Epilogue

BEYOND THE LEGEND

We must ask of our historians and of those who write about us to be more thorough, more dedicated to seek the full truth and to be more disciplined and rigorous about their evaluating and characterizing of our peoples’ struggles, of the roles played by our organizations and by our significant leaders. We demand that our history be analyzed from the perspective of the fundamental contradictions present in the society as a whole during its making. We demand that the most important consideration be given to the role of our workers in determining our history and that this last be the measuring stick for giving significance to this or that event, this or that organization or leader.

BERT CORONA

“Analyzing the Writing of Our History and Its Importance,”
   unpublished manuscript, Stanford University Library

Plaster saints are not real. We don’t learn anything from plaster saints; we don’t write plays about them over and over. We write plays about tragic heroes, because we can identify with them.

MARSHALL GANZ

interviewed by the author, March 26, 2008

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

MR. SCOTT

in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962

IN JOHN FORD’S CLASSIC WESTERN FILM, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, audiences are challenged to reconsider the meaning and importance of heroes in the development of the American West. Although Jimmy Stewart’s character, Ransom Stoddard, did not kill the fearsome Liberty Valance, a man who had terrorized the townspeople of Shinbone, Arizona, in the name of protecting the land and interest of cattle barons, he received credit for it, rising to the level of U.S. senator for his supposed act of courage. Years later, when Valance’s real murderer, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon, dies, Stoddard tries to set the record straight with the local newspaper. The editor, however, will not have it. Beleaguered from carrying the burden of this lie for so long, an incredulous Stoddard asks, “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” For Scott and his readers, however, the lie had become a convenient myth that provided Shinbone and the state of Arizona with a useful creation story that no one wanted to abandon in the name of truth. “This is the West, sir,” Scott replied. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Released the same year as the National Farm Workers Association began, Ford’s cautionary film about the superficiality of heroes has surprising resonance with the history of the farm worker movement and the way historians and the public have remembered its Arizona-born leader, Cesar Chavez. Although Chavez has always had his critics, most historians, both popular and professional, have celebrated him as a visionary, pious, and virtuous leader who would have achieved a national farm workers union if not for the forces mounted against him.¹ This literary approbation has precipitated a surfeit of public memorials in Chavez’s honor, ranging from the renaming of public streets and schools, to statues and a postal stamp. Most recently, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar designated the birthplace of the movement, Forty Acres, a National Historic Landmark for the purpose of remembering the “national significance of the life and work of Cesar E. Chavez.”² The students and professors of Chicano and Latino academic programs have been among the most vested in the Chavez legend, celebrating his birthday and offering scholarships in his name to those whose humble background or commitment to social justice mirrors those of the late labor and civil rights leader. Although these are all laudatory actions, they draw a picture of Chavez’s leadership that is far removed from the complex history that I have told in this book.

From the Jaws of Victory contributes to a critical reassessment of Chavez and the United Farm Workers union. In the process of sharing my findings, I have encountered concerned true believers of the Chavez legend who have questioned the value and intent of this project. My purpose has been to hold the UFW leadership accountable to the thousands of farm workers who were let down by the union’s retreat from the fields and to produce a usable past for those who wish to advance the cause of farm worker justice today. This has been the common sentiment among many veterans of the movement whom I have consulted for this book, especially the desire to reconsider the decisions Chavez made from the mid-1970s to the end of that decade. To be sure, a consensus does not exist on the significance and meaning of Chavez’s leadership among all who dedicated their lives to the struggle. Yet, the debate that raged among 275 former UFW volunteers on LeRoy Chatfield’s online listserv in 2004 and 2005 suggests that neither the public nor those close to the UFW have been well served by more than forty years of hagiography. Oral histories, the listserv, and an evaluation of many hours of recorded executive board meetings have led me to a new interpretation that accounts for the mix of pride and disappointment experienced by the men and women who invested deeply in the project of farm worker justice. Such an accounting is necessary if we hope to learn from Chavez’s mistakes as well as his successes.

Although I began this project with the zeal of a labor historian intent on telling the story of the United Farm Workers from the point of view of the volunteers, I became convinced that no accurate picture of the union during its heyday is possible without confronting the legacy of Cesar Chavez. The control Chavez exercised over the union meant that most decisions passed across his desk. There were exceptions to this rule, which I have explored in vivid and sometimes harrowing detail. In the field, volunteers and staff members adapted their strategy to the particular conditions of the fight, whether it was Jerry Cohen negotiating a settlement with the Teamsters, Gilbert Padilla and Marshall Ganz organizing field workers, or Jessica Govea and Elaine Elinson appealing to consumers, storeowners, or dock workers not to buy, sell, or unload grapes. Yet the lack of democracy in the union meant that Chavez more than anyone determined the net impact of these people’s efforts. In the end, I found it impossible to downplay or explain away his role in favor of privileging the story of the rank and file and the staff.

Nor should I have. In telling this story, I have tried to avoid presenting Chavez as the fake that Stoddard turns out to be. As Ganz has admitted, Chavez was no “plaster saint”—colorful and noble on the outside, hollow and devoid of substance on the inside. Chavez possessed many valuable qualities that inspired hundreds of volunteers to dedicate their lives to the union and millions of people around the world to rally behind la causa. His “single-minded doggedness,” as Fred Ross put it, may have been his most important quality, encouraging people not to give up when prospects for success looked grim.³ Chavez’s leadership proved to be especially important in the early years, when someone needed to show the courage necessary to walk away from a secure paycheck and trusted organization in order to build a movement that addressed the specific needs of farm workers. That this same impulse led him to ignore warning signs and reject the counsel of close friends in favor of pursuing what he believed to be the right course of action makes his failures and the deterioration of the union all the more painful. Rather than continue to see Chavez in the narrow light of celebration, I have widened the lens to show him as the tragic hero he was. Such a perspective allows us to honor his tremendous virtues as a leader while not forgetting the perils that come with autocratic leadership.

My measure of the man has been the health and security of the farm workers he purported to serve. Such a perspective conforms to the prescription for responsible history offered by Mexican American leader, Bert Corona. As Corona suggests, fundamental contradictions between employees’ rights to fair and humane treatment in the workplace and the desire of wealthy and more powerful entities to flourish in our society were at play in this tragic drama. The failure of farm workers’ collective bargaining rights to keep pace with the expansion of growers’ profits reveals the degree to which this system privileges owners over workers. The continued suffering of farm laborers, even as California grapes are sold worldwide and grape sales flout the old conventions of seasonal markets, offers an important reminder of the need for more advocacy on their behalf. The dilemma of H2-A guest workers and undocumented food producers today sadly resembles the experience of braceros and farm workers in the 1950s and early 1960s that precipitated the farm worker movement in the first place. If their lives constitute the measuring stick by which we determine the success or failure of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, then the story would be a depressing one indeed.

The value of history, however, is not simply to determine winners and losers. I have focused equally on issues of strategy, particularly how the poor, the young, and the disfranchised overcame tremendous odds to win more battles than they lost. The story of the boycott in particular offers a vision of hope for humanity by demonstrating the capacity for consumers and volunteers to take action in the interest of people far removed from them and their station in life. Although the current orientation of food consumer activism signals a disturbing drift away from the welfare of farm workers, the grape boycott lives in the memory of many people who either volunteered on the picket lines or refused to buy grapes. Recent campaigns by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to add a penny-per-pound to fast-food meals in order to increase farm worker pay in Florida echo the activism of UFW boycott volunteers begun more than four decades ago.⁴ The language and strategy of the boycott is also ubiquitous in the pursuit of justice for immigrants, from the threat of Latino residents boycotting the U.S. census in response to federal neglect of immigration reform to a national boycott of the state of Arizona to protest harassment of ethnic Mexicans under the 2010 law SB1070. The grape boycott, whether acknowledged or not, informs these new conflicts and shapes the strategy of current labor and civil rights organizations. For those who wish to employ boycotts today, it behooves them to study the grape boycott and see that it succeeded due to constant organizing and adapting of strategies that propelled the movement forward.

The history of the boycott also reminds us of the capacity of people to overcome differences to work together. At the height of the boycott, volunteers from diverse backgrounds lived and worked in boycott houses far from their homes and comfort zones to build effective networks that shut down the grape markets and forced growers to seek a strategy of moving sales beyond their traditional strongholds. These movements precipitated new coalitions among farm worker advocates, including cooperation with labor unions abroad. It is worth noting that many of the key volunteers in the grape boycott network came from Jewish families, including Elaine Elinson, Marshall Ganz, and Jerry Brown, to name just a few. Their identities occasionally had meaning in the struggle. Elinson, for example, cited her grandmother’s radical political beliefs as a motivating force behind her activism, while Ganz and Brown cited their affinities with Jewish storeowners as levers for change in the Toronto markets. When viewed in the wider context of the union’s history, we see the presence of Jews in important staff positions, such as Jerry Cohen and Sandy Nathan, who were essential to the advancement of the union. Their ability to see affinities with nonwhite and poor workers demonstrates the elasticity of a “family of resemblance” among people who stood outside the WASP majority in the 1960s and 1970s.⁵ Viewed from the perspective of Mexican and Filipino farm workers, the embrace of young college students and white religious volunteers demonstrates a similar inclusivity and willingness to adapt to difference in pursuit of a shared goal.

The United Farm Workers survived the end of the boycott, but the political upheavals of the late 1970s still reverberate through the union and the lives of veterans today. In the years immediately following 1978, Chavez’s refusal to decentralize power and welcome contributions from organized workers in Salinas led to an unfortunate standoff between him and the rank and file. By 1981 he was working with a small cadre of loyalists to expel rebellious members at the national convention, forever closing the possibility of democratic reform in the union. By then, however, most of the critics from within the union leadership had either resigned or become suspected of treason themselves. Sadly, the vitriol and distrust that pervaded the union in the final years of the 1970s continue to shape exchanges among veterans of the movement.⁶ Such anger and suspicion seem an unfitting way to remember anyone who participated in the union’s heyday.

The United Farm Workers continues to pursue farm worker justice, but its strategies have not produced the kind of results that the boycott achieved in 1970. In 2005, the United Farm Workers broke from the AFL-CIO to join the labor coalition Change to Win, which included, among other unions, their old rival, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The change, however, did them little good, as they failed to gain the support from workers at Giumarra Vineyards to represent them in contract negotiations with the son of the grower who signed the first historic grape contracts in the San Joaquin Valley.⁷ More recently, in 2010, UFW president and Chavez’s son-in-law, Arturo Rodríguez, joined with comedian, Stephen Colbert, in the “Take Our Jobs” campaign that invites average Americans to do field work and eliminate the need for foreign nationals to do this labor. The strategy has attracted much publicity, although the union’s objectives remain somewhat murky. Colbert and Rodríguez have drawn attention to the hypocrisy of politicians who harangue against undocumented immigrants, but their joke rests in part on the premise that farm work is an undesirable job. This uneasy interpretation has not escaped everyone, least of all Doug Adair, a veteran of the grape boycott and the grape fields of Coachella Valley. “The truth is,” Adair writes, “if the very thought of doing farm work didn’t make so many Americans laugh, we’d all be better off.”⁸ For him, the union would be truer to its mission if it honored the occupation that feeds the nation by working for contracts rather than chuckles.

Today not one field worker laboring on grape farms in California is covered by a labor contract. Gone are the days of “double minimum wage,” paid vacations, unemployment insurance, and the modest pension plan that the United Farm Workers fought for and won in the 1970s. Today most farm workers in California are indigenous migrants from Mexico or Guatemala making $5 an hour, far below the state’s minimum wage of $8.⁹ Few have the courage to challenge inhumane treatment because of their undocumented status and the lack of faith in the United Farm Workers. In fact, the name of Cesar Chavez has slipped so far from the consciousness of those in the field that workers are more inclined to associate his name with the retired Mexican boxer Julio Cesar Chavez than the labor leader who led the campaign for their rights.¹⁰ Meanwhile, the California Table Grape Commission campaigns to sell table grapes worldwide, producing record profits for growers who now worry more about escalating land values than the cost of labor.¹¹ This is not the result anyone could have imagined at the height of the grape boycott.

If the story of the United Farm Workers teaches us anything, it is that the gains made on behalf of workers cannot be taken for granted as permanent and immutable. Contrary to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement, the arc of history does not bend toward justice for farm workers. The rights won for farm workers in the 1960s and 1970s were not a moveable feast—sustainable gains that could be extended across time and place. Rather, this history proves that it takes constant and accountable engagement with workers and consumers to defend the interests of food producers whose rights have been and remain the most tenuous among us.