http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20091112_marc_cooper_on_the_fate_of_cesar_chavezs_dream/
Nov 13, 2009
By Marc Cooper
The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar
Chavez's Farm Worker Movement
By Miriam Pawel
Bloomsbury Press, 384 pages
In the midst of a searing heat wave in the summer of 2005, three
Mexican-born California farmworkers succumbed to the relentless sun
within a few weeks of each other. Outraged local community groups,
some with roots in but no longer affiliated with the legendary United
Farm Workers union, organized a protest march and rally in the gritty
town of Arvin, in California's Central Valley.
At the last minute, a delegation from the UFW more or less
commandeered the event from the original organizers. I was there
reporting on the conditions in California's fields (for a piece that
would be published few weeks later in the L.A. Weekly) when I saw the
UFW arrive. Accompanied by a caravan of shiny vans, with a high-tech
mobile broadcast unit along from one of the union-run radio stations,
UFW members in trademark red-and-black T-shirts disembarked from a
couple of buses and joined the crowd assembled in a church patio.
The contrast couldn't have been more stark. The farmworkers were
dusty and rail-thin and mostly young men dressed in jeans and work
shirts. Many, if not most, were fairly recent border-hoppers from the
impoverished Mexican state of Oaxaca. And most of them were Mixtec
Indians who spoke choppy Spanish. The UFW members, by contrast, were
older, clearly middle-class, many of them Chicanos, many of them
college-educated, thick around the middle and wearing neatly pressed chinos.
As one of their leaders used a bullhorn to shout "Viva La Causa! Viva
Cesar Chavez!" many of the heat-weary farmworkers only politely
clapped or just stood unmoved.
Among those who have worked as California farmworker advocates, or
who have done any reporting among such advocates over the last decade
or so, there's a well-known and grim joke: Ask almost any farmworker
today just who is Cesar Chavez and the answer is that he's a great
boxerJulio Cesar Chavez, that is.
If one needed any proof of the waning influence of Chavez's UFW, he
or she would have to look no further than a momentous union election
held shortly after this rally at the giant Giumarra vineyards. Even
though the union had had one of its first contracts with the massive
grower and was riding the crest of anger over the recent heat-related
deaths (so dire that even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
imposed an emergency order to give some relief to fieldworkers), the
UFW was soundly defeated in a slap-dash drive to reunionize the
Giumarra workers.
Again, this was hardly a surprise to those few lawyers, advocates and
organizers still paying attention to California's campesinos. By
2005, the UFW held no contracts with any Central California table
grape growers. Indeed, more than 40 years after its founding, only
about 1 percentor 5,000of the state's farmworkers were organized by
the UFW. The union reaped revenues of $20 million to $30 million a
year by cashing in on the iconic stature of its founder, who died in
1993. And it controlled a $150 million network of affiliated
foundations, charities, service groups, construction firms and
housing corporations, managed mostly by Cesar Chavez's offspring and
relatives. But it simply did not organize farmworkers. It was a
family business. Not a union.
In the spring following that overheated summer of 2005, then-Los
Angeles Times reporter Miriam Pawel set off a ruckus by writing a
deeply researched multipart series detailing this tragic decline of
the UFW and the rampant Chavez family nepotism that was capitalizing
on the name of the union's founder while ignoring the plight of its
supposed constituents.
Some Latino and leftist groups went apoplectic over the public
critique of the Chavez legacy. The union reacted furiously, picketing
the Times, handing ultimatums to its then-editor and ultimately
issuing a 62-page letter from one of its lawyers threatening to sue
Pawel and the Times unless they retracted the story. And, not
coincidentally, the L.A. Weekly and this author was served with a
similar threat, in a 20-page demand, over a similar piece I had
written before Pawel's series.
The union enlisted Democratic Party allies including Rep. Howard
Berman and Clinton crony Mickey Kantor to pressure reporters and even
bloggers who had any part in the spate of public criticism of the
UFW. (In February of 2006 Truthdig summarized 100 pages of pushback
spin from the UFW.)
The Los Angeles Times made a few very minor corrections, but no
retractions were made and Pawel's story stood basically unscathed.
Nor were any lawsuits ever filed. What had been written about the
UFW, as uncomfortable as it might be, was true. And the union knew
it. In the end, it was the heavy-handed UFW press relations chief who
had to quietly resign.
Pawel, drawing on and greatly expanding the research she did for the
L.A. Times series, has come back for a second dipping with her
engrossing and just as exquisitely assembled book "The Union of Their
Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker
Movement." Her tack this time is quite different. Instead of a dry,
almost legalistic indictment of the failings of the UFW, her approach
now feels like the script of the great Costa-Gavras film "The
Confession," or like Arthur Koestler's classic anti-Stalinist memoir
"Darkness at Noon."
Chronicling the lives of eight of Cesar Chavez's closest
alliesincluding crack organizer Eliseo Medina, UFW legal eagle Jerry
Cohen and Chavez's closest spiritual aide, Chris HartmirePawel takes
us painfully deep into their personal agonies and heartbreak. Like
the loyal Czech communist Arthur London in "The Confession," all
eight gave their youth if not their very souls to a deeply passionate
and idealistic cause only to eventually find themselves victims of
some sort of trumped-up purge in which they are forced to put
allegiance to the leader over all moral and ethical concerns. Imagine
idealistic young lawyer Ellen Eggers, who joins the UFW to fight the
bosses only to find herself forced to defend the union bureaucracy
against lawsuits filed by unjustly purged UFW field reps. Her payback
for doing Chavez's legal work is to eventually see herself ostracized
and ignored by the union founder.
Pawel is no anti-union right-winger. She openly expresses her awe for
the bedazzling talent, commitment and magical moral charisma that
allowed Cesar Chavez to build the unthinkable dream of a union of
California's most oppressed and forgotten workers. From the first
Delano strike in 1965, working with the handful of supporters whom
Pawel chronicles, Chavez chalks up a miraculous decade. Not only does
he wind up on the cover of Time, but farmworkers claim a noble space
in American history.
The real problems begin, however, when in the mid-1970s then (and
most likely future) Gov. Jerry Brown allies with the UFW and ushers
into life the most advanced farm labor legislation and regulatory
agency in Americathe Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
Just when the decks are cleared for Chavez to push full steam ahead
in organizing his union on an unprecedented even playing field, he
balks. Moreover, he seems to sink into a paranoid depression and
become prone to unpredictable and unprovoked tirades and lashing out
at the closest of friends, suddenly branded as traitors.
Pawel can't answer the central enigma surrounding Chavezhis true
state of mind and motivation. No one can. Whether he was, as one aide
put it, "a little crazy," or whether he was more a utopian visionary
or a Christian ascetic, or a simple megalomaniac, he told everybody
around him he was definitely not interested in building one more
"business union." And that's the theme Pawel repeatedly circles back
to. Every time history offered him a choice between building a
vigorous union or dreaming up a more amorphous social movement,
Chavez always chose the latter. At least verbally.
He saw virtue and redemption in a life of poverty and sacrifice and
was notorious as a penny-pinching micro-manager averse to delegating
any real power. His most talented organizer, Eliseo Medina, who broke
his piggy bank to join the union as a teenager only to be
ignominiously pushed out 12 years later, argued that workers wanted
to join a union to have a better life with less sacrifice, not more.
(Medina's argument was borne out by history. He went on to build a
still-thriving career inside the country's largest unionthe
SEIUprecisely by organizing tens of thousands of service workers and
ushering them into the middle class.)
But Chavez wouldn't budge from his grandiose and rather inarticulate
vision of building something bigger. Worse, by 1977 he started
dabbling in the Synanon cult and imported its vicious and abusive
role-playing "Game" into union management, and he deployed it
ruthlessly to tear down those around him.
Dissidents, opponents and loyalists alike were chewed up in a series
of purges led by Chavez. His brilliant legal team, instrumental in
building the union, was forcefully dismantled because its members
complained they could no longer support their families on a salary of
$150 a week and they refused to move to Chavez's bunkered and
isolated headquarters in the barren California mountains. Chavez
forced other union staff members to get by on a wage of $5 a day and
resisted all demands to professionalize the union.
As the years passed, and the union waned (its last real organizing
effort before Chavez's death in 1993 had taken place 14 years
previously), it morphed into primarily a direct mail outfit,
soliciting millions of dollars for a series of boycotts no one could
keep track of. Those campaigns were warmly embraced by urban liberals
but did little if anything to improve working conditions in the
field. Meanwhile, Chavez was increasingly isolated in his remote La
Paz compound30 miles east of Bakersfieldwhile he dreamed of
building an ascetic, pious, collective community.
Shortly after Chavez died, leftist author Frank Bardacke wrote in The
Nation that "at the time of Cesar Chavez' death, the U.F.W. was not
primarily a farmworker organization. It was a fundraising operation
run out of a deserted tuberculosis sanitarium in the Tehachapi
Mountains, far from the fields of famous Delano, staffed by members
of Cesar's extended family and using as its political capital Cesar's
legend and the warm memories of millions of aging boycotters."
Pawel fully if not reverently acknowledges the immeasurable
contribution the early UFW and Chavez made to the creation of a
broader Latino rights movement. Even more important, the UFW spawned
an enormously talented and committed corps of unionists and activists
who, after being forced out from La Union, went on to enrich the rest
of the labor movement.
As to the UFW, neither its yin nor yang ever fully materialized. It
failed to grow either into a mature union or a broader social
movement of poor people, as Chavez advocated. Nor did it ever build
any of those self-sustaining communities Chavez extolledexcept for
becoming essentially a Chavez family business which tightly controls
the multimillion-dollar network of UFW-affiliated groups and
Democratic Party lobbies.
The plight of the farmworkers themselves, meanwhile, remains pretty
much unchanged, with barely any significant UFW presence in the
fields. As Pawel notes, the workers still earn barely the minimum
wage, lack health care and sometimes find themselves sleeping in cars
or tents or under trees.
There is one sad, ironic coda to this tale. Chavez's progeny did
finally scrap his limiting ethos of hair-shirt austerity. In the
decade after his death, the salaries they granted themselves and
other top managers of the UFW shell groups rose 600 percent. And more
since then.
--
Los Angeles-based writer and author Marc Cooper is director of
Annenberg Digital News at the Annenberg School for Communication &
Journalism at the University of Southern California.
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