In Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo, the scientist is met by Andrea, one of his acolytes, after he’s recanted his heresy—that the Earth orbits the sun—rather than submit to torture at the hands of the all-powerful Church. They exchange the following remarks:
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.
Galileo: No, Andrea. Unhappy the land that needs a hero.
That exchange came to mind yesterday when I read the New York Times story documenting Cesar Chavez’s grooming, molestation, and rape of two middle-school-aged girls, the daughters of activists in the union Chavez founded and led, the United Farm Workers, as well as his rapes of the union’s co-founder and fellow leader Dolores Huerta.
Because Chavez was a hero in a land that needed one. He came to public attention in the mid-’60s, leading a fledgling union of America’s most hardworking and exploited workers. By 1966, Paul Schrade, director of the United Auto Workers’ Western states region, was providing assistance and counsel, and introduced him to Robert Kennedy, who embraced Chavez as a fellow leader in the fight against racism and poverty. An apostle of nonviolence with a luminous devotion to winning a better life for a workforce at once essential and overlooked, Chavez appeared to have some of the same Gandhian qualities as Martin Luther King. After 1968, with King and Kennedy both assassinated, Chavez’s heroic stature grew to fill that void—that need.
He wielded the weapons of the poor, visibly, expertly. He led hundred-mile marches of his members, and clergy, and leftists old and new, to California’s capitol, seeking a ban on the most backbreaking forms of harvesting, and a state law enabling farmworkers to collectively bargain. (They had been excluded from those rights in the National Labor Relations Act.) He staged well-publicized fasts to protest the farm owners’ intransigence. He dispatched his members and his organizers to cities across the nation to organize grape boycotts, in hopes of pressuring California’s big farm owners to recognize the union and negotiate contracts with it. And for a little more than half a decade, he, and the union, prevailed: The union won contracts with some major farms; membership soared to more than 50,000; the legislature and the new governor—Jerry Brown—banned the short hoe and in 1975 passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which accorded farmworkers the same right to bargain that other American workers had enjoyed since 1935. Those successes inspired other efforts to organize farmworkers, or at least pressure lawmakers on their behalf, in Ohio, Texas, Arizona, and Florida.
But that success was short-lived.
By the late 1970s, Chavez had begun dismantling the union that he led. He told his staff to cease administering the contracts the UFW had won and to all but stop organizing farms. He adamantly held to the union’s initial policy of not paying its staff and its attorneys more than the bare pittance it had paid at its founding. He spoke instead of building a vast movement of the poor, though he declined to provide a focus, or targets, for where that organizing should begin and how it should proceed. He squelched all opposition within the union’s ostensible governing body; he termed it treasonous. Over a period of years, he devoted meetings of union officers and staff to the “game” devised by the then-fashionable drug rehab organization Synanon, which featured members venomously attacking one another, in the ostensible hope that this would bring the participants closer together. Not surprisingly, it drove them further apart and broke all bonds of trust.
Also not surprisingly, the union quickly lost more than 80 percent of its members, and since that time has never claimed more than 10,000 members. (In recent years, under new leaders and buoyed by a new California law that permits card-check recognition, the UFW has finally begun to grow again, however modestly.)
All this is documented by a number of studies and books, chief among them two essential reads: Miriam Pawel’s The Union of Their Dreams and Frank Bardacke’s Trampling Out the Vintage, which reports on some of the violence that Chavez authorized against his critics. You can read a good brief history of this dispiriting tale in this review of Pawel’s book, which ran in Dissent in 2010.
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Chavez’s abuses, strategies—ultimately, his vision—drove many of the most talented organizers out of the union. Some left; some were purged. Eliseo Medina, who’d joined the union as a teenager and was quickly sent to Chicago to organize the grape boycott there, was perhaps the chief internal advocate for continuing to organize the farms and administer the union’s contracts there. He battled Chavez over the fundamental question of whether the union’s members could broadly direct the union, or whether that was solely up to Chavez. When he lost that fight, he left and went to work for SEIU, where he eventually rose to be the national union’s number two officer and turned the union into the nation’s most powerful organization fighting for immigrants’ rights, including their right to be eligible for citizenship. The massive 2006 demonstrations for immigration reform testified to the scope of his influence. Miguel Contreras also joined the union as a teenager and later went to work for HERE, the union of hotel and restaurant workers, before becoming the leader of the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO. There, he activated many local unions (more than 300 belonged to L.A.’s AFL-CIO) in election campaigns, focusing on naturalizing, registering, and mobilizing the millions of immigrants who’d flocked to Southern California—in the process, changing California from a purple state to one of deepest blue. Huerta, for her part, went on to boost countless campaigns to boost the rights and economic prospects of workers, women, and racial minorities.
One might conclude from this that it wasn’t Chavez who fundamentally changed California; it was his onetime acolytes turned dissenters. But it was Chavez who put the cause of Latino rights and Latino power on the left’s, and then America’s, agenda in the years between 1965 and 1975. It was during that ten-year time span that urban Latinos began demonstrating for equal rights in California, and winning public office—seats on city councils and in the state assembly—there. Chavez was no Malcolm X, but he raised Latinos’ racial consciousness nonetheless. That’s why his birthday has been a holiday in California; that’s why there are streets named after him in a host of American cities. That had never been Chavez’s primary mission; he ultimately saw himself more as a tribune of class than a tribune of race. But after the murders of 1968, a space had fallen open for a nonviolent hero to at least a portion of the leaderless American left, and that was a space that Chavez came to occupy.
For those who’ve followed what subsequently happened to his union, and his responsibility for its decline, his heroic stature has long been the subject of doubt, qualification, and some dismay. Now, it’s simply gone. Unhappy the land …
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