW flag to save for his twelve-year-old daughter, Elena. One hundred twenty pallbearers took turns of three minutes carrying the heavy casket. Marchers were still lining up in Memorial Park when the procession reached Forty Acres, the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe leading the way. Mourners carried ten thousand white gladiolas, Helen’s favorite flower, an echo of the ten thousand roses distributed at Gandhi’s funeral. In front of the large tent that covered much of the lawn at Forty Acres was a giant banner with a likeness of Chavez and the slogan viva cesar chavez. Ten thousand rented chairs seated less than a quarter of the crowd, but many preferred the shade of the trees to the heat of the crowded tent. Cardinal Roger Mahony was the chief celebrant, joined by two dozen concelebrants. At the end of the stage, tall and gray, was Father Donald McDonnell.

The next day, Chavez was buried in a private ceremony at La Paz, next to the graves of his beloved dogs, Boycott and Huelga.

Epilogue

Forty years after she walked out of the fields on strike in September 1965, Consuelo Nuño picked grapes in a Delano vineyard. She worked for Hronis, a company owned by the family that
El Malcriado
had exposed in the early 1960s for cheating sugar beet workers.

Her arms ached after eight hours of harvesting grapes, but hot showers helped. She thought about retiring but enjoyed the camaraderie of the work. She had health insurance, though most of her coworkers did not. Like most growers, Hronis hired crews through labor contractors, the middlemen whom the UFW had once driven out of the fields.

Nuño lived just a few miles from Forty Acres. The old headquarters stood largely deserted in 2005, the front lawn overgrown. The UFW had no contracts in the Delano vineyards.

Chavez’s legacy loomed large in Delano nonetheless. As he had foreseen, Mexican Americans once shut out of power had become the establishment—in city hall, on the school board, and in the courts, the venues that had once been bastions of Anglo power. Students attended Cesar Chavez High School, which had opened in 2003 on the east side of town. The school board chose the name
¹
although the decision cost $100,000; the grower who sold the land had specified he would collect damages if the school were named after a person he found objectionable.

“He’s the most important citizen
²
Delano has ever had,” said grape grower Martin Zaninovich, who once led the fight against Chavez. “And we just have to acknowledge that.” The UFW never won an election at Zaninovich’s Jasmine Vineyards. His workers had an employee handbook and profit sharing, and many sent their children to college. In retrospect, Zaninovich said, Chavez had brought attention to some important issues, though he was never a labor leader.

In the Delano vineyards, younger workers knew little if anything about Cesar Chavez. Many were recent immigrants. They associated the name only with a famous Mexican boxer. But for older workers like Nuño, Chavez’s lessons about dignity outlived his union. “They taught us
³
how to defend ourselves,” she said. She tried to pass that on to the next generation.

In the cities and on the college campuses where he so often spoke in later years, Chavez’s face was painted on murals and etched in stone. His name was written on street signs, his words invoked to inspire young people, and his slogan “Si se puede” turned into a universal rallying cry.

Jared Rivera was fourteen years old when Chavez died. Jared’s father had grown up in a migrant family; Jared attended the University of California at Berkeley, where the Cesar Chavez Student Center sits near the hall where Chavez asked the crowd to donate their lunch money in 1966 to bail his wife out of jail. Rivera joined MEChA, one of the few Chicano organizations that thrived into the twenty-first century. He studied Chicano history and decided to work as a community activist and labor organizer. Sixteen years after Chavez’s death, Rivera pointed to a tattoo of the black eagle on his arm: “I’m an organizer
⁴
because of him.”

Around the country, thousands of people whose lives were shaped by Chavez worked to reconcile conflicting emotions. They had worshipped Chavez and become disillusioned, basked in his tutelage and endured his wrath, admired his courage and despaired his decisions. Each wrestled privately to come to terms with a personal sense of Chavez’s legacy. For some, that struggle took many decades. For others, reconciliation came more easily.

Gustavo Gutierrez still lived in the Phoenix house where Cesar Chavez began his fast in May 1972. I interviewed him in his living room in the fall of 2011. His ample frame filled the chair, his large face encased in a bushy beard and white mane, a gray ponytail flowing down his back. Every so often he reached for a plastic water bottle, revealing the stumps on his hand where he lost fingers during an early accident in the fields. He lifted the water bottle over his enormous stomach and squirted a small dog he was training not to bark.

Gutierrez reminisced about the first time he met Chavez, in the spring of 1965. Chavez and Fred Ross conducted a training session at the Arizona migrant workers organization where Gutierrez worked. Ross came in with a scrapbook full of stories about the CSO. Chavez explained how to conduct house meetings. A year later, Gutierrez joined the last four days of the march to Sacramento, carrying a sign that said arizona farmworkers support california farmworkers. In 1970, he went to Delano to witness the grape growers sign the first contracts, and from there to Salinas to help with the lettuce strike.

The memories were still fresh, though Gutierrez was seventy-nine years old: The pride he felt marching in the
peregrinación
. The admiration when he watched Chavez plan strategy. The annoyance when Chavez challenged Gutierrez’s car allowance. The disappointment when direct mail appeals began to carry Cesar Chavez’s name as the return address, instead of the UFW’s. The defiance when Manuel Chavez delivered the message that Gutierrez should shut down the Arizona farmworkers union. The anger when his efforts to help Arizona farmworkers were undermined.

Gutierrez smiled, at peace with his memories. He embraced Cesar Chavez in all his complexity. “Cesar was my mentor,” Gutierrez said. Palms up, he held his right hand above his head and lowered his left near the floor. On balance, he said, the good outweighed the bad. It was not even close.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all the people who helped me over the last nine years to understand Cesar Chavez, who educated me not only about the farm worker movement but about agriculture, labor unions, organizing, social movements, California history, Catholicism, and Mexican culture. If I tried to thank everyone, I would surely leave some out. Many are cited in the list of interviewees; some whose contributions were immeasurable do not appear. My profound thanks for all the conversations and insights, the cups of tea and the glasses of wine.

I am indebted to those who made the history, and to those who preserved it. I am grateful that Cesar Chavez recognized the historic nature of his quest and that advisers such as LeRoy Chatfield and archivists such as Philip Mason helped preserve the documentation. Chatfield’s work both in the early days of the movement and in more recent years has provided scholars with an invaluable resource. I owe special thanks to the staff at the Reuther Library at Wayne State, who have over the course of almost a decade of visits been unfailingly helpful and supportive, often under trying circumstances. My thanks to Elizabeth Myers, William LeFevre, and, especially, Mary J. Wallace, for her patience and unflagging help in untangling the audio archives that were so crucial to my research.

Jeffrey Burns at the archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco guided me not only through relevant collections there but pointed me to others. Thanks also to Kevin Feeney, archivist at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and to Polly Armstrong and Ignacio Ornelas at the Green Library at Stanford. Several colleagues graciously shared observations and research. Thanks to Felipe Hinojosa, Gabriel Thompson, and Bruce Perry.

A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to complete my research. A two-week stay at Mesa Refuge was a writer’s dream.

For the photographic display, I’m indebted to Mary Wallace and to Wendy Vissar, whose creative counsel and technical expertise helped shape a compelling visual narrative.

Writing is a solitary pursuit, but I had a wonderful support team. My agent, Gloria Loomis, believed in the book from the beginning. At Bloomsbury, I’m indebted to Laura Phillips, Rob Galloway, and especially to Peter Ginna, whose thoughtful editing and guidance made this a far better book. John Hoeffel caught errors that no one else did. My three readers helped me think through both what I wanted to say and how to say it; many thanks to Sam Enriquez, Geoff Mohan, and above all to my husband, Michael Muskal, for his wise counsel and enduring faith and encouragement.

Thanks to everyone who understood the importance of this biography, and especially to those who trusted me to tell the story of someone who changed their lives.

Bibliography

This book is drawn chiefly from the extensive array of primary sources available in more than a dozen public archives. In addition to written documentation, the UFW archives at Wayne State University include hundreds of tape recordings of union board meetings, conferences, and conversations. In the course of my research, I listened to more than fifteen hundred hours of tapes, including recordings of thirty national executive board meetings between December 1973 and December 1980. Several dozen additional tapes of conferences, staff meetings, interviews, and public events between 1967 and 1981 also provided rich source material.

Audiotapes made between 1969 and 1975 by Jacques E. Levy, Chavez’s official biographer, are also an invaluable resource, documenting many key junctures in the union’s history. A third important source of tapes is available on the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project website; I relied in particular on a series of interviews conducted by Fred Ross, mainly in March 1969 (the Fred Ross Sr. Oral History Archive).

I was also privileged to have access to private collections of several key participants in the farm worker movement. In addition, Bruce Perry, who conducted research on Chavez for several years, generously shared with me written material and more than two hundred interviews recorded in the mid-1990s.

Over the last seven years, I have interviewed more than eighty individuals who knew Chavez in a wide range of capacities. Those conversations helped me craft the biographical narrative and provided essential background. They are cited where relevant and a full list of interviewees is included. All quotations in the book, however, are drawn from primary sources.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations for individual archives follow their identification below. The Walter P. Reuther Labor Library at Wayne State University in Detroit is the repository for archives of the UFW and more than a dozen related collections. I use the following abbreviations for collections cited: