THE EXTRAORDINARY CESAR CHAVEZ

...Although the Federal money in no way would have been used to support the strike, Chavez felt that critics would assume so...

...The man who helps us now is a man that we can help later on when the strike in Delano has been won...

...The picket lines still form every day...

...They openly proclaim their lack of trust in fellow growers...

...It would seem worthwhile to try to take his measure...

...Among other problems and challenges, there is a touchy, delicate situation which at this time is rarely discussed: the fact that there are two unions, NFWA and AWOC...

...The beginning of this growth might well be dated from the television showing of the late Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame...

...The battle that the growers fought was a ruthless one against both the forces of nature and the devices of men...

...There is no doubt either but that the farm labor movement has benefited from the civil rights movement...

...Another aspect of that pilgrimage makes clear the soundness of Chavez' longer range plans...

...Though the great majority of the AWOC and NFWA members are Roman Catholics, as indeed are most of the growers, one "outside" priest, Father William King from Oklahoma, was moved after visiting the area to comment: "Except for generalizations, the diocese has done nothing...

...Said one NFWA member: "He has come up out of poverty because we needed him...

...The workers are demanding that at long last they receive what most other American workers already have: a minimum wage, elimination of child labor, unemployment insurance, and, above all, legal protection of their right to organize and to bargain collectively with the employers as equals...

...What does that future hold...

...But eventually he realized that he was not effectively reaching the poorest and most disadvantaged of the Mexican-Americans, the seasonal farm workers, who were in the greatest need of help...

...They went on strike when the area growers refused to match the wages being paid for the same work in nearby California valleys...

...He is a short, muscularly built, thirty-nine-year-old American of Mexican background...

...But it is not likely to change the man himself...

...Chavez does not seek personal recognition, and praise only embarrasses him...

...In this effort Chavez had considerable success...

...So strong and open, in fact, has been church support for the strikers that one of the growers' chief spokesmen, Martin Zan-inovich, warned: "Church leaders had better start looking for other financial means to carry .out these radical theories they are attempting to force on us...

...It is trying to pretend that there is no strike...

...Though they could not have won this battle without the help of a Federally-subsidized water supply, they take fierce pride in having made the desert produce crops in rich abundance: tomatoes, melons, grapes, and a wide variety of other fruits and vegetables...

...A little inconvenience now means much more support later on...

...The strikers have reason to hope, however, that they will not have to hold out that long...

...His decisions are never given as orders...

...As a young man, while working in Delano, he met and married a strong-souled Mexican-American girl who shared his growing conviction that farm workers need not and should not be victims of injustice...

...The telephone is constantly jangling and a radio-telephone squawks now and then...

...But once migrants began to settle permanently in a community as they have in Delano and elsewhere and to commute seasonally to jobs within a feasible radius, it became possible to begin organizing...

...He travels the country widely, and his account of Cesar Chavez and the Delano strike is based on personal, on-the-scene observation...

...With Father McDonnell's encouragement, Chavez accepted a job as organizer for the Saul Alinksy-inspired Community Service Organization...

...They have been ruthless too in dealing with their labor force...

...Certainly the needs of the agricultural workers in Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Alabama, and Florida are as great and urgent as those in California...

...That means that, like the battle itself, they, too, have been ruthless, even in their dealings with other men...

...Schenley Industries, second-largest Delano grower, whose public image if not also its sales charts had been hurt by a nationwide NFWA-sponsored boycott of its products, had suddenly agreed to recognize the National Farm Workers Association and to bargain collectively with the union as the legitimate representative of the workers...

...FATHER JAMES L. VIZZARD, S.J...

...So speaks the man who is determined to lead his people out of bondage, the leader who provides the greatest hope of our generation that the isolated and exploited farm worker will be brought into the mainstream of American life...

...Asking, "Don't you think it would be good to . . .?" or "Shouldn't we . . .?", he gets consent and action without commanding...

...For one thing, the time is right...

...It is not known if Chavez shares the vision which others see for him...

...In a message explaining the purpose and spirit of this effort, Chavez wrote: ". . . In every religious-oriented culture 'the pilgrimage' has had a place, a trip made with sacrifice and hardship as an expression of penance and of commitment . . . "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...

...So, a week after the AWOC went out, the 2,500 NFWA members joined them...

...His family was constantly on the move, exceedingly poor, easily exploited by employers and labor contractors, with none of the benefits of the agricultural wealth they helped to produce...

...Others have been suggesting that Chavez may well turn out to be the Martin Luther King of the Mexican-Americans...

...The reason why Chavez has been able to make headway ultimately lies in his intimate understanding of his own people and of California's farm industry...

...Please thank the members of your group for their kind offer...

...But that is too early and too superficial a reading of the situation...

...Before our cause was known, it was over...

...It is not an ordinary type of leader who can evoke that kind of commitment...

...A few days later this breakthrough was reinforced by a similar offer from two wineries controlled by Roman Catholic organizations outside the area of the strike...

...Said Chavez: "As much of the support as possible must come from people along the pilgrimage route...

...The pilgrims carried no food or bedding...

...At the moment, they see all of their future bound up in the success of the NFWA's strike against the Delano grape growers...

...The strike against more than thirty grape ranches spread over more than 400 square miles requires constant and quick communications—shifts of picket lines, warnings of threatening violence, pickets being arrested on trumped-up charges...

...In them you see a strange combination of gentleness and strength, sadness and humor...

...Like the vast majority of the Association's members, he comes out of a migrant labor family which followed the crops in the Southwestern states...

...His voice is soft, his speech articulate...

...It is not at all coincidence that the NFWA began to achieve a leadership role only short months after Congress had brought the bracero program to an end...

...If the truth about Chavez is anything remotely like this, he obviously is a man to be reckoned with...

...Before that film shocked a nation which had just finished a bountiful Thanksgiving dinner, there had been only a relative handful of "professionals" who were concerned with, and involved in, migratory labor problems...

...He knows, however, that the growers, particularly the largest of them, the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation whose yearly sales run into hundreds of millions of dollars (and whose S&W Fine Foods brand products are now under boycott), are tough and resourceful...

...While disappointed, of course, at the necessity of postponing the projects, he stated: "Our assault on poverty has already been launched...

...still, the growers got their grapes picked and their vines pruned (though the quality of the work and the crop suffered considerably...

...The greatest labor leader to come along in a generation...

...Besides, he realized that he could not devote sufficient time and energy to administering the grant while he was deeply involved in leading the strike...

...Although living in the same community and often working side-by-side in the fields, the Filipino and Mexican-American communities in Delano never had much in common...

...The important thing is, it works...

...Chavez, of course, is delighted with this historic development and has hope that other growers will soon conform...

...Clad though he always is in working clothes—his plaid shirt is almost a uniform—his quiet dignity is impressive...

...The strike is still on...

...The strike was started early in September 1965, not by the NFWA but by the AFL-CIO-sponsored Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee...

...But "Harvest of Shame" exposed to millions of decent people the miserable, inhuman conditions under which farm workers live and work...

...The present NFWA headquarters in Delano is a small, run-down, crowded, former grocery store on the edge of town right across the road from vineyards which have been struck now for more than eight months...

...The speaker was a young MexicanrAmerican, one of the small band of striking grape pickers who, almost three weeks earlier, had set out on a 250-mile "pilgrimage of penance and prayer" from Delano to the state's capitol...

...Ever since the Civil War days when they were denied the use of slaves, they have incessantly reached out to find and exploit disadvantaged workers of this and other nations...

...This time we can win...

...He is one with his people and proud of it...

...In fact, just before the strike broke out in Delano last September, the NFWA had won a $286,000 grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity for some of these projects...

...Foot-weary though he was after twenty days on the road, he said with a kind of joyous conviction: "If we get to Sacramento and Cesar says we go on to Washington—I say, okay, I go to Washington...

...They saw the time had come when they had to stake a common claim on a better way of life...

...Strangely enough—or perhaps it was to be expected—the churches closer to home have not been sympathetic to the strike...

...Migrant farm families usually earn less than $2,000 a year...

...The emergence of Chavez and the NFWA in Delano gave a sharp focus to that crusade, and the farm workers there found that they were not alone...

...I believe that there is an ever-present danger that we will lose our humility, then our loyalty to performing menial tasks, then our tie to the small people, and then our cause...

...Although Zaninovich called the pilgrimage "a parade that is nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of the news media," all less-biased observers note that it was precisely its deeply religious character which made it so noteworthy and effective...

...If Chavez succeeds, labor will be more costly but, even more important, the growers will have lost their unilateral power to control others' lives by arbitrary decision...

...No such timidity, however, has characterized the concern and commitment of the churches elsewhere...

...Finally, Chavez himself has repeatedly emphasized that without the backing of the churches the Delano effort would have little chance to succeed...

...The industry has a long history of busted deals, labor pirating, and cutthroat competition...

...Those who survived and won the victory did so because they were the fittest and toughest...

...That you can see every day...

...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...

...On Chavez' initiative, however, the grant was suspended for the duration of the strike...

...When these six hundred AWOC members walked off the job they were ejected from the company barracks where some of them had lived for as long as twenty years...

...From the beginning, the NFWA has had the friendly and helpful assistance of the Migrant Ministry of the California Councils of Churches...

...This time we will win...

...When you meet him, however, you gradually become aware that some of the things said about him, which sound so extravagant and which cause him so much embarrassment, might well be true...

...Victory there, if and when it comes, will certainly enhance Chavez' already considerable stature...

...It was his insight, for instance, that contributed to the NFWA's and AWOC's pledge of non-violence which, as the civil rights movement has demonstrated, and as Gandhi had shown earlier in India, is not only a sound and admirable posture, but also an effective instrument of justice...

...Some have suggested that this local timidity or opposition can be connected with the fiscal needs of the churches...

...We, as a group, can only bring honor by continuing to fight here in Delano and by continuing to remain non-violent in our struggle...

...Precisely as farm workers they have been deliberately excluded from practically every piece of social and welfare legislation, either state or Federal, passed in the last thirty or forty years...

...Chavez is the founder and general director of the National Farm Workers Association based in Delano, California...

...Farm workers, whether Negro or Mexican-American, as most of them are, have been deprived of equal rights not just on the basis of race but also on the basis of occupation...

...It was Chavez too who had the inspiration to characterize the trip from Delano to Sacramento not as a march of protest but rather as a pilgrimage of penance and prayer...

...Few would quarrel with the statement that it is the most important and exciting thing going on now in California...

...One or the other will have to bow out of the picture...

...In turning down a national award for which he was chosen, he wrote: "What has happened in Delano during the past year is not the work of any one man and I do not believe it would be fitting to honor any one...

...It was not difficult to identify events in Delano with those in Selma, Alabama...

...His brown, burnished skin and black hair make clear his Mexican origin...

...They are beginning to speak up with an organized voice and organized power...

...While their Lenten pilgrimage from Delano to the state capitol at Sacramento was dramatizing their cause—on the last day, Easter Sunday, they were joined by 10,000 sympathizers and allies—a major breakthrough was announced...

...As proof, Chavez points to the hundreds of new NFWA members signed up during and since the pilgrimage...

...Zaninovich even suggested that elections be held in the churches "to determine if the philosophy church leaders are expounding today is representative of the attitudes of their flocks...

...But his people have granted him an admiration and a leadership that are extraordinary...

...Moreover, the Ministerial Association of Delano, mostly Protestant but including also the local Catholic priests, has openly condemned the strike...

...Over the generations they have brought in hordes of Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Arabs, and Okies and Arkies in the Dust Bowl days—and Mexicans, always Mexicans, either U. S. citizens or aliens from across the poverty-stricken border...

...When we are honored or acclaimed, I believe that we risk all this...

...So, Chavez is looking to the future, beyond the day when the strike will be won...

...If he stays with the NFWA and devotes his total energy to the community development aspects of the association, that slow and complex movement, important though it is, will limit his influence and effectiveness to one area or a small group of communities...

...It would probably be an impossible task without the all-out support of organized labor...

...The organization and movement which Chavez heads do not constitute the first effort on the part of farm workers to achieve justice and decency in their work and in their lives...

...They, too, were tired of being pushed around and treated as second-class citizens...

...As they moved on from town to town, they left behind a committed core of friends and future allies...

...In the past," says Chavez, "we were never able to keep a strike going long enough to win outside support...

...Preferring to build soundly rather than quickly, and thinking of the NFWA as something more than just a labor union, Chavez spent three years signing up more than 2,000 Mexican-American families as dues-paying members, developing what is now a thriving credit union, beginning the publication of their own monthly El Malcriado (The Disadvantaged), starting a burial insurance program...

...He is among the greats...

...He acquainted them with Catholic teachings on the rights and dignity of workers and the need for organization...

...The growers who are struck are not the kind to take this type of challenge lying down...

...That vision encompasses a truly national farm workers' association with Chavez the one man now on the scene who could bring this about...

...has long been the director of the Washington, D.C...

...They were fed and put up each night by local sympathizers...

...He listens patiently and intently...

...His intermittent schooling ended with the seventh grade, but over the years his searching mind and love for books have made him knowledgeable and articulate on a wide range of subjects...

...All through the harvesting and pruning seasons of last fall and winter they advertised and sent recruiting teams throughout California, to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and even deep into Mexico to round up strikebreakers to supplement those they were able to find in the Delano area...

...Chavez, however, had practically grown up in the fields and, in addition, had years of experience in organizing Mexican-Americans in California's communities...

...Of key importance, too, has been the growth of a nation-wide network of knowledgeable and concerned allies...

...Perhaps the most important Catholic in California" is how he was recently described by Monsignor William Quinn of the Bishops' Committee for the Spanish Speaking...

...The only way to fight farm labor poverty is with a union contract...

...A recent letter of his makes that clear and also provides a remarkable insight into the kind of man he is...

...And it works...

...There, while both of them and their older children worked intermittently as grape pickers and prun-ers, he began in 1962 to lay the foundations for the National Farm Workers Association...

...To be sure, his appearance is ordinary enough...

...This fledgling union is made up in Delano mostly of aging, Filipino bachelors whose single status is a monument to the inhumanity of our previous immigration laws which allowed men but not women to come in from the Philippines...

...Although they are now working together in the closest harmony, no one really expects that in the long run there can be two potentially competing unions...

...This time it is different...

...They could not have slaves but they created their own cruel adaptation of slavery...

...None of these previous efforts has ever succeeded...

...But Cesar Chavez, to whom the young worker was referring, is no ordinary kind of man...

...Whether or not this development takes place, it would seem that Chavez himself will have to face a difficult personal decision...

...Such a nation-wide organizing effort would be enormously difficult even if Congress does soon bring farm workers under the protection of the National Labor Relations Act...

...After having survived, somehow, for the first months of the strike on their own meager resources, they are now getting substantial (if still inadequate) financial support from these allies...

...If necessary, the unions are ready, and feel themselves able, to continue the strike throughout the harvesting and pruning seasons late this year...

...Champions of reform, such as Senator Harrison Williams Jr...

...Counter-recruiters"—NFWA and AWOC truth squads —have gone everywhere in the Southwest and into Mexico to publicize the strike and to discourage workers from taking Delano jobs as strikebreakers...

...he is the chief spokesman on Capitol Hill for his church on farm and farm labor matters...

...All along the route are people, poor people, who want to help us...

...Since the strike has dramatized the workers' struggle for justice, churches and synagogues throughout the country and national church leaders have given the struggle their unstinted moral and even financial support...

...of New Jersey, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther, and others suddenly found themselves with countless allies in their crusade for justice for agricultural workers...

...In the meantime it is vital for Chavez and the NFWA that the struggle at Delano be won...

...So, Chavez quit the CSO, turned down a $21,000 Peace Corps job offer, and settled in his wife's hometown of Delano...

...NFWA staff members, many of them unpaid volunteers, move in and out to confer hurriedly, get new directions, work on a new press release...

...That came from one of the top men of the AFL-CIO...

...A significant turning point in Chavez' life took place when he met a scholarly, zealous, young priest from San Jose, California, Father Donald McDonnell...

...They are an independent breed of men who have repeatedly risked everything in a relentless struggle to force these hot, thirsty lands into productivity...

...Father McDonnell not only understood the Chavez' frustrated passion for justice but showed them how it might be achieved...

...As his weary marchers passed through the dozens of small towns along the way, they elicited support from local residents...

...So, we have to talk about the strike...

...With remarkable tenacity, the NFWA and AWOC members have held out despite being evicted from their homes for non-payment of rent, having their cars repossessed, and just barely existing on donated food...

...In him and in the National Farm Workers Association they have entrusted their hopes and their ambitions...

...That strike is still going on today, ten months later...

...NFWA and AWOC pickets persuaded many of the strikebreakers out of the fields...

...In the middle of this amiable confusion, Chavez seems unflappable...

...Future plans envisioned a cooperative grocery store, a cooperative garage and service station (for farm workers, their cars are as essential as their hands), legal and medical aid, and a wide range of other services of which, until now, poverty has deprived them...

...The most likely outcome is that the strictly union activities of the NFWA will be merged with those of AWOC, the AFL-CIO affiliate with its largely Filipino membership...

...Now the victims of this exploitation are beginning to demand their emancipation...

...But the NFWA immediately recognized that the AWOC cause was also their cause...

...Why does Chavez seem to be succeeding where the others have failed...

...No one yet has figured out how to organize into a coherent union those farm workers whose lives are essentially migratory...

...That explains why SNCC and CORE and other civil rights groups and leaders have backed Chavez with volunteer staff workers, publicity, and funds...

...Under that program, so long as growers had been able to call in thousands of Mexican citizens to harvest the crops or to break a strike, there was little chance that domestic workers could organize effectively to represent and defend their own interests...

...What worked there would not work equally well in the fields...

...They struck and set up picket lines, as best they could, at the entrance gates of some thirty-two ranches, including the giants of the area, the Di-Giorgio Fruit Corporation with 4,500 acres, and Schenley Industries, with only a little fewer...

...Chavez' early years were typical of those of the countless thousands of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest...

...It would seem to some that in this regard at least the strike has been a failure...

...His eyes capture your attention...

...From the very beginning, the strikers took and, despite constant and grievous provocations, have kept a pledge of non-violence...

...We're getting help...

...The danger among our farm workers, indeed among anyone who becomes suddenly press-worthy, is that we lose sight of ourselves and of our real place in society...

...Another factor of great importance is that the Delano workers, although seasonal, are now also residential...

...That kind of life does not allow for much formal education...

...For almost a decade he and his wife and their growing family (they now have eight children) traveled throughout California wherever Mexican-Americans had begun to settle, talking with them, one-by-one or in small groups, about how the CSO, their organization, would give them the strength of unity...

...They are beginning to threaten an end to poverty and discrimination...

...office of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference...

...Previous efforts, while undertaken with great good will and considerable expense, were usually led by those whose organizing experience had been limited to urban industries...