IN THE UNION OF THE SPIRIT

Cesar Chavez and the Quest for Farmworker Justice

Daniel P. Rhodes

To all appearances, Cesar Estrada Chavez was a rather unimpressive figure. Diminutive in stature, he had a boyish face, a wide, faintly aquiline nose, chestnut skin, and thick onyx-colored hair often neatly parted low on the left side and combed back and to the right across his head. He was handsome but forgettable. That he would organize the first farmworker union in a struggle for justice that took on the industry of agribusiness scarcely seemed possible.

The differences could not be starker between Chavez and the heroes of popular Westerns playing during the time that he was organizing farmworkers in southern and central California. Next to a Roy Rogers or a John Wayne, he surely would have seemed unintimidating and even unremarkable. Compared to the great orators of the day—such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr.—he would have seemed prosaic. Only his eyes offered a clue: they were captivating and intense. He was hobbled by chronic back pain much of his life as a result of years spent working bent over in the fields, bone depletion, and one of his legs being slightly longer than the other, something that would be diagnosed later in his life. Yet this physical fragility and meekness was nearly eclipsed by the calm, fortified nature of his presence. One journalist biographer described him as a person of “density” who “walks as lightly as a fox.”1 He had a sharp sense of humor, and though he was kind, he could also be acerbic. As a kid he had been a travieso (prankster), and this disposition served him well throughout his life.² Many photographs of Chavez capture his wry smile framed by a look of determination; he was a man pitted against the odds, and he seemed to enjoy it.

Chavez was a shrewd union and community organizer who, with gritty creativity, sustained a quest for justice among farmworkers. His aim first and foremost was to forge solidarity among migrant laborers. This goal grew out of his own personal and spiritual yearning to belong, and the farmworker movement he led was built on these relationships and connections. Rarely does solidarity take the shape of a life, but it did in the person of Cesar Chavez; it was the single objective that infused and consumed him.

His people recognized it. As Luis Valdez, the innovative founder of El Teatro Campesino, wrote, “Here was Cesar burning with patient fire, poor like us, dark like us, talking quietly, moving people to talk about their problems, attacking the little problems first and suggesting, always suggesting—never more than that—solutions which seemed attainable. We didn’t know it until we met him, but he was the leader we had been waiting for.”³ In him and his fellow leaders, farmworkers found their own capacity to transform their plight through the formation of a union that could challenge the power of agribusiness.

Chavez always understood the movement to be about more than wages or contracts; it was a spiritual campaign. For him, the work of the union was woven inextricably into a fabric of religious significance. Jesus was with them, and in their struggle and sacrifices they were a part of his kingdom, his people. It was nearly sacramental—eucharistic.

This sacred quality of Chavez’s work registered for me at church one Sunday. As our priest made the sign of the cross over the eucharistic elements, she asked God to sanctify them to be “the holy food and drink of new and unending life” and to sanctify us to receive them as a new people. Then, just before we were to pray the Lord’s Prayer and receive the elements, she said, “All this we ask through your Son, Jesus Christ. By him, and with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and forever. Amen.” During this prayer of consecration, I caught a glimpse of how Chavez understood the union. Here, the very life of the Godhead gathers and joins humanity in the creation of a new people, a people in the union of the Spirit suffused with transformational grace, binding love, and hopeful endurance. Through much suffering and difficult labor, Chavez and his people were being gathered in a sanctified union for a society in need of transformation. Their search for justice was inscribed with God’s own life. Suffused with this calling, Chavez came to embody their spiritual quest for a new reality.

***

Prior to the 1965 grape strike where, as his mentor Fred Ross said, he “walked into history,” Cesar Chavez himself trod the destitute road of the migrant laborers he later began to organize.4 It was an experience that profoundly shaped him. The Chavezes were never wealthy, but when Cesar was a child the family resided on a farm near Yuma, Arizona, on the eastern side of the arid North Gila Valley in the foothills of the Laguna Mountains. This farm was a 160-acre plot that his grandparents carved out of the rocky Arizona countryside. The valley’s name, Gila, came from a Native American word meaning “river that runs salty.”⁵ The surrounding area was a makeshift arrangement of rough canals and fields planted with grasses or whatever crops could withstand the desert heat and brackish soil. Foreshadowing what was to come, Cesar’s parents, Librado and Juana, had relocated to the ranch in 1929 after their own small business venture fell into debt and was foreclosed. The young family took up residence in a large storage room attached by a breezeway to the main adobe house at the center of the compound built by his grandfather and namesake, Cesario, or Papa Chayo as they called him.

His grandfather had died by the time they moved to the homestead, but one of Cesar’s aunts and his elderly grandmother, Dorotea, affectionately called Mama Tella, still lived in the main house.6 More of Cesar’s aunts and uncles lived just up the adjacent canal. Here Cesar, with his older sister, Rita, and younger brother, Richard, enjoyed the relative security, stability, and community that he would always associate with home.

They were a tight-knit family and, as Cesar recalled, “I had more happy moments as a child than unhappy moments.”⁷ This fond and familiar life, however, soon came to an end. The county, likely influenced by a neighboring banker eager to acquire the ranch, took possession of the property in the late summer of 1937 when Cesar’s father could not make up the back taxes he owed. Though they were allowed to stay for another year while they appealed the seizure, they eventually lost the farm, which was auctioned to their banker neighbor for a mere $1,750, a total of less than half of the taxes they owed.

Intense sorrow must have consumed Chavez as his family packed into their Studebaker the following spring while a bulldozer leveled their fields and horse corral. “When we left the farm,” he recalled, “our whole life was upset, turned upside down. . . . We had been uprooted.”⁸ From that point on he carried with him an abiding homesickness. “I bitterly missed the ranch,” Cesar recollected. “Maybe that is when the rebellion started. Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on the land, and I knew a different way of life. We were poor, but we had liberty. The migrant is poor, and he has no freedom.”⁹ The loss scarred him deeply.

Loss was not the only thing that shaped Chavez’s character as an organizer and his hope for the farmworkers. His devoutly Catholic family, especially the strong faith of his mother and grandmother, also deeply formed him. His grandmother, Mama Tella, was an orphan raised in a convent, where she learned to read and write both Latin and Spanish. She catechized Cesar and his sister, Rita, preparing them herself for First Communion. She taught them about the saints, and as Cesar stated, “I remember her, she was always praying, just praying.”10 Cesar’s primary apprenticeship in the faith, however, came by way of his mother, Juana. With no church near their home, she taught them their prayers, taking up where Cesar’s grandmother had left off. He recalled, “As we didn’t have a church in the valley and it was very difficult to go to Yuma, it was my mother who taught us prayers. Throughout the Southwest and Mexico where there were no priests for a long time, the amazing thing was that people kept the faith. But they were oriented more toward relics and saints. My mother was very religious without being a fanatic, and she believed in saints as advocates, as lobbyists, to pray to God for her. Her patron saint was St. Eduvigis.”¹¹

A Polish duchess, Eduvigis had given all her possessions to the poor when she converted to Christianity. As a boy, Chavez recalled his mother always reaching out to those in need in imitation of this saint, modeling for him the spirit of charity. Within their home, instruction in the faith often also took the form of his mother’s dichos (proverbs) or consejos (advice). These “sermons,” as Cesar related, were his first trainings in nonviolence, selflessness, honesty, and other virtues long before he would read St. Francis, Catholic social teaching, or Gandhi. She frequently wrapped these teachings in stories that included miracles and magical realism, opening young Chavez’s imagination to the possibility of holy surprises.¹² Deep spirituality shaped the Chavez home just as it would saturate his work with farmworkers later. As he stated, “I don’t think that I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. While most people drawn toward liberalism or radicalism leave the church, I went the other way. I drew closer to the church the more I learned and understood.”¹³ He grew in wisdom and stature under the influence of his mother’s religión casera (homespun religion), so characteristic of devout Mexican Catholics, and it permeated all of life.14 This faith formed the core and basis for a moral vision not only of individual piety but even more of human community and society.

Faith and family sustained Cesar even as both of these put him on a path of hardship. The Chavezes were well acquainted with suffering. One of Cesar’s younger sisters, Helena, died at eleven months old of dysentery, a condition likely engendered by the dilapidated state of their living quarters. His siblings and he suffered constant marginalization in school, where they were not allowed to speak Spanish. (Cesario, his given name, became the Anglicized Cesar.) But once the family was forced off their Arizona homestead, life took a more difficult turn as they experienced a new level of poverty and discrimination as a result of their dislocation. In his new schools, students taunted him for wearing the same gray V-neck T-shirt every day, and his teacher regularly insulted his Mexican heritage. He recalled, “when I came to class, I was frightened. I didn’t know the lesson. I was given a seat, and the next morning I wasn’t sure if that was really my seat. I was so frightened I was afraid to even ask the teacher for permission to go to the restroom. I didn’t dare ask very often, as the kids laughed at my accent, the way I talked.”¹⁵ He attended more than a dozen different schools before finishing the eighth grade, when he quit so he could work full time for the family in the fields.

Merchants in the new towns they passed through refused to serve them, and they faced segregated seating in movie theaters and restaurants.¹⁶ As new migrant workers, they also struggled to learn the system, often arriving too late to gain work or falling prey to con men and crooked managers. Working their way northwest through the Imperial Valley and the Central Valley, they finally reached San Jose and the impoverished and flood-prone eastside barrio of Sal Si Puedes, which means “get out if you can.” There, they moved into a resident’s vacant garage, the only place they could find to live. As they traversed the state working the fields, exploitation by labor contractors and growers was a constant. The family often inhabited barns, shacks, or labor camps, or slept under a tarp near ripening crops, inhabiting unfamiliar and often hostile places. Chavez became familiar with being an outcast.

He also became intimate with the oppression of working the fields, symbolized by el cortito—the short-handled hoe, the use of which required a bent, subjugated posture. Of the terrible jobs Chavez was forced to work, one of the worst was thinning lettuce. Laboring as fast as possible because pay was piece rate, or by the row or acre, los lechugueros (lettuce harvesters) had to work stooped over in a tireless rhythm of pulling and chopping. “It was really inhuman,” Chavez recounted. “Every time I see lettuce, that’s the first thing I think of, some human being had to thin it. And it’s just like being nailed to a cross. You have to walk twisted as you’re stooped over, facing the row, and walking perpendicular to it. You are always trying to find the best position because you can’t walk completely sideways, it’s too difficult, and if you turn the other way, you can’t thin.”17

Beyond the excruciating and humiliating labor, as Chavez knew from experience, the entire system was saturated with prejudice and injustice aimed at dehumanizing the workers. Farmworkers could not afford to purchase the very produce they harvested. They had no protections and no insurance. They were frequently exposed to poisonous pesticides. Growers pitted one ethnicity against another in order to solidify their dominance and curtail any resistance from the workers. Reflecting later on the impact of these experiences, Chavez relayed, “There are vivid memories from my childhood—what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose if I wanted to be fair I could say that I’m trying to settle a personal score.”¹⁸ The life of farm labor was difficult, but they survived and resisted its dehumanization as a family, only deepening their devotion to one another. In their loss and struggle, as Chavez learned, they found new fibers of solidarity and strength, building a sense of home among one another.

It’s only fitting that, years later, his small home in Sal Si Puedes was the place where Chavez heard his spiritual call to organize farmworkers. The calling came during a house meeting scheduled by Fred Ross, who had come north after being hired in 1946 by Saul Alinsky and his Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation to organize Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. A practice launched by Ross, a house meeting was an organizing tool for beginning to turn anger and seeming impotence into power and possibility through collective engagement. A tall, thin figure, refined, articulate, and tedious, Ross was also somewhat unorthodox. Years later, Ross’s eulogist would reiterate his philosophy of organizing with one of his favorite sayings: “A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.”19 He had been trying to organize in the area for more than five years by the time he met Chavez, but his efforts had borne little fruit.

It was the early summer of 1952 when the local priest, Fr. Donald McDonnell, along with the parish nurse, Alicia Hernandez, suggested the two meet. At that time, Chavez was working in a lumberyard when he wasn’t in the fields. Initially suspicious of the gringo outsider, Cesar and his brother, Richard, eventually acquiesced to meeting with Ross after Helen, Cesar’s wife, refused to continue to deflect Ross’s attempts to make contact. That evening of Monday, June 9, 1952, as Chavez recounted years later, “He [Ross] changed my life.”²⁰ Amid a rugged group of workers intentionally gathered by Chavez to intimidate him into leaving them alone, Ross made his pitch, suggesting that even the most powerless could change things if enough of them worked together.²¹ Unexpectedly, Chavez found himself ignited by Ross’s message, which converted him to organizing.

Still, Chavez was an unlikely leader. Rather meek in affect and not prone to grandstanding, he did not fit the typical stereotype of the head of a movement. Initially, he was even petrified of his own house meetings. He often circled the neighborhood several times before entering the house. Once inside, he would hide in the corner, only to finally pipe up when someone asked, “Where’s the organizer?”22 Nevertheless, he kept at it because he found life in building community. Chavez envisioned the apostle Paul as an organizer who, similarly, admitted to being no eloquent rhetorician or extraordinary personality (1 Cor. 1) but found strength in the power of the community-gathering spirit of the gospel. Like the apostle, Chavez went to the people, and from the grassroots began to build the connections essential for fashioning a new future.

The choice to organize farmworkers and to subject his family to the challenges they faced was not easy for Chavez. But it was a call he could not escape. For four years he contemplated the move. “More than anything else, I wanted to help farm workers,” he recalled. “Only my financial security had me tied up and kept me from moving. There was my wife, Helen, and I knew it would be asking a lot of her to give up what we had.” At the time he had a decent job with a regular paycheck, and the family had been able to put away some savings. They had eight children to care for. “Helen and I discussed the problem from many angles,” he recounted. “There were the risks, the odds against success, and the desperate needs we saw daily around us. Helen, naturally, was very worried about our children. If I quit, who knows what would happen? Where would the money come from for food and clothes and housing? I could only point to my own childhood where, despite our struggles and bitter experiences, ours was a very close and happy family. I was sure our children could endure.”²³

Finally, Cesar and Helen decided that they could not organize farmworkers the way they wanted without first liberating themselves. As Chavez stated, “I realized that I couldn’t do what I felt must be done without first giving up one of the best jobs I’d ever had.”²⁴ What made the decision so difficult was that Chavez was already working as a professional organizer on farmworker issues with the Oxnard-based Community Service Organization (CSO). But, as is so often the case with top-down approaches, he quickly realized that while he could achieve small changes this way, a larger co-creative effort to change the system itself was necessary. And he saw that the only way to do this was to commit fully to live with and among the people.

Chavez learned this lesson while working under Ross at the CSO, where he was constantly frustrated with leaders who became complacent and focused on their own comfort. Another source of frustration was the desire for immediate results, which meant work toward real, hard change was aborted. Venturing out on his own to organize differently, Chavez did not want to repeat those mistakes. Instead, he sought to build off of the tradition of mutualistas (the informal mutual assistance programs) that Mexican immigrants in the Southwest had been self-organizing for years. Consequently, he did not even call the new organization a union but the Farm Workers Association, and he initially focused on setting up cooperative service-provisions.25

Organizing this way was a family enterprise, and as Helen and he had anticipated, it required sacrifice and dedication. Often the family went without food or other basic necessities. Helen juggled many responsibilities, picking crops while running a nascent credit union, administrating a co-op, and caring for their growing family. Together, they embodied the ethos and spirit of the organization.

Chavez’s method was simple and direct, resulting in a deep commitment from early members of the organization. One of these early members was Manuel Rivera, who sought Chavez’s help after his family was left destitute as a result of a dispute with a dishonest labor contractor. Chavez and Helen welcomed the Rivera family into their small home and loaned them one of their cars while working to help them get back on their feet and resolve the issue. Rivera never forgot this sacrifice and genuine charity. Even after he was struck by a truck while on a picket line years later and rendered lame, he remained stolid in his dedication to the movement and to Chavez.26 Such incidents testify to the powerful character of Chavez’s grassroots style of leadership. Chavez’s gifts were not exactly recognizable on the surface, and neither was the potency of the movement he organized. But he was able to see his own story in others’ stories, and he saw in this connection the possibility of writing together a new one. Such a path was never straightforward, but it was the path of real change, for, as he cheerfully believed, “God writes in exceedingly crooked lines.”²⁷

Suffering alone under the cruel hand of agribusiness, farmworkers were left to a life of pain, misery, and despair. But suffering together, Chavez believed, they might begin to translate this pain, anger, and alienation into a powerful movement for change. As the “Plan of Delano,” an early summation of their cause, stated:

We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause. We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the law of the land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hungers on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. WE SHALL ENDURE.²⁸

The organizing movement, forged in a spirit of solidarity, constituted something of a new people borne in and through hardship and maltreatment. These bonds would form the base of all that was to come.

***

In the spring of 1962, Chavez left the CSO and struck out on his own, moving his family to the small central-California town of Delano, located at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Here Chavez sought to establish a base for his union among the residential farmworker community.29 It became the epicenter of a radical farmworker movement.

The bed of an ancient inland sea, the San Joaquin Valley stretches two hundred miles down the spine of central California and is some sixty miles wide. Set between the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east and the coastal mountain range to the West, it was the heart of the agribusiness industry and would become the battlefield of La Causa (the movement). Massive irrigation projects rendered the fertile soil one of the most productive regions in the world; a quarter of the United States’ fruit and vegetables grew in its fields. Vast farms dominated the area geographically, and the growers, along with the transnational corporations connected to them, dominated its political and socio-economic landscape.³⁰ As an industry, agribusiness was immensely powerful and well coordinated. Large conglomerations with farms of 50,000 to even 100,000 acres were not uncommon.³¹ Only the largest and most cutthroat of family farms survived, as they adopted the monopolistic “best practices” of their industry competitors.³² The growers clearly had the upper hand, and the workers had little traction against such aggregated power.

The structure of this food basket of the country was that the growers owned the land, reaping the rewards of its bounty, while migrants provided the labor. It was an arrangement established early on in the industry to the great benefit of the growers. John Steinbeck vividly depicted the exploitations of this burgeoning industry in his epic The Grapes of Wrath. But such practices did not end after the Great Depression. One such strategy was the implementation of the Bracero Program. Braceros were seasonal workers imported from Mexico for the purpose of filling the labor shortage created by World War II. A program instituted by Congress in 1942, braceros worked under tight regulations and at set wages. Their temporary contracts left them open to wage theft. Housing in their labor camps was deplorable. As aliens, they suffered racism, lived under the thumb of growers who could have them deported without cause or notice, and were forced to overpay for necessities they could purchase only through their sponsors. The program was so popular among the growers that they lobbied for its extension well past the conclusion of the war. A surplus, compliant labor force of imported workers was extremely useful for the growers in breaking strikes and holding down wages.33 The program was discontinued by Congress in 1965, but the practice of importing workers to dilute the workforce and suppress wages remained regular among growers. To maintain their position of power, the growers knew it was important to ensure that the workers remained insecure and isolated.

Though the situation in Delano was difficult, Chavez realized that the town provided some advantages as a place to begin. He had family in the area, providing a natural support network and safety net for the precarious venture. It was also one of the few communities in which workers resided nearly year around, as the temperamental vines of the table grape trade required tending even when the fruit was not in season.³⁴ While there were still many migrants flowing through the area, Chavez rightly estimated that the somewhat settled population would be crucial for getting the organization off the ground. Furthermore, though they were rather large, family-owned companies controlled the town’s lucrative table-grape industry.³⁵ This fact was not inconsequential, as the proprietary nature of these farms made them more susceptible to strikes and boycotts than their corporate kin, most of which were part of national or multinational conglomerates. Nevertheless, the work of building an indigenous movement was slow, tedious, and filled with risk and failure.

Early on, for instance, a private foundation offered Chavez a $50,000 grant to jump-start the organization, no strings attached. Though the infant movement’s finances were tenuous at best, he turned it down. His reasoning for doing so was integrally connected to his vision for the movement itself. He argued that if they accepted the money, they would feel the need to work faster than is consistent with building the kind of trust-based, grassroots organization he envisioned. As Chavez recognized, the membership itself had to invest in the organization instead of relying on outside resources that would always be subject to external expectations and could be withdrawn at any time.36 This was no small decision for Chavez, as his own salary was drawn from the union’s scant budget. At the time, he was the only farmworker leader in the nation who depended on dues for his salary.

At last, in September of 1962, after a summer of endless relational and house meetings, the Farm Workers Association (FWA, and later NFWA, adding National to its title) held its first convention with a modest 150 delegates in attendance. It elected its first officers, adopted its symbol in the black eagle flag, and embraced its motto: Viva la Causa. Dues were set at $3.50 per month,³⁷ though collecting these dues was a constant struggle. The organization was small and ragtag. But by its second anniversary, the intentional work began to bear fruit, and the union had gained one thousand dues-paying members associated with fifty local affiliates throughout the valley.³⁸ Attempting to build momentum by focusing on winnable issues, Chavez was selective about the FWA’s actions even as he recognized that it needed to start delivering for the workers. He wrote to Ross in early 1965, saying, “We need a fight right now.”³⁹ But the workers themselves, though loaded with grievances, were still reluctant to engage.

The union chose for its first contest the rose industry in McFarland, California. There were some advantages for them here. The workers were skilled and therefore tough to replace with scabs, or strikebreakers. Additionally, the delicate nature of the plants made the work time sensitive. Agreeing by vote ahead of time, they struck on May 3, seeking a raise in wages. Union leadership, beginning with the feisty Delores Huerta, cofounder of the movement, nearly had to coerce the workers into sticking to the plan. To prevent the workers from sabotaging their own strike, she parked her truck in one worker’s driveway, pinning in his car to keep his crew from reporting to work.40 Though the workers were unwilling to press for full contracts, the movement claimed its first win with a small increase in pay. A similar small victory that summer over rent hikes in a labor camp near Porterville, California, allowed the organization to gain experience and build confidence. These campaigns also allowed them to make vital allies, not the least of which was the California Migrant Ministry led by Reverend Chris Hartmire. They were maturing into a real union.

The first true contest for the organization came with the 1965 grape harvest, commencing an all-out struggle with the powerful growers of the table-grape industry. This struggle—a five-year campaign in which Chavez’s farmworkers were overmatched in every category—set the tenor and trajectory of Chavez’s movement. As the war in Vietnam flared up under the newly resolved Johnson administration, the sparks of protest began to fly in the California fields. The renewed use of braceros by growers along with racially disparate pay structures intensified tensions and frustration, pushing workers to the brink. In May, in the Coachella Valley of Southern California, the Filipino-led Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO) responded with a strike, earning limited raises for Filipino and Mexican workers bolstered by the area’s brief, but intense, harvest season. As the harvest season jogged north into the heart of grower power in the San Joaquin Valley and the city of Delano, however, even small victories became more difficult. Here, the farmworker movement clashed with entrenched growers.

On September 8, Filipino workers walked out of the vineyards, protesting wage discrimination. The move was met immediately by grower force; growers evicted these workers from labor camps while colluding with police to harass them. Faced with such backlash, Larry Itliong, the Filipino head of AWOC, reached out to Chavez and his young union for assistance. Chavez knew they were grossly underprepared and underorganized for such a fight. “All I could think was, ‘Oh God, we’re not ready for a strike,’ ” he later recalled.41 The union members would have to vote, deciding for themselves what to do. On September 16, Mexican Independence Day, some five hundred union members squeezed into the warm meeting hall at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Delano. Chavez remembered:

We first talked about the Filipino brothers, about solidarity and the need to have a general strike. When my turn came, I recalled a little story.

155 years ago in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico . . . a padre proclaimed the struggle for liberty. He was killed, but ten years later Mexico won its independence. . . . We are encouraged in another struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us. But it must not be a violent struggle, even if violence is used against us. Violence can only hurt us and our cause.⁴²

Their quest too had to embrace the spirit of nonviolence and sacrifice. Members voted enthusiastically to strike with their fellow AWOC workers, shouting “Viva la causa!” and “Huelga, huelga!” (Strike, strike!).⁴³ Ready or not, the time for them to act had come.

The farmworker union was no normal union, and this would be no standard union struggle. It was a struggle that reached all the way down to their values, their spirits and faith—something Chavez understood and from which he drew. In fact, his first act after the vote was to gather his family and pray a Hail Mary for each grower.⁴⁴ Incessant prayer and regular Mass permeated the movement. Like any war, it came with suffering, but such suffering for the cause found meaning in the religious culture and spirituality of the union. As Father Jim Drake described it, “Mexicans believe that from suffering you get strength rather than death. This is expressed in penitential acts and especially in the Eucharist,” where they connect not with the conquistador mentality but with the suffering servant. He continued, “When we celebrate the Eucharist in a field or beside a picket line, with real grapes and real bread, it has the kind of earthly meaning that it had in the Indian villages before all the cathedrals were built.”45 This theological outlook pervaded even their view of time. Chavez himself had learned an old Mexican dicho from his mother: “Hay mas tiempo que vida” (We have more time than life), and this mantra guided his work. The growers may have had the money and the political, legal, and police power that came with it, but the farmworkers had the trajectory of the cosmos on their side.⁴⁶ The long view of justice gave them more freedom and hope, and allowed them to be more patient amid a struggle the growers wanted to end quickly.⁴⁷

Tensions around the Delano grape strike quickly escalated. El Malcriado (Bad Boy, or Outcast), the union’s bimonthly paper, reported regular incidents of growers intimidating strikers by driving at them with their trucks, spraying them with poisonous sulfur, and physically assaulting them.⁴⁸ These acts of violence were not without effect, and soon strike efforts began to flag. In response, Chavez expanded the union’s tactics, launching a national boycott of grapes with the help of United Auto Worker president Walter Reuther. This move not only drew publicity to the situation but also offered a way for sympathetic consumers around the country to participate and support the effort. Production slowed with the shrinking market, angering growers as they watched their fruit shrivel on the vine or were forced to dump it off to wineries. They hit back. In one instance, they had the police apprehend forty-four farmworkers and clergy, loading them into a paddy wagon where they sat for hours in the baking midday sun. Then, after humiliatingly searching them, the officers booked the protestors in the Bakersfield jail. Eight of those arrested were mothers, whose thirty-eight children had to fend for themselves for the three days their mothers were held. When police refused to allow the children to see their parents, the union members and clergy gathered on the jailhouse steps to pray and sing.49 Slowly, the farmworkers’ witness in the face of such aggression by the growers began to tilt the position of the church, which had to this point remained rather conservative in its view of the struggle. Finally, a farmworker Mass was hosted in Delano in honor of St. Joseph the Worker with top church officials presiding, providing leverage.⁵⁰

At this time, Chavez turned to another controversial and radical practice to act against the growers’ system. With the beginning of the Lenten season in 1966, Chavez’s union orchestrated a march, or what Chavez called the peregrinación (pilgrimage) of penance and revolution. Embarking from Delano, they would proceed up through the San Joaquin Valley until they reached the state capitol in Sacramento. They timed their arrival for April 10, Easter Sunday, and their route stretched some three hundred miles. As with other civil rights marches, this pilgrimage was intended to build solidarity and to pressure officials and growers by lifting the plight of the farmworkers onto the national stage.

As a pilgrimage, however, it was not solely protest. A pilgrimage is drama, a public performance of an alternative and deeply significant story. To walk the road of pilgrimage is to participate in a narrative, usually connected with the life of Christ or a saint. This kind of journey invites those involved to reorient themselves through physical exertion and repentance in order to solidify their devotion. Chavez understood that this was exactly what the farmworkers needed. This act of embodied prayer called them back from the temptation of violence and reoriented them to the core commitments and spirit of the movement. It also reaffirmed their devotion to the cause, functioning as a kind of ascetic training for the struggle ahead.⁵¹

The pilgrimage publicly transformed the framework of the movement, setting the cause of the farmworkers dramatically within a theological story. In the process Chavez was able to integrate the fragmented groups of farmworkers as participants joined in the journey. And he discovered that as an organizing tactic, it allowed them to shift the field on the growers by locating the movement in a sacred history.52 As people on a pilgrimage, they weren’t merely laborers; they were sojourners on a spiritual quest of liberation, making their way out of the oppressive system of agribusiness. As Chavez stated, “There’s something about a march that is very powerful. It’s a powerful weapon, a powerful organizing tool, and it has a powerful influence on those who participate. . . . [It] picks up its own cadence, its own spirit, its own history.”⁵³ Penance and pilgrimage were not standard organizing procedure. They were certainly not part of the Alinsky or Ross community organizing playbook. Chavez stated his own reason for the march:

Throughout the Spanish-speaking world there is another tradition that touches the present march, that of the Lenten penitential processions, where the penitentes would march through the streets, often in sack cloth and ashes, some even carrying crosses as a sign of penance for their sins, and as a plea for the mercy of God. The penitential procession is also in the blood of the Mexican American, and the Delano march will therefore be one of penance—public penance for the sins of the strikers, their own personal sins as well as their yielding perhaps to feelings of hatred and revenge in the strike itself. They hope by the march to set themselves at peace with the Lord, so that the justice of their cause will be purified of all lesser motivation.⁵⁴

Chavez himself encountered suffering on this path. He developed severe blisters on one of his feet that left him unable to walk. His foot became infected, and the infection spread upward, swelling his leg. He broke out in a fever. His nurse forced him to ride in a station wagon alongside marchers for two days. Then Chavez resumed the walk, limping on a cane. Through such suffering, however, the pilgrimage only seemed to pick up momentum. A banner depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe headed the procession, followed by the black eagle flag. The marchers were bolstered by constant prayer and evening programs that included singing, theater performance, and dramatic readings of the “Plan of Delano.” The mood was religious and revolutionary. Chavez saw that, as pilgrims, “the farmworkers in the union—the strikers and boycotters—were themselves the Church-in-the-world, showing the way for many Christians who yearned for a better world.”55

Pressure from the pilgrimage eventually began to weigh heavily on the growers. As the progression reached Stockton on April 3, where a crowd of nearly five thousand festive workers and their families greeted them, Chavez received a call from Sidney Korshak, a representative of the Schenley Corporation, a multinational company and one of the main players in Delano grape industry. Korshak said Schenley was ready to recognize the union and to sign a contract, a message that Chavez took to be a prank and that prompted him to abruptly hang up. Korshak, however, persisted in calling back, and that night, Chavez and Chris Hartmire drove from the procession to Beverly Hills to negotiate, arriving at one o’clock in the morning. Even then, no easy resolution came. But after hours of back and forth with the company and other players, they finally reached an agreement. Schenley would formally recognize the union and give the workers a raise of thirty-five cents per hour. The company also accepted the union’s hiring hall and its credit union.⁵⁶ The remainder of the contract was to be worked out in the next sixty days. A few days later, as the rain fell on Easter Sunday, some ten thousand marchers amassed in front of the capitol in Sacramento, celebrating the end of the pilgrimage and the new work contracts between the union and Schenley. Aside from a small victory for pineapple workers in Hawaii, this was the first time in US history that an agricultural laborers union had gained recognition by a corporation.57 It was to be only the beginning.

***

With Schenley contracts in hand, the union turned its attention to the DiGiorgio Corporation, the largest of the Delano growers and a family-owned business headed by the patriarch, Robert DiGiorgio. No minor opponent, the DiGiorgio Corporation was the inspiration for the infamous Gregorio ranchers in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They had been ruthlessly blocking strikes since the 1930s.⁵⁸ The movement was about to commence a new chapter in its five-year battle with the grape industry.

One thing the union learned in the struggle with Schenley was how powerful a boycott could be. It was the losses associated with the boycott that really got Schenley to the negotiating table. The union now sought to bring the same tactic to bear on DiGiorgio, calling for a national boycott of their products after the company refused to allow its workers to vote for union representation. Again, success seemed unlikely as the well-connected and powerful company dug in. Company guards threatened picketers with guns, pushed them to the ground, assaulted them, and colluded with police to have them arrested.⁵⁹ These acts of intimidation were merely the start. At the behest of DiGiorgio, police grew increasingly abusive. Similarly, as other growers came to DiGiorgio’s side, the corporations and their employees became more hostile to the workers. On October 15, 1966, Manuel Rivera was run over by Lowell Schy, a Goldberg Packing Company salesman. Rivera was on a picket line outside the vineyard entrance when an exasperated Schy commandeered the truck of a reluctant driver and proceeded to ram through demonstrators. Rivera was caught in the wheels, his broken body left lame as a despondent Schy locked himself in the truck’s cab. A riot nearly ensued and was only avoided because Chavez intervened to keep angry picketers from mobbing Schy.

DiGiorgio also used the notorious Teamsters union to derail the farmworkers. DiGiorgio cut sweetheart deals with the Teamsters in order to argue that there was already union representation in the fields. It also hired Teamster goon squads to harass and rough up strikers. Meanwhile, DiGiorgio filed a litany of suits against the union, attacking the organization itself and entangling it in court disputes. Playing its political leverage, DiGiorgio was able to win a court order restricting pickets, severely hamstringing the union.

In the eyes of many of the farmworkers, the tactic of nonviolence seemed to be failing, provoking a fairly tense meeting of union members at the American Legion Hall in Delano. Pressure within the union was building to respond to DiGiorgio’s actions with force. While the union agreed to continue nonviolently, Chavez admitted he was “out of ideas of things to do” but that he was willing to trust in members to find the answers. They concluded the meeting with things still up in the air.60

The turning point came, Chavez recalled, from a burst of holy creativity. “A couple of hours later,” he recounted, “three ladies said they wanted to see me.” Chavez expected them to ask for money, and he knew he would have to refuse, since the union was broke as a result of the long strike. Nonetheless, he invited them into his office. He reported,

First they wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be offended by what they wanted to tell me. Then they wanted to assure me that they were not trying to tell me how to run the strike.

After we got over those hurdles, they said, “We don’t understand this business of the court order. Does this mean that if we go picket and break the injunctions, we’ll go to jail?”

“Well, it means that you go to jail, and that we will be fined,” I said.

“What would happen if we met across the street from the DiGiorgio gates, not to picket, not to demonstrate, but to have a prayer, maybe a mass?” they asked. “Do you think the judge would have us arrested?”

By the time they got the last word out, my mind just flashed to all the possibilities.61

After this meeting, Chavez asked his brother, Richard, to outfit his old station wagon as a small, portable shrine. Richard installed a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, candles, a cross, some flowers, and a flag bearing the union eagle, and union leaders held a vigil just outside the entrance to the vineyards. Soon they added a daily Mass to the twenty-four-hour prayer meeting. The practice gained steam. “Every day we had a mass, held a meeting, sang spirituals, and got [the workers] to sign authorization cards,” Chavez relayed. “Those meetings were responsible in large part for keeping the spirit up of our people inside the camp and helping our organization for the coming battle.” Like Joshua facing the formidable walls of Jericho, they confronted DiGiorgio with active, prayerful observance, looking for God to work. “It was a beautiful demonstration of the power of nonviolence.”⁶² Not part of the typical organizing manual, it originated with the workers, and, drawing on their faith, it continued to build the unique character of the farmworkers movement. The pressure from the campaign along with the negotiation of a shrewd merger with the Filipino AWOC union positioned Chavez’s union to win elections at DiGiorgio ranches, securing recognition from the company.⁶³ But it also bolstered Chavez’s own spiritual devotion, re-centering the cause within his own connection to God.

The victory in the struggle with DiGiorgio led to another fight. On August 3, 1967, the union challenged the Giumarra Corporation, the largest provider of table grapes in the country. Short on money and struggling to maintain morale, the union was truly outmatched by such a Goliath. After weeks of strikes, again Chavez turned to the boycott to contest Giumarra, initiating what became the largest and most hostile confrontation between the union and the growers to that point. Giumarra vigorously retaliated, filing court injunctions, hiring braceros, intimidating picketers, and bringing in the Teamsters. In order to defang the boycott, Giumarra colluded with other growers to share labels, making it impossible for consumers and distributors to distinguish the boycotted products from others. This move prompted the union to call for a comprehensive boycott of all table grapes, ramping up the confrontation.64

As the fall of 1967 gave way to the winter and spring of 1968, the entire country seemed embroiled in conflict, giving way to what would be one of the most violent years of the nation’s history. Student protests of the Vietnam War erupted on campuses across the nation, and images of police beating back demonstrators filled the evening news. Sit-ins at lunch counters ignited violent white reactions across the South. Before summer, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy would be assassinated, bringing strained racial relations to a boil and sparking uprisings from Chicago to Los Angeles. Similarly, tensions rose between the union and the growers, and more and more members began to think violence was necessary. Facing escalating actions from Giumarra and other growers, workers began to resort to more aggressive tactics, displaying weapons at picket lines and setting fire to packing sheds.⁶⁵ As Chavez noted, the temptation mounted to resort to the “dangerous short cuts” of violence.⁶⁶ “I thought that I had to bring the Movement to a halt, do something that would force them and me to deal with the whole question of violence and ourselves. We had to stop long enough to take account of what we were doing.”⁶⁷ After Giumarra won a contempt citation against him, charging that the union had harassed and intimidated company employees, sabotaged their trucks, and illegally picketed, Chavez turned to another holy practice that would also be one of the most controversial actions of his life. On Valentine’s Day, Chavez quietly began to fast.⁶⁸

As with the pilgrimage, the fast was a spiritual discipline that would galvanize the movement, forging deeper solidarity and recommitment to nonviolence. The fast was part of Chavez’s spiritual sense of the transformative mission of the movement.69 He would explain later, “I undertook the fast because my heart was filled with grief and pain for the sufferings of farmworkers. The fast was first for me and then for all of us in the union. It was a fast for nonviolence and a call to sacrifice.”⁷⁰ For Chavez, the means of the struggle could not be divorced from its goal; on a deeply religious level, he believed that the union had to embody an alternative to the growers’ violence and dehumanization.⁷¹ As knowledge of Chavez’s fast leaked out, it began to impact the workers profoundly. It served to bring them together. Each evening, a Mass was celebrated at Forty Acres, the union headquarters where Chavez had taken up residence, and farmworkers from across the region converged on the site. As the media caught on, it also gained national attention, drawing Senator Robert Kennedy’s involvement in the ongoing labor dispute. As something of a “time out,” this faithful improvisation on organizing allowed the workers to recollect themselves and to bond together. It also invigorated their belief in the truth of their cause.

Many viewed it as a stunt, a distraction, or an ego trip. Some organizers intentionally avoid such actions, taking them to be moral manipulation, ineffective, and utopian. But for Chavez, I think there was more to it. The fast was a way of focusing his entire person—body, mind, and spirit—on a cause that went well beyond contracts or raises. It was a refining of his desire for a new country. He was a fan of the Spanish phrase “encaprichado a vencer” (dead set, or hell-bent, on victory).⁷² He could be stubbornly single-minded. Indeed, his doggedness was a trait that tragically impacted the union years later when close friends and longtime leaders were pushed out as his leadership took a dictatorial turn.⁷³ The fast signaled to the growers the depth of his dedication, renewed despite all their antics. His spiritual resilience would be essential for the strenuous years ahead.

The fast racked Chavez’s body. He lost forty pounds. His kidneys suffered severe damage, and his already ailing back was rendered frailer from nutrient depletion. On March 10, 1968, an enervated though saintly looking Chavez joined with over eight thousand farmworkers and supporters to break his fast. Joined by Senator Robert Kennedy, a mile-long procession of priests, minsters, nuns, farmworkers and their children, and union officials followed the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the union flag, arriving at a makeshift altar on a flatbed truck where Chavez waited. The people carried boxes of semita (Mexican peasant bread) for the Mass.

Too weak to speak, Chavez asked the union’s vice president, Julio Hernandez, and Reverend Jim Drake to read his speech first in Spanish, then in English. It was brief and to the point, articulating the basic credo of the farmworker movement.74 “We are a family bound together in a common struggle for justice. We are a union family celebrating our unity and the nonviolent nature of our movement,” it said. “It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life.”⁷⁵

The struggle with Giumarra and the grape industry crested in the spring and summer of 1970. Pressure had been mounting on the growers throughout the intervening year, as the nation began to awaken to the farmworker’s situation. “Gradually, it became a national moral issue not to eat grapes,” due in no small part to the boycott efforts in cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit.⁷⁶ With losses amounting to $25 million, the growers made a last-ditch effort to challenge the union, turning again to the Teamsters. They also entreated Governor Ronald Reagan to intervene. Reagan took to national television, denouncing the boycott. Growers also persuaded the sympathetic President Richard Nixon to vastly increase the Defense Department’s purchase of table grapes. But the boycott proved too durable, compelling Giumarra and the industry to the negotiating table. A committee of Catholic bishops arbitrated.⁷⁷ Desperate to cut a deal, John Giumarra, the owner and company president, summoned Chavez to room 44 of the Stardust Motel in Delano at 2 a.m. on July 26. By daybreak, Giumarra leveraged his influence to assemble all the growers at the local parish school auditorium to meet with union leadership for what became an intense two-day-long interchange. At last, on July 29, an overflow crowd gathered in the hall at Forty Acres, and Giumarra dramatically signed off on the contracts, throwing up his hands in mock surrender.78 The other growers then followed, though not with such a flourish.

Helen Chavez, Robert F. Kennedy, and Cesar Chavez breaking the fast, March 10, 1968. Photo by Richard Darby. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

In the midst of the celebration, Chavez—ever mindful of the deeper reality of these events—spoke thoughtfully, saying, “The strikers and the people involved in the struggle sacrificed a lot, sacrificed all of their worldly possessions. . . . Ninety-five percent of the strikers lost their homes and their cars. But I think that in losing those worldly possessions they found themselves, and they found that only through dedication, through serving mankind [sic], and, in this case, serving the poor and those who were struggling for justice, only in that way could they really find themselves.”79

Within this statement is the spirituality of Chavez and the movement he led. A sojourner who found his home among the farmworkers, Chavez sought in solidarity with them to challenge the unjust system of agribusiness. But he also believed that justice would come only by peaceful means, for only the work of nonviolence could transform the country and create the home he sought. Such was his unflinching commitment to the unity of the Spirit, the illuminating theme of his life.

As I came to read about his life, I grew to see Chavez as an icon of what faith-based organizing can do. His life is a reminder of the kind of country for which Christians long. But it is also a tangible example of the way there. In his spirituality, I can see what solidarity and nonviolence mean and how they lead to the justice we desire. Nothing may capture the arc of his witness like these words from his “Prayer of the Farmworkers’ Struggle,” where he pleads: “Show me the suffering of the most miserable / So I will know my peoples’ plight / Free me to pray for others. . . . Help us to love even those that hate us / So that we may change this world.”⁸⁰ Praying with him, I hope we will yearn for the same union of the Spirit that he sought and that our sacraments celebrate.