A Mystic in the California Fields
BROOKS, THOMAS R.
A Mystic in the California Fields Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa By Jacques E. Levy Norton. 546 pp. $12.95 Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Walls Come Tumbling Down: A History of...
...Richard Chavez, Cesar's brother, provides Levy with a graphic account of the bedlam that ensued...
...he has compromised, for example, on jointly administering hiring halls with the growers...
...In sum, it seems fair to say that the Teamsters union speaks to the migrant workers' fears, while the United Farm Workers speaks to their aspirations...
...Chavez' profound empathy for the men and women who labor in the vast California fields is rooted in his past...
...Even worse, inexperienced administrators couldn't cope with hiring hall problems...
...In his teens, Cesar wore pachuco clothes, the pegged pants and long coat that were both a symbol of youthful rebellion against the "old ways" and an affirmation of being Chicano...
...He then served a hitch in the Navy, was married, and started a family...
...For UFW supporters these mixed results raise a question: Why would farm workers freely choose the Teamsters...
...Not long afterward the huge DiGorgio Corporation sought to bring the Teamsters on the scene, precipitating the merger between the Association and AWOC that produced the United Farm Workers (UFW...
...There seemed to be little that distinguished him from other young Chicanos, except a special intensity...
...Despite strong mutual distrust, the Association supported the AFLCIO's already existing Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) in a strike against the grape growers...
...The CSO reacted negatively, however, to his notion of making his incipient hiring hall a permanent institution, a cross between an immigrant mutual aid society and a trade union...
...Quick to sense the opportunity for a counterattack, the growers hit out at hiring hall practices and paved the way for the Teamsters' successful incursion...
...Teamster intimidation continues, of course, and the truckers have in fact gained slightly better wages than the UFW in recent contracts...
...Levy's book shows how Chavez not only shattered that image without bloodshed, but mobilized the country against the power of agribusiness through the boycott...
...The result is a powerful book, attractively produced with striking endpapers and marvelous photographs...
...By last December the UFW had won 189 of 352 elections and represented about half the voting workers, or twice as many as the Teamsters...
...The primary source of the Teamsters' appeal, then, is perhaps its violent image...
...And while the legislation represents a union victory, it is also a personal triumph for Cesar Chavez, the inspirational leader of the United Farm Workers...
...Encouraged by Father Donald McDonnell, an activist priest, Chavez read the labor encyclicals, the lives of St...
...Yet, like Gandhi, Chavez is pragmatic...
...Confronted by a Farm Workers strike, the truckers' imported goons to violently enforce their agreements...
...For whatever reason, all of his actions were invested with a tremendous amount of energy," recalls Fred Ross, an organizer with the late Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation...
...In Cesar Chavez, a superb "oral history" of the man and his movement, Jacques E. Levy appropriately has taken most of his material from interviews with Chavez, interweaving accounts from his close supporters and family...
...But the Farm Workers' overall benefits—including such matters as protecting the worker at the hiring stage and limitations on the use of poisonous pesticides—are unquestionably superior...
...It was Ross who recruited him at age 25 to the staff of the Community Service Organization (CSO), the Alinsky offshoot chiefly engaged at the time in voter registration and citizenship drives in the barrios of Southern California...
...And Cesar Chavez, in Levy's skillful hands, illuminates both...
...Workers were furious about dues being deducted twice-over because of bookkeeping errors...
...The whole essence of nonviolent action is getting a lot of people involved," Chavez says, "vast numbers doing little things...
...When the CSO subsequently sent him to Oxnard, he discovered that with the cooperation of the California Farm Placement Services the growers were illegally employing braceros, migrant workers from Mexico, ahead of the more expensive American labor...
...his mysticism is foreign to trade unionism...
...The workers were given the right to choose their own representation in free elections...
...By presenting the local unemployed for work, Chavez broke the grower-placement service collusion...
...A new governor and pressure from organized labor changed the ground rules of the dispute in 1975...
...The UFW was forced to give up intensive picketing and fall back on the boycott...
...By 1970, the United Farm Workers had signed more than 300 contracts covering 30,000 members...
...12.95 Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Walls Come Tumbling Down: A History of the Civil Rights Movement" There is new hope in the fields of California now that the state has guaranteed farm workers the right to bargain collectively as well as freely choose their own representatives...
...Thus, in 1962 Chavez broke away to begin organizing the National Farm Workers Association...
...When it was lost in the Great Depression, he and his family joined the army of migrant laborers toiling for the giant California growers...
...A number of contests remain to be decided by the courts, and in some instances union affiliation was rejected altogether...
...Traditionally, the individual farm worker was weak and he saw his employer as all powerful...
...As a boy Cesar worked on his family's farm...
...Chavez felt his young outfit was not ready for a difficult job action (it had only about 200 dues payers out of 1,700 members), but refused to permit scabbing...
...Chavez, it might be argued, is a bad administator...
...When the UFW began to organize the lettuce workers of Salinas, the growers signed up with the trucking union, leaving contract details to be completed later...
...Nevertheless, the Teamsters' violent approach to trade unionism has apparently attracted those who appear to believe —if one may oversimplify—that it takes evil to cope with evil...
...Suddenly the union had to switch from directing a boycott to running a bureaucracy...
...Over the next difficult years, Chavez brilliantly combined the techniques of the boycott and the strike in a painfully slow yet increasingly successful battle with the agricultural empires...
...Francis and Gandhi, and the 1940 La Follette hearings on farm labor...
...employers could no longer make some convenient arrangement with a compliant union and then bind employes accordingly...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 3
