The teaming up of United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez and Sen. Robert Kennedy marked an important moment in the fight for the rights of Latinos in America, a time in history brought to life by a film biography of Chavez, says James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
In 1996, with great fanfare –
and under the influence of political adviser Dick Morris – President Bill
Clinton signed the largest welfare “reform” bill of the last 35 years. It was
so harsh toward recipients that many speculated that not even Ronald Reagan
would have signed it. But Clinton, as a titular Democrat, had the cover to do
so. Many commented at the time that this act demonstrated that the Arkansas
governor’s association with the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council was
not just cosmetic.
Upon signing the bill, Clinton
utilized the words of the late Robert Kennedy, quoting the liberal icon as
saying that work is what the United States is all about; we need work as
individuals and as citizens, as a society and as a people. When Rory Kennedy,
Bobby Kennedy’s youngest daughter, heard this invocation of her father’s name
to support a law that would hurt the poorest and most disadvantaged people in
America, she immediately called Peter Edelman, who had been a legislative
assistant to Kennedy when he was a senator.
Edelman, who was working for
Clinton as assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, resigned in
protest against the new law. A year later, the Harvard-educated lawyer wrote a
blistering essay about the “reform” bill and Clinton’s role in it. Five years
later, Edelman explained that not only was the bill a bad one but he was
outraged at Clinton’s use of his former boss’ name in signing it.
Edelman wrote, “President
Clinton hijacked RFK’s words and twisted them totally. By signing the bill,
Clinton signaled acquiescence in the conservative premise that welfare is the
problem — the source of a culture of irresponsible behavior,” while RFK
envisioned a large American investment to guarantee that people actually could
get decent jobs.
Kennedy wanted both protections
for children and outreach to those who could not find jobs. In other words, he
wanted to do something big about ending poverty. (See the introduction to
Edelman’s book, Searching for America’s Heart.)
RFK and Justice
Perhaps nothing illustrates the
difference between the Democratic Party now and then than Edelman’s role in
getting Sen. Kennedy to Delano, California, in 1966. It’s a story Bill Clinton
probably knew about, but – to my knowledge – never mentioned in public.
Kennedy had been serving on a
subcommittee of the Senate Labor Committee that dealt with the plight of
migrant workers. That is, people largely from either Asia or Central America
who worked the huge fruit and vegetable farms in California and other southern
states for the large agribusiness owners.
Prior to 1965, these workers
had no real labor rights. Because of a strong agribusiness lobbying effort, the
minimum wage law did not apply to them. Neither did child labor laws or
collective bargaining statutes. The national media had only once noticed their
plight – in late 1960, when Edward R. Murrow broadcast his famous CBS
documentary Harvest of Shame.
Edelman and labor leader Walter
Reuther convinced Kennedy that his presence was needed at congressional
hearings being held in March 1966 in Delano. There was a strike going on led by
a Mexican-American activist named Cesar Chavez. Kennedy’s presence there would
give Chavez’s movement some media attention and bolster the spirits of his
followers.
Labor representative Paul
Schrade told me that he and Reuther had already been to Delano and met Chavez,
who suggested that Kennedy attend the hearings. Schrade said he called Jack
Conway, who was Reuther’s liaison to Kennedy’s office, and connected with
Edelman, who joined with Conway in convincing Kennedy to attend the hearings by
making the argument that “These people need you!” (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert
Kennedy and his Times, p. 825)
Though reluctant, Kennedy
finally relented. But even on the plane ride out, he still wondered why he was
going. But, if anything, Edelman underestimated the attention and aid RFK was
about to bestow on Chavez and the farm workers.
Both the local sheriff and the
district attorney were there to testify. As Kennedy either knew, or was about
to learn, both men were in the pocket of the wealthy landowners. With cameras
running and reporters in attendance, a famous colloquy took place between
Kennedy, who had served as Attorney General of the United States, and Sheriff
Leroy Galyen of Kern County.
Galyen: If I have reason to
believe that a riot is going to be started because somebody tells me that
there’s going to be trouble if you don’t stop them, then it’s my duty to stop
them.
Kennedy: So then you go out and
arrest them?
Galyen: Yes, absolutely.
Kennedy: Who told you they’re
going to riot?
Galyen: The men right out in
the fields that they were talking to says, “If you don’t get them out of here,
we’re going to cut their hearts out.” So rather then let them get cut, you
remove the cause. …
Kennedy: This is an interesting
concept. … Someone makes a report about someone getting out of order… and you
go in and arrest them when they haven’t done anything wrong. How can you go in
and arrest somebody and they haven’t violated the law.
Galyen: They’re ready to
violate the law, in other words….
At this point, Kennedy cracked
up and laughter enveloped the proceedings.
Kennedy: Could I suggest in the
interim period of time … the lunch period … that the sheriff and the district
attorney please read the Constitution of the United States.
When the hearing was over,
Kennedy met Chavez outside and told him that he supported the strike. The
senator then joined Chavez on the picket line. Chavez felt protective of
Kennedy, wondering if he wasn’t going too far too fast. For instance, when a
reporter asked RFK if “the Huelga” (the strike) may be communist inspired,
Kennedy instantly replied with: “No, they are not communists. They’re
struggling for their rights.” (ibid, p. 826)
What RFK Brought
As Dolores Huerta, another
United Farm Workers founder, noted, “Robert didn’t come to us and tell us what
was good for us. He came to us and asked two questions: What do you want? And,
how can I help? That’s why we loved him.”
And as Chavez later said about
RFK’s appearance there, “He immediately asked very pointed questions of the
growers; he had a way of disintegrating their arguments by picking at very
simple questions. So he really helped us … turned it completely around.” (ibid)
As Edelman later said about
Kennedy’s flight into Delano, “Something had touched a nerve in him. Always,
after that, we helped Cesar Chavez in whatever way we could.” (ibid, p. 827) As
Kennedy saw it, Cesar Chavez was doing for Hispanics what Martin Luther King
Jr. was doing for black Americans, “giving them new convictions of pride and
solidarity.” (ibid)
Kennedy called on labor leaders
to help Chavez organize the migrants. It was the beginning of a friendship that
lasted for more than two years until Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in Los
Angeles after winning the California primary on June 6, 1968.
When Kennedy was shot at the
Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy had Dolores Huerta on the podium with him. He had
thanked her and Chavez for mobilizing the voters in Central California. Chavez
then served as an honorary pallbearer at Kennedy’s funeral service.
The humorous scene between
Galyen and RFK is depicted in the film Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step
at a Time, which was released last year in theaters but which got so little
media push and publicity that I didn’t see it. But Patricia Barron, a
Mexican-AMerican friend of mine, advised me to get it on Netflix or from Red
Box. “Jim, it’s at least as good as Selma” – and she was right. I actually
think it’s better than Selma, but lacked an Oprah Winfrey/Brad Pitt producing
team to promote it.
Both movies focus on an iconic
leader representing an oppressed group of Americans, with Selma centered on Dr.
King. And as Kennedy noted, Chavez was probably the closest role model that the
Hispanic community has in comparison to King.
Chavez did face a
David-and-Goliath struggle that, in some ways, was comparable to King’s
accomplishments. King’s opponent was the system of racial segregation that
replaced slavery across the South after the Civil War and the failure of
Reconstruction. Segregation was ingrained in nearly every aspect of Southern
life and culture – and was enforced by both law and violence.
The Lords of Agribusiness
Chavez’s opponents were the
omnipotent lords of California agribusiness, which was the largest industry in
the state. They dominated the area from north of Santa Barbara to approximately
south of San Jose. When one drives that stretch of the Golden State Freeway,
one can see that the huge expanse is largely made up of agricultural fields.
The owners of the fields felt
their profits relied upon maintaining the pose of being farmers, but they were
really running a large industry. Privately they did not refer to themselves as
farmers, but rather as ranchers, growers or agribusiness men. (See Chapter 1 of
So Shall Ye Reap, by Joan London and Henry Anderson)
There was good reason for that.
In 1970, the average farm size in California was over 700 acres; twice the
national average. The average sales price for a farm was over $300,000; five
times the national average. The top 2.5 percent of the industry accounted for
the employment of 60 percent of the migrant labor force.
As authors London and Anderson
point out, this type of wealth allowed the growers to employ a phalanx of
lawyers, PR men, and state and federal lobbyists – all of it in the cause of
preserving and disguising their dominance over their cheap and plentiful
workforce.
With this kind of power at
their disposal, the growers took advantage of laws that allowed them to claim
the government subsidies that sought to sustain average farmers. For example,
irrigation water was delivered to them at a fourth of what it should have cost
because they took advantage of a subsidy that was reserved for farms of 160
acres or less in size.
As London and Anderson
revealed, the growers rigged the system to achieve this by making trusts of
their properties and partly holding their land in title to their wives,
sisters, daughters, sons, nephews and any other relatives they could find. They
also intervened with the state government in Sacramento to make their industry
exempt from unemployment insurance and benefited further because only a very
small minority of the farm workers were signed up for Social Security. Thus,
there were very few records of these farm workers who really were transients.
For 30 years, until 1967,
agricultural workers also were excluded from the milestone Fair Labor Standards
Act, meaning they were not subject to minimum wage laws or overtime
regulations. Almost all of them worked on a piecework scale based on how much
fruit or how many vegetables they picked.
Both Sacramento and Washington
excluded agribusiness from the Wagner Act of 1935, which was perhaps the most
far-reaching of New Deal legislation governing worker/employee relations.
Without its application, the growers did not have to recognize collective
bargaining efforts and were free to terrorize organizers who also faced the
fact that local law authorities that were on the growers’ side.
Seeking Out Labor
In addition to all of this, the
growers went looking for minority groups at home and abroad who they could
exploit – sometimes as distant as the Far East but, after the Mexican
Revolution, there was a steady stream from the south both available and
exploitable. This was made legal by the bracero program, a diplomatic agreement
with Mexico permitting the importation of temporary manual labor into the U.S.
By 1945, because of claims of a labor shortage brought on by World War II,
there were 50,000 braceros in the California fields.
As London and Anderson note,
the growers were so powerful that they were allowed to exempt their workers
from Selective Service and use prisoners of war in their fields. After Ronald
Reagan’s election as California governor in 1967, he showed his appreciation
for the growers’ huge campaign donations
by letting them use prison convicts for work, until the state Supreme Court
overturned the order.
What existed closely resembled
a feudal system, down to the workers living in properties sometimes owned and
monitored by the landowners. It was, as one scribe wrote, a condition of
semi-voluntary servitude.
But politicians like Reagan had
no qualms about preserving it. He appointed growers like Alan Grant to the
California Farm Bureau Federation, the UC Board of Regents, and the State Board
of Agriculture. From his lofty perch, Grant saw no problem with the system as
it was and no need for unionism in agriculture. As he famously said, “My
Filipino boys can come to my back door any time they have a problem and discuss
it with me.”
As with Dr. King, there was a
history of organizing attempts for Chavez to look back on. After violence broke
out in 1913, two organizers were jailed. And six years later, the Criminal
Syndicalism Act was passed in California, essentially making union organizing a
criminal act.
During the Great Depression,
some strikes were led by communists, so agribusiness later used red-baiting and
violent tactics to crush strikes. Under the Criminal Syndicalism Act, several
strike leaders were arrested, two were killed, and over 20 were wounded –
violent tactics that persisted until 1939, condoned by local authorities and
hailed by the local press barons.
This anti-unionism was endorsed
by Richard Nixon, who was elected to Congress from California in 1947 and was
making his reputation as a red-baiter. In 1950, during a strike in the Delano
area, the giant DiGiorgio ranch hired strikebreakers, a practice that Nixon
endorsed, signing a document asserting that farm workers had been properly
excluded from labor laws.
“It would be harmful to the pubic
interest and to all responsible labor unions to legislate otherwise,” Nixon
stated, a position that became known as the Nixon Doctrine and helped turn that
strike around in favor of the growers.
The strike was called off later
in 1950 after court orders limited picketing, boycotting and the importation of
assistance from other unions. One of the young men on the picket line nearby
was Cesar Chavez.
Escaping Violence
Chavez’s grandparents came to
America to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Cesar was born in
Arizona in 1927. His family moved to California in 1938 and first lived out of
their car, then under a tent. As he later related, sometimes they would eat
wild mustard seeds just to stay alive. His family then worked as migrant farm
laborers under the influence of local contractors. They would move up and down
the state following plant harvests.
Chavez dropped out of school at
age 14 in the eighth grade and became a full-time worker in the fields. In his
early 20s, he married Helen Fabela and in 1949 they had the first of their
eight children. With a young family, he decided to leave the shifting tides of
the migrant worker stream and moved to San Jose. In season, he harvested
delicacies like apricots. In the offseason, he worked in lumberyards.
His father, Librado, had been
active in union organizing and favored eventual affiliation with the CIO rather
than the AFL. The CIO was Walter Reuther’s union. Young Cesar would sit in on
these discussions and learn as he went. He was also stung by the whip of
racism. In his teens, he remembered being removed from a movie theater for
violating segregated seating rules.
But the single event that
probably changed Chavez’s life the most was the night a priest named Father
McDonnell knocked on the door of his home. Fathers Donald McDonnell and Thomas
McCullough were famous in the area as the “priests to the poor.” The two
divided up the central part of the state and visited, by their own estimate,
about a thousand farm labor camps. Very early they realized that the growers
would never divide up their farms and sell them to the workers, so the only way
to achieve any justice or dignity for the migrants was through a union.
In 1952, Fred Ross visited the
Stockton area from an agency called the CSO, or Community Service Organization,
an offshoot of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. The group’s idea was
to recognize central issues and then build local alliances finding common
approaches to address the issues. Alinsky hired Ross to organize
Mexican-Americans in the Los Angeles area, and – after considerable success –
Ross shifted north to San Jose.
The knock on the Chavez door
was part of a Ross/McDonnell cellular approach, called the house meeting. In a
three-week period, Ross and McDonnell would visit several houses each night. At
the end of the three weeks, they would then have a larger meeting at one of the
bigger homes to include all the people they talked to who were interested in
the cause identified by the CSO. They would elect temporary officers and send
the people out to knock on more doors, leading eventually to a local chapter of
the CSO.
The night that Ross met Chavez,
Ross reportedly wrote in his journal, “I think I found the guy I’m looking
for.”
Ross ended up hiring Chavez to
work for the CSO at $35 per week. In 1953, he became a statewide organizer,
working from northern California, south to Oxnard. Chavez and Huerta, whom Ross
also recruited, built the state CSO into a coalition of 22 chapters in
California and Arizona, concentrating on getting farm workers state disability
insurance and signing up as many as they could for Social Security benefits.
These developments meant the growers had to keep files and records on their
workers.
Expanding the Fight
The next target for Ross,
Chavez and Huerta was to end the bracero program, which they finally did at the
end of 1964. But there was a problem Chavez had with the CSO, which would not
commit to an all-out push to organize and unionize the farm workers of
California. Chavez resigned and took his life savings of $900 out of the bank.
He moved to Delano, explaining that “My brother lived there, and I knew that at
least we wouldn’t starve.”
Chavez started organizing the
local farm workers, calling his new agency the Farm Workers Association. He
deliberately avoided the word “union,” which he knew was offensive to the
growers. He also borrowed money from a friend to open up a credit union and
offered those who joined preferential rates on insurance. By 1964, he had
enough workers paying dues that he could devote all his energies to building
the union.
In 1965, Chavez went on the
offensive. He called a rent strike against the Tulare Housing Authority. He
then called two strikes against small growers. He won and the strikers were
rehired. But the greatest conflict of Chavez’s career — the one Bobby Kennedy
enlisted in – was the massive farm workers’ strike from 1965 to 1970, which
expanded into first a national boycott, and then an international one.
Diego Luna’s film begins near
the end of that boycott. Chavez (played by Miguel Pena) is in a radio station
in Europe trying to expand the scope of the boycott to England. He begins
talking about how he started out, and the film flashes back to the beginning of
his career as an organizer for CSO near San Jose. Chavez arranges a house
meeting so he can question some of the workers in the area.
The narrative then jumps to his
dispute with CSO over a focus on union building for farm workers, and we
witness his family move from San Jose to Delano. We see his early struggles to
get the farm workers union going. For example, a visit from the local sheriff,
who is surely meant to suggest Galyen.
But the picture really picks up
momentum with the beginnings of the
five-year strike and boycott, which, ironically, was not started by
Chavez. It was actually begun by Larry Itliong, the leader of Filipino workers.
Itliong chose to have his followers go on strike because the grape growers in
Delano would not pay comparable wages as the growers in the Coachella Valley.
The film depicts this moment of
crisis very strongly: we see the forces of the growers standing outside the
worker’s barracks in the middle of the night, demanding, with a loud speaker,
that they return to work or be evicted. The workers refused, and many were
evicted.
Itliong then wrote to Chavez.
From past experience, Itliong knew the growers in Delano would try to recruit
strikebreakers from the Hispanic ranks and asked Chavez to support the walkout
by not having the Mexican-Americans replace his men in the fields.
A United Front
This was a portentous moment
for Chavez because his efforts were relatively new, and the union he was
leading was not fully formed. But he saw that what Itliong was asking him to do
was to stand up for all farm workers everywhere — whether they be
Asian-Americans or Mexican-Americans. Chavez argued for backing Itliong and
carried the day in the Union Hall. Although the dynamics behind the Filipino walkout
are skimped, the scene with Chavez leading the argument in the hall is vividly
depicted in the film.
On Sept. 16, 1965, Chavez and
his workers joined the Filipino picket line. For all intents and purposes, this
was the beginning of the five-year strike, called La Huelga. When the boycott
was added, Chavez called it La Causa.
Realizing that the stakes had
been raised by the alliance of Chavez and Itliong, the growers started revving
up their battery of weapons. First they used the legal venue, going to court to
get injunctions against picketing. They cited the criminal syndicalism laws to
disallow Chavez from speaking to his followers on a bullhorn. The local courts
were so rigged that they even forbade the strikers to use the word Huelga. The
growers knew these perverse decisions would be reversed on appeal, but they
thought they could outlast the farm workers.
If it would have been anyone
besides Chavez and Itliong, that may have been the case. But as the film
carefully notes, Chavez had hired a capable attorney to beat back these
ridiculous rulings, a man named Jerry Cohen, who got Chavez, his wife, and
Huerta out of jail.
The film next depicts the
beginning of the boycott. Chavez started small, deciding to attempt to boycott
just one winery. But he realized that he would need allies to spread the word.
So, he had his followers perform outreach to sympathetic leftist groups like
students and civil rights advocates.
In another good scene, the film
shows the effectiveness of this boycott and how it began to split the ranks of
the growers. Julian Sands plays the director of the boycotted company, with
John Malkovich as the representative of the growers’ association. Malkovich
asks Sands not to give in, but as Sands makes clear, he really did not have a
choice. The boycott was hurting sales too much. (Malkovich also executive
produced the film.)
Mixing black-and-white newsreel
film with a reenactment, the picture next depicts the appearance of Sen. Robert
Kennedy at the Delano hearing. Luna found an actor named Jack Holmes who has a
strong natural resemblance to Bobby Kennedy. However, the film underplays this
remarkable moment by not showing the bonding that took place afterwards between
the two men.
But Luna does show the
climactic event that took place after Kennedy left. Borrowing a page from
Gandhi and King, Chavez organized a 245-mile walk from Delano to Sacramento.
Luna’s depiction of this event briefly includes the skits that playwright Luis
Valdez would prepare for the protesters to watch at night. These were almost
always satiric in nature and meant to caricature the arrogance and
insensitivity of the growers.
The main intent of the march
was to get California Gov. Pat Brown to push a bill through the legislature
that would give agriculture workers the right to organize. That bill eventually
did pass, but it was later under the governorship of Pat Brown’s son Jerry.
The 23-Day Fast
No film about Chavez would be
complete without his 23-day fast over the escalating violence used by the
growers to harass his followers. Chavez was also disturbed by the failure of
the farm workers to refrain from retaliation. Chavez only drank water during
this period and – although Chavez did attract much attention to his efforts –
many thought he had endangered his health. Finally, Bobby Kennedy arrived to
convince Chavez to stop and take Holy Communion with him.
The film does a nice job in
playing off the Holmes/Kennedy scenes with the newsreels of Ronald Reagan
attacking both Chavez and his union. After Kennedy leaves, we watch as Reagan
attacks the grape boycott as immoral, and he accuses Chavez of using threats
and intimidation tactics against the grape growers.
Luna and his scriptwriters do
an even better job with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. We watch as Chavez
pulls his car over to hear a radio bulletin about Kennedy’s assassination. Luna
then cuts to Kennedy’s requiem at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The director is
careful to include a shot of presidential candidate Richard Nixon in
attendance.
This will strike the theme
that, with RFK dead, Chavez lost a key ally in the political world. The growers
increased their violent tactics. And, with Nixon in the White House, they
thought they had a solution to the national boycott because Nixon facilitated
agreements that allowed them to ship their grapes to Europe to be sold.
But Chavez was planning for
this maneuver. Because of the expanded exposure of his work in the mass media —
a Time Magazine cover for instance — he had become something of a
celebrity. So, the film picks up where
it began: with Cesar speaking on the radio in England, promoting the boycott
abroad. He also made alliances with unions there to not handle U.S. grapes.
And in what is probably the
highlight of the film, Luna shows Chavez and his new English friends dumping
unshipped grapes into the Thames River, a reverse Boston Tea Party. The film
crosscuts this with a montage of Malkovich on his empty ranch: one with no
workers, abandoned tractors, and unmoved grapes spoiling in crates.
Being checkmated abroad was the
last straw for the growers. In July 1970, many of these agribusinesses decided
it was time to recognize the United Farm Workers, even if it meant signing
contracts with Chavez. The film ends with that historic signing.
The Chavez/Kennedy/Itliong
struggle was truly a case of the underdog winning out through sheer
determination and courage. The deck was completely stacked against their cause,
but with help from good people like RFK, Reuther and Pat Brown, Cesar Chavez
did make a difference and achieved what no one had done before him.
There have been surprisingly
few films made about Chavez, even though his life was full of both epic and
personal drama. I only know of two documentaries: Viva LaCausa and The Fight in
the Fields. The latter PBS documentary goes beyond the time limits of Luna’s
film and confronts some of the problems the UFW had later. After all, it was
not easy to maintain what Chavez achieved with Ronald Reagan in the White House
and George Deukmejian in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.
Luna has made a good film, one
with a strong underlying message. Chavez was not handsome and photogenic like
JFK was. He was not anywhere near the speaker that King was. And he did not
have the wonder drug of charisma, as did Malcolm X. That Chavez achieved what
he did with so few natural gifts was a great testament to what an ordinary man
can do when touched with the right moment and the right inspiration.
James DiEugenio is a researcher
and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other
mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland