Forging latino power, p.11
Forging Latino Power, page 11
March from Delano to Sacramento led by the NFWA banner of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patron Saint of the Americas. Photo by Harvey Richards. Courtesy of Paul Richards.
Had historical time allowed for the dreamt-of general strike, it is easy to imagine that a similar march from Delano to Sacramento would have been a key part. The 1966 march drew in multiple ways on the iconography of revolutionary movements in Mexican history. There was the procession led by a banner with the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, gathering strength as it passed through dozens of rural towns and colonias; and the movement’s repeated chant and slogan, both hiding and suggesting the word revolución with the fig leaf of Viva La Causa, common to both the Mexican and US wars of independence.19 And there was the nightly reading of the “Plan of Delano,” modeled after the manifesto issued at the outset of the Mexican Revolution led by Emiliano Zapata, who became an icon of the urban Chicano movement.20 The text of the Plan de Delano, recited by the baritone-voiced activist and Chicano playwright Luis Valdez, who had developed it in close consultation with Chavez, invokes “revolution” five times.21 Besides that, someone, most likely Cesar, must have shared with Valdez the idea of a general strike, at least as an original vision of the movement. Valdez wrote the lyrics of one of its most popular songs, “Huelga en General,” by which he meant general strike. The song proclaims both “¡Viva la revolución!” and “¡Viva huelga en general!”22
Dolores addresses the rally at the culmination of the farmworkers march to the California capitol, Easter morning 1966, demanding an agricultural collective-bargaining law. Photo by John Kouns. Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge.
The march from Delano, after covering over three hundred miles in twenty-five days, massed at the state capitol building, joined by thousands of supporters. That is where, on the morning of Easter Sunday 1966, Dolores proclaimed the movement’s central demand, as well as the weapon she said they were prepared to use to back it up:
On behalf of all of the farmworkers of this state, we unconditionally demand that the governor of this state, Edmund Brown, call a special session of the legislature, to enact a collective-bargaining law for the farmworkers of the state of California. We will be satisfied with nothing less . . . .
We are citizens, and we are residents of the state of California, and we want the rules set up to protect us in this state, right here.
If the rules to settle our economic problems are not forthcoming, we will call a general strike to paralyze the state’s agricultural economy . . . .
The social and economic revolution of the farmworkers is well underway, and it will not be stopped until we receive equality.
Dolores gave voice that Easter morning to a vision and a dream that grew out of the years she and Cesar spent in CSO, becoming organizers and leaders, overcoming more than a century of displacement, marginalization, exploitation, invisibility, and erasure that had marked the Mexican American experience in California. But that was the dream, not the current reality or revised strategy. Governor Brown was not in Sacramento that Sunday. He offered to meet the next day, but Chavez turned him down.23 There would be no discussion of the movement’s demand, no special session of the legislature, no farm-labor-law reform—not for another decade—and no general strike. But in the span of less than a month’s time, what was soon to be rebranded as the United Farm Workers (UFW) of America had garnered far more attention than CSO had in its first fifteen years combined.
The still-not-chartered union thus was committed to sustaining an unplanned and unforeseen local strike, knowing it could not be won locally. They were deprived of the unfinished secret weapon that, in Cesar and Dolores’s plans, would have made the difference—the dreamt-of general strike that would sweep the whole valley and force state government to act. Lacking that strategic weapon, the movement turned to multiple other means to widen the scope of the conflict beyond its local beginnings: the march, boycotts, fasts, and other tactics borrowed from Gandhi and the civil rights movement, including using national leaders to draw national media attention. There were dramatic occasions when different means combined, to historic effect. When Cesar’s first public fast approached its end in early March 1968, his inner circle had a choice of national leaders to invite to Delano for the ceremonial mass. Dr. Martin Luther King had just sent Chavez a long and touching telegram, his second. As a fellow student of Gandhi and the country’s premier civil rights leader, Dr. King would have made a logical choice. But Senator Robert Kennedy was the UFW’s ace national supporter, and he had been in touch throughout the fast. Furthermore, the news media’s eyes were fixed on RFK, who seemed likely to soon declare his bid for the presidency. So they invited Kennedy. The Chavez–Kennedy reunion for the breaking of Cesar’s fast—as an act of communion between fellow Catholics—was a proverbial moment for the ages.24
Triumph and Tragedy in LA
Though it did not make development of Mexican American electoral power its top priority, as CSO had, the UFW proved itself at least equally adept at registering voters and getting them to the polls. On the return flight from Los Angeles, RFK reportedly made his decision to run, and he declared his candidacy days later. The union knew it could make the difference in the country’s biggest primary and immediately swung into action, with a particular focus on LA’s Eastside. Strike-related duties were suspended: The California Latino-empowerment movement, now in its UFW-led phase, again had a president to elect—its greatest champion yet.
With high-profile tactics, and especially the development of the consumer boycott of table grapes, the farmworker movement had already had an impact on urban Mexican Americans, other Latinos, and the wider public. Boycott organizers were sent to major markets across the country and into Canada to connect with progressive organizations and church groups to mobilize them in support of the boycott and strike. The California farmworker rebellion in the San Joaquin Valley seemed to stimulate the emergence of the Chicano student movement in the cities. Thousands of LA high school students walked out of their classes near the end of Cesar’s twenty-five-day fast. The same Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights that, just weeks earlier, had been the base for organizing the student walkouts now became the UFW’s primary election campaign HQ.25 As soon as he was physically able, Chavez set out to speak at universities in support of the Kennedy campaign, as well as in churches and at outdoor rallies. On April 4, RFK was about to address a campaign rally in the Midwest, and Chavez was preparing to speak at a church in Sacramento, when they got word of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis.26
Primary elections, as a rule, are far less salient, draw far fewer voters, and involve a fraction of the effort and resources of general elections. But in growing and mobilizing the California Latino electorate, the 1968 RFK campaign led by UFW—in spite of its tragic end on the night of the primary—appears to have surpassed CSO’s historic effort in the 1960 general election. Both JFK in his 1960 fall campaign and RFK in the 1968 primary conducted whistle-stop train swings through the San Joaquin Valley, attracting heavily Mexican American crowds. But while JFK reportedly drew out hundreds at each stop, RFK drew thousands.27 Bobby won all the counties the train passed through, and more, but LA was the county he needed most, and he won it by the widest margin.28 Cesar directed both the CSO and UFW efforts, and at least one source claims the UFW registered more voters in the abbreviated 1968 primary campaign than CSO did for the fall 1960 general.29 In an oral-history interview just a couple of years later, Cesar himself claimed to have deployed fifty times the number of people to campaign for Bobby as he had for John eight years before.30 Some part of this was due to the operation Fred Ross put together, paying registrars a quarter per signature gathered, plus bonuses for the most productive. But Cesar principally had the Eastside organized down to the block level, and more resources than ever before.31 Several precincts—Dolores told Kennedy it was four—maxed out at 100 percent voter turnout well before the polls closed. In multiple precincts, the vote for RFK soared past 90 percent, and in one of them hit 100 percent. According to biographer Jean Stein, Dolores told Kennedy of this as she escorted him from his hotel room to the victory party in the Ambassador’s ballroom, prompting the senator to hug her.32
More Battles to Win . . . and Lose
With race riots sweeping the country, the Vietnam War intensifying, and antiwar protests gaining strength, LBJ withdrawing from the election, civil rights morphing into Black Power, and the women’s and Chicano movements taking off, historical time accelerated to a breakneck pace—and a national backlash in the 1968 election took the form of the return of Richard Nixon.33 The subsequent Nixon administration tried to help the California grape industry with massive Defense Department purchases for the military, but the growers opted to negotiate with the UFW—with negotiating teams headed by Dolores Huerta—and nearly all signed contracts with the union in 1970.34 Just two years later, however, the California farm lobby attempted to weaken the union with a ballot initiative that would deprive it of a secondary boycott weapon—the tactic of picketing grocery stores that carried nonunion produce. When the Arizona legislature passed a law that year with the same effect, the UFW found itself fighting a two-front war. Chavez decided to lead a special effort himself in his native state and relocated to Phoenix to attempt to recall the governor, who had immediately signed the openly anti-UFW bill into law. The union mobilized and expanded its network in Arizona to gather recall signatures and register voters, and Cesar undertook another extended public fast. It was in this struggle that the union adopted the slogan Sí Se Puede. The recall qualified for the primary ballot, but the attempt to oust the governor failed. The UFW’s focus on Arizona did, however, propel the state’s Mexican American community to a new level of political development, and critically boosted Raúl Castro’s campaign for governor in 1974. Arizona thus elected a Mexican American governor five decades before California even had a serious candidate for that office on a general-election ballot. Although Castro’s performance was troubled, and he resigned to become US ambassador to Argentina during the Carter administration, the seeds of Arizona’s historic role in the 2020 presidential election were sown, resown, and cultivated decades in advance.
Following its 1972 loss in the Arizona primary, the union had to turn its full attention back to California and the farm lobby’s ballot initiative, known as Proposition 22. The initiative’s presence on the fall ballot made this existential test of the UFW’s electoral capabilities both more direct and more consequential than the 1968 presidential primary had been—and despite Nixon’s landslide reelection, the union won with an astounding repudiation of the growers. The UFW was now confirmed as a major player in California politics and policy—the most formidable Latino political force in US history. It furthermore had a new champion in the state Assembly with the election of Richard Alatorre from LA, who immediately founded the Chicano Legislative Caucus. The union’s unambiguous defeat of Proposition 22 gave it new clout in its dealings with the AFL-CIO and established a personal bond between Chavez and then–Secretary of State Jerry Brown. The next step in the UFW’s political ascent was the end of Ronald Reagan’s governorship and Brown’s election as his successor in 1974, which was followed by perhaps the most extraordinary inaugural address in California history. Jerry Brown had, of course, witnessed the rise of the UFW from the start, in particular its challenge to his father in 1966 with the march to the capitol and demand for a special session of the legislature to address farmworkers’ collective-bargaining rights. At some point, perhaps after his father’s defeat to Ronald Reagan for reelection that fall, Jerry seems to have concluded that he had erred in his handling of the farm-labor question and the UFW.
Precisely eight years after Reagan ended his father’s political career, Jerry Brown was sworn in as governor of California before a joint session of the state legislature, which he proceeded to address. Thus, in January 1975, the new Governor Brown declared he would summon a special session of the legislature for the sole purpose of considering and voting on a bill governing agricultural labor relations, the first law of its kind in the country, to establish collective-bargaining rights for farmworkers—precisely what Dolores Huerta had demanded from the steps outside the capitol in 1966. And so it came to pass.
Enactment of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in 1975 further confirmed the UFW’s extraordinary clout in the state—now in both the electoral and policy spheres—and radically transformed its fundamental work of union building and maintenance that year. But it meant that suddenly, within months, the UFW had to compete with the Teamsters—the biggest union not in the AFL-CIO—in hundreds of recognition elections at farm operations all over the state, to determine which of the two, or neither, would represent the workers. The UFW performed impressively well in those contests, timed per the ALRA to coincide with harvests at each location, when the most farmworkers would be present. The days of house meetings and community organizing were well behind it now. The struggle had shifted decisively to the workplace, and to competing for the approval of whoever was employed at each location—independent of the community they lived in, or whether they lived in California year round at all.
There was little respite following that year’s harvests, as a new presidential election loomed in 1976—effectively an open race. Nixon had been forced out—and the incumbent-but-unelected president, Gerald Ford of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was in his first contest beyond his own congressional district. Not long into the caucuses and primaries, the previously unknown governor of Georgia emerged as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Brown had been California’s governor for just over a year when the election cycle started, and Carter began his ascent from nowhere. Under the circumstances, it would be only natural for Brown to at least consider and likely opt to get his name on the state ballot as a “favorite son” candidate—as his father had done three times—and thereby enhance California Democrats’ influence at the convention.35 After letting some sixteen contests pass and finding the Democratic field—Carter, in particular—uninspiring, Brown casually strolled into the last stretch of the race and quickly managed a stunning upset with a decisive win, clear across the country in Maryland.36
Brown had already been riding high in the polls in California, and his greatest achievement by far was securing the first farm-labor law in US history. In a span of five months, starting at the end of August 1975, over four hundred local union-recognition elections were held throughout the state, with the UFW winning nearly half and receiving twice the total votes as the rival Teamsters.37 But by February 1976, the new Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) had exhausted its budget, putting on hold any more elections until sometime the next fiscal year. The UFW found itself with full-time volunteers and seasoned organizers with little to nothing to do, just as the country’s attention was turning to the presidential primaries.38 After abruptly entering the race and proving his national appeal in Maryland, Brown called on the UFW to conduct his field efforts in the remaining states. Eight years after answering the call from its last great champion, Bobby, the UFW again took on a presidential primary campaign—but this time not only in California. There was little prospect that Brown could amass enough delegates in the remaining states to stop Carter, but he could get to the convention in New York City that summer as a major player.
With just a few days’ notice, the union’s talented organizers helped Brown nearly beat Carter again in neighboring Oregon, and they then went on to pull off new upsets in Rhode Island, Nevada, and New Jersey. And of course, to nobody’s surprise, Brown blew away the presumptive nominee in California, the most delegate-rich state, by a three-to-one margin.39 California Latinos attended the nominating convention in New York as Brown delegates, with Cesar Chavez as their moral leader. Another of Brown’s historic moves was to have Chavez, the former farmworker with an eighth-grade education, give the big speech placing Brown’s name in nomination, before a television audience of some fifty million Americans, and more abroad.
This moment certainly appears to have been the apex of the UFW’s political ascent, unsurpassed in the Latino experience before or since. What followed in the coming months and years has served to confirm such a take. Immediately after the convention, the UFW got to work on another big lift—its own initiative on the fall ballot, designed to strengthen and protect the gains of the ALRA. Among its various provisions, the new Proposition 14 would have required the legislature to adequately fund the ALRB and mandated that union organizers have access to meet with farmworkers on the growers’ property. The union mobilized all its resources behind this initiative of its own creation, but this time lost decisively, humiliatingly, to the growers’ lobby.40 Whereas in 1968, 1970, 1972, 1975, and in the last primaries of 1976, the UFW had shown that farmworkers could win, that November showed they could also lose in a landslide.
According to longtime close aide and confidant LeRoy Chatfield, an “embarrassed and hurt” Cesar Chavez disallowed any public discussion or internal critique by the union’s hundreds of volunteers and staff of the “devastating” electoral loss. “Chavez simply expected the movement to ignore the reality of this defeat and the public rebuke that came with it, pick up the pieces, pull itself together, and carry on as if nothing had happened,” Chatfield wrote decades later.41 The growers’ extraordinarily successful mobilization and margin of victory appear to have hurt Democrats on the California ballot, including Carter and incumbent US Senator John Tunney, who was ousted by aggressively right-wing academic S. I. Hayakawa.42 Both Carter and Tunney had endorsed the UFW’s proposition, and Tunney was closely associated with the Kennedys—often compared to Robert Kennedy in particular.43
