Cesar Chavez

• 1. Introduction

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  Cesar Chavez was born Cesario Estrada Chavez on the 31st of March 1927 and died on the 23rd of April 1993. Many Mexican Americans came to speak of him as a "folk saint." California farm owners saw something else entirely, a communist subversive. The same man earned both reputations by organizing the people who worked the state's fields.

  He co-founded the union that became the United Farm Workers. His campaigns borrowed from Catholic processions, Masses and fasts, and from the example of the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. The Federal Bureau of Investigation watched him anyway.

  This documentary asks how a man who left school after junior high built a national movement from a handful of farm towns. It asks why a leader so celebrated in the late 1960s later saw so much of his support drift away. And it asks what a life this contradictory leaves behind. The answers begin with a family farm in the Sonora Desert.

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• 2. Yuma to San Jose

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  In 1898, a Mexican named Cesario Chavez crossed into Texas. He went on to build a successful wood haulage business near Yuma, Arizona. In 1906 he bought a farm in the North Gila Valley of the Sonora Desert. His wife Dorotea and eight children had come with him from Mexico. The youngest, Librado, became the father of Cesar.

  Librado married Juana Estrada Chavez in the early 1920s. She had been born in Ascensión, Chihuahua, and crossed into the United States as a baby with her mother. Their first child, Rita, arrived in August 1925, and Cesar followed nearly two years later. Three more children came after him, two sisters named Rita and Vicki and two brothers named Richard and Librado, counting Rita among the sisters.

  In November 1925, Librado and Juana bought a group of buildings that held a pool hall, a store and living quarters. Debt soon forced them to sell. By April 1929 the family was living in the galera, a storeroom at the house of Librado's parents, which now belonged to the widowed Dorotea.

  The biographer Miriam Pawel described the household as "a typical extended Mexican family" that was "not well-off, but they were comfortable, well-clothed, and never hungry." The family spoke Spanish, and Dorotea largely directed Cesar's Catholic instruction. His mother Juana practiced folk Catholicism as a devotee of Santa Eduviges. Relatives nicknamed him "Manzi," after his fondness for manzanilla tea. He played handball and listened to boxing matches on the radio.

  In 1933, Cesar began attending Laguna Dam School, where speaking Spanish was forbidden. Teachers expected him to start using the name Cesar. Dorotea died in July 1937. The Yuma County government then auctioned her farmstead to cover back taxes. Librado used delaying tactics, but the house and land were sold in 1939. Cesar regarded the sale as an injustice against his family, with banks, lawyers and the Anglo-American power structure as the villains. His Catholic faith pushed him toward a belief that poor people were a source of moral goodness in society.

  Like many migrants during the Great Depression, the Chavez family went to California. They picked avocados in Oxnard and peas in Pescadero before reaching San Jose, where they first lived in a garage in the city's poor Mexican district. They moved often, and Cesar joined the family in the fields on weekends and holidays. He changed schools many times and stayed longest at Miguel Hidalgo Junior School. His grades were average, though he excelled at mathematics. Classmates mocked his poverty, and many businesses refused to serve non-white customers. He finished junior high in June 1942 and became a full-time farm laborer.

  In 1944, Chavez enlisted in the US Navy and trained at Naval Training Center San Diego. He reached the base on Saipan in July, moved to Guam six months later and was promoted to seaman first class. He left the service in San Francisco with an honorable discharge in 1946, then went to Delano, where his family had settled.

  In 1947, he joined the National Farm Labor Union and picketed cotton fields in Corcoran. That year the union called a strike against the DiGiorgio grape fields. Strikers formed caravans and marched around the property, urging workers inside to join them. Chavez led one of those caravans.

  He married Helen Fabela in Reno, Nevada, in October 1948, in a double ceremony shared with his sister Rita and her fiancé. The couple settled in the Sal Si Puedes neighborhood of San Jose. Fernando was born there in February 1949 and Sylvia in February 1950. Linda arrived in January 1951, shortly after a move to Crescent City, where Chavez worked in the lumber industry.

  At the General Box Company in San Jose, Chavez befriended two social justice activists, Fred Ross and Father Donald McDonnell. Both were European American, and both worked mainly within the Mexican American community. Ross was building a chapter of the Community Service Organization, and Chavez helped him found it in San Jose and join voter registration drives. Members soon elected Chavez vice president of the chapter.

  McDonnell lent him books, and Chavez developed a love of reading. Among them were biographies of Francis of Assisi, of the labor organizers John L. Lewis and Eugene V. Debs, and of Gandhi, who introduced him to nonviolent protest. Chavez also helped McDonnell build Our Lady of Guadalupe, the first purpose-built church in Sal Si Puedes, which opened in December 1953. In that same late autumn, the General Box Company laid him off.

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• 3. The Organizer's Apprenticeship

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  Fred Ross found funds in late 1953 so that the Community Service Organization, known as the CSO, could pay Chavez to set up new chapters. His route ran through Decoto, Salinas, Fresno, Brawley, San Bernardino, Madera and Bakersfield. Chapters tended to collapse once Ross or Chavez stopped running them. Saul Alinsky advised joining the more than twenty chapters into one self-sustaining national organization.

  In late 1955, Chavez returned to San Jose to rebuild the chapter there until it could support a full-time organizer. He opened a rummage store, ran a three-day carnival and sold Christmas trees, though he often lost money. In early 1957 he moved on to Brawley. The constant moving uprooted his family. He saw little of his wife and children and missed the birth of his sixth child.

  By 1957, Chavez was growing disillusioned with the CSO. He thought middle-class members were steering its priorities and money in directions he disliked. He objected, for example, to holding the 1957 convention at the Hacienda Hotel, whose prices he considered too high for poorer members. During the Cold War, amid McCarthyite suspicion that leftist activism fronted for Marxist-Leninist groups, the FBI opened a file on him.

  At Alinsky's urging, the United Packinghouse Workers of America paid the CSO $20,000 to open a branch in Oxnard, and Chavez became its organizer. Local Mexican American laborers told him they were passed over or fired so that employers could hire cheaper Mexican guest workers called braceros, in violation of federal law. Chavez set up the CSO Employment Committee, which ran a registration campaign. Unemployed farm workers signed their names to show they wanted work.

  The committee aimed its criticism at Hector Zamora, director of the Ventura County Farm Labor Association, who controlled most jobs in the area. It used sit-ins, a tactic also used by the civil rights movement in the American South. Some companies replaced braceros with unemployed Americans. Federal officials began investigating bracero complaints properly, and the state farm placement service promised to look for unemployed Americans first.

  In 1959, Chavez moved to Los Angeles as the CSO's national director. He settled in Boyle Heights with his wife and eight children. The finances were so poor that even his own salary was in doubt, and he laid off several organizers. A life insurance scheme for members never materialized. Instead he won money from wealthier donors for specific projects. The California AFL-CIO paid $12,000 for voter registration in six counties with large Mexican populations. The benefactor Katy Peake offered $50,000 over three years to organize California's farm workers. The CSO also helped win an extension of the state pension to non-citizens who were permanent residents. Chavez resigned at the ninth annual CSO convention in March 1962.

  In April 1962, Chavez moved his family to Delano and rented a house on Kensington Street. He wanted a union for farm workers but told people he was only conducting a census of their needs. He called his project a "movement" rather than a trade union. His wife helped, and so did Dolores Huerta, whom Pawel called his "indispensable, lifelong ally." The Reverend Jim Drake and the California Migrant Ministry also backed him. Chavez, a Catholic, was at first wary of Protestant preachers but came to see them as key allies.

  On the 30th of September 1962, the National Farm Workers Association was formalized at a convention in Fresno, and delegates chose Chavez as general director. Members agreed to pay monthly dues of $3.50 once a life insurance policy was running. The group took the motto "viva la causa" and a flag showing a black eagle on a red and white background. In January 1963, Chavez was elected president, with Huerta, Julio Hernandez and Gilbert Padilla as vice presidents. He kept real control with the staff he led, and at the second convention in Delano the presidency was scrapped.

  The association began collecting dues and launched an insurance policy. Later in 1963 it opened a credit union with a state charter, after the federal government refused one. A volunteer named Bill Esher edited the group's newspaper, El Malcriado, whose print run rose from 1,000 to 3,000 copies. In September 1964, the association moved from Chavez's house to an abandoned Pentecostal church on Albany Street in West Delano. Its income and spending more than doubled in its second full year.

  In April 1965, rose grafters asked the association for help with a strike over working conditions. It targeted two companies, Mount Arbor and Conklin. Workers struck on the 3rd of May, and after four days the growers agreed to raise wages. Chavez's name began to circulate among leftist activists across California. Within months, a much larger fight would open in the same town.

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• 4. The Delano Grape Strike

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  In September 1965, Filipino American farm workers organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, or AWOC, began a strike in Delano for higher wages. Chavez and his largely Mexican American supporters voted to join them. The strike covered more than 400 square miles. Chavez split the pickets into four quadrants, each served by a mobile crew under a captain. He insisted that strikers never answer provocation with violence.

  Growers tried to provoke and threaten the strikers. Pickets also appeared outside the homes of strikebreakers, which split families and ended friendships. Police photographed protesters and arrested several. In October, Chavez spoke in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to raise money for those arrested and collected over $1,000. Many growers called him a communist, and the FBI began investigating him and his association.

  In December 1965, United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther marched with Chavez through Delano. It was the first time the strike drew national media attention. Reuther pledged $5,000 a month from the union, to be shared between AWOC and Chavez's association. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, also became an important ally.

  The civil rights movement's success with boycotts persuaded Chavez to try one himself. His first target, in December 1965, was the Schenley liquor company, which owned one of the area's smaller vineyards. Pickets appeared in other cities where Schenley's products were delivered for sale.

  In March 1966, a Senate subcommittee on migratory labor held three hearings in California. Senator Robert F. Kennedy attended the third, in Delano, and toured a labor camp with Chavez.

  By then the picket lines were thinning. Hundreds of pickers had struck at first, but some had gone back to work, found other jobs or left Delano. To keep the pickets going, Chavez invited left-wing activists from elsewhere, especially university students from the San Francisco Bay Area. Coverage in the SNCC newspaper The Movement and the Marxist paper People's World helped recruitment. By late fall 1966, a protest camp in Delano had its own medical clinic and children's nursery. Luis Valdez's El Teatro Campesino performed skits with political messages. Tension grew between the striking farm workers and the student radicals.

  Schenley's lawyer, Sidney Korshak, approached Chavez in 1966, and the two agreed to open contract talks within 60 days. Chavez ended the Schenley boycott and turned to the DiGiorgio Corporation, a major Delano landowner. DiGiorgio called an election among its vineyard workers, hoping to weaken Chavez's group. The conservative Teamsters union competed in it. After DiGiorgio changed the terms in the Teamsters' favor, Chavez pulled his association off the ballot and urged supporters to abstain.

  Nearly half of eligible workers abstained in June 1966, and the Teamsters won. Chavez appealed to Governor Pat Brown, who wanted the endorsement of the Mexican American Political Association. Brown declared the election invalid and ordered a rerun in August, supervised by the American Arbitration Association. On the 1st of September, Chavez's union was declared the winner. DiGiorgio then largely halted grape production in Delano.

  Giumarra, the largest grape grower in the San Joaquin Valley, was next. In August 1967, Chavez announced a strike against it, followed by a boycott of its grapes. Around then his association merged with AWOC to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, or UFWOC. Larry Itliong of AWOC became assistant director but soon felt sidelined. UFWOC also became an organizing committee of the AFL-CIO, which made it a formal part of the US labor movement and brought a monthly subsidy. Some left-wing staff distrusted the AFL-CIO because of its anti-communist views.

  Ethnic tension between Filipino and Mexican members persisted. Most new volunteers were white, recruited through left-wing and religious groups or social service internships. LeRoy Chatfield, Marshall Ganz and the lawyer Jerry Cohen joined Chavez's inner circle, and his old friend Fred Ross returned. Antonio Orendain soon stood as the only Mexican migrant among the union's senior ranks.

  In June 1967, Chavez launched the first purge of people he saw as disruptive or disloyal. He said he wanted to remove members of the Communist Party USA and related far-left groups, yet the FBI's report at the time found no evidence of communist infiltration. Esher left because he disapproved. The Teatro had criticized the union's links with the AFL-CIO, and Chavez feared it had become a rival to his standing. When he asked it to disband, it split from the union and toured the United States.

  In May 1968, Chavez appeared on the Today television show and announced a boycott of all California grapes. Supporters across the country picketed stores and disrupted annual meetings of several supermarket chains. The idea was to pressure supermarkets so they would pressure growers. The growers hired a public relations firm and warned stores that other products would face similar boycotts. They also turned to the newly elected governor, Ronald Reagan, who sought the Teamsters' support.

  In July 1969, Chavez's portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Peter Matthiessen and Jacques E. Levy, who had close access to him, both wrote favorable books. Inside the union, personal loyalty to Chavez counted for more and more, and tension with Itliong grew.

  The boycott began to bite in the Coachella area, where the grower Lionel Steinberg signed contracts allowing his grapes to carry a union logo and so escape the boycott. Other Coachella growers called him a traitor but followed. In July 1969, the Delano growers agreed to negotiate. Chavez insisted the talks also cover Delano High School, where several pupils, including his daughter Eloise, had been disciplined for protesting in support of the boycott.

  On the 29th of July 1970, the Delano growers signed contracts with the union at the Forty Acres Hall, in front of the press. The contracts brought wage rises for pickers, a health plan and new safety rules on pesticide use. Pesticides would return as one of Chavez's causes much later in his career.

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• 5. Pilgrimage, Fasts and Kennedy

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  About fifty marchers left Delano in March on a 300-mile walk to the state capitol at Sacramento. Chavez wanted the route to pass through dozens of farmworker communities and draw attention to their cause. He gave the march Catholic meaning. Marchers carried crucifixes and a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and their slogan was "Peregrinación, Penitencia, Revolución," meaning "Pilgrimage, Penitence, Revolution."

  Chavez presented the walk as penance. His feet became painful, and for part of the journey he used a cane. He argued that the image of his suffering would help the movement. At each stop the marchers read aloud a "Plan de Delano" written by Valdez, deliberately echoing the "Plan de Ayala" of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. At Easter, over 8,000 people gathered in front of the state capitol, where Chavez spoke briefly.

  The union bought land known as The Forty Acres for its new headquarters. Chavez hoped it would be a "spiritual" center where members could relax. He designed it with a swimming pool, a chapel, a market and a gas station, plus gardens with outdoor sculptures. He wanted Gandhi quotations in English and Spanish painted inside the main building.

  Meanwhile, Chavez worried that his supporters might turn to violence. Some members destroyed property, which they did not count as breaking the movement's nonviolent creed. His cousin Manuel had tampered with refrigerator units on trains so that grapes shipped from Delano spoiled before arriving. In February 1968, Giumarra won a contempt citation against the union, stating that members had threatened and intimidated its employees and placed roofing nails at the entrances to its ranches.

  That same month, Chavez began a fast. He said it reaffirmed his commitment to peaceful protest and described it as penance. He stayed at Forty Acres, where at that point only a gas station stood. Many union members saw the fast as a stunt. Itliong was annoyed that Chavez had not consulted the board, which considered a motion urging him to cancel the plan. The motion failed.

  Father Mark Day announced a Mass at Forty Acres every night. Crowds of supporters came, and the gas station was decorated as an impromptu shrine. Protestant clergy and Jewish rabbis also spoke at the Masses. After three weeks, Chavez's doctors urged him to stop. He agreed to end the fast at a public event on the 10th of March.

  Chavez invited Robert Kennedy to be the guest of honor. Thousands of observers and the national press watched as the two men shared bread. Not long afterward, Kennedy announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination and asked Chavez to serve as a delegate in the California primary. Through May, Chavez traveled California urging farm workers and registered Democrats to back him. His activism helped Kennedy win the state.

  Chavez was at the victory celebration in Los Angeles on the 5th of June when Kennedy was assassinated. He later served as a pallbearer at the funeral in New York. The killing came two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and union members feared Chavez might also be targeted by his opponents.

  In September 1968, Chavez's back pain worsened and he was hospitalized at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose. He recovered for a time at St Anthony's Seminary in Santa Barbara, then moved into Forty Acres because his home was too crowded. A donation from the United Auto Workers had paid for an office and meeting hall there, and a trailer served as a medical clinic. It was still far from his original vision. He used the image of his physical suffering as a tactic, though some in his inner circle thought the pain was partly psychosomatic.

  In March 1969, the doctor Janet Travell found that fused vertebrae caused the pain. Her exercises and treatments eased it. Between September and December, Chavez crossed the country in a Winnebago, speaking at dozens of fundraisers and rallies for the grape boycott. At a speech in Washington, DC, he spoke out against US involvement in the Vietnam War for the first time, because his son Fernando had been arrested as a conscientious objector.

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• 6. Salinas and La Paz

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  In July 1970, the Grower-Shipper Association of the Salinas Valley renewed its contracts with the Teamsters. Chavez was angry and traveled to Salinas to talk to lettuce cutters, many of whom were unhappy with Teamster representation. In August, thousands of cutters marched to Hartnell College to hear him. He stressed that the Teamsters were run by white people while most of the cutters were not, and the crowd voted to strike. Many joined his union over the following days.

  Chavez chose Interharvest, owned by the United Fruit Company, as the first target. The Teamsters met with him, and they agreed to give up their contracts with the growers' association. The growers then won a temporary restraining order against a strike, and Chavez began another protest fast. During a ten-day truce he reached an agreement with Interharvest but not with the others. The strike against them began on the 24th of August, when cutters started picketing the lettuce fields.

  Lettuce production fell by three quarters, and prices doubled. Courts issued restraining orders against the pickets, and picketers who broke them were fined. The union paid many of the fines and supported strikers in other ways, which proved costly. Chavez decided the pickets could not last and switched to a boycott of Salinas lettuce.

  He picked the Bud Antle company as the first boycott target. Bud Antle won an injunction against the boycott, but Chavez carried on. He was charged, found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to ten days in the Monterey County jail. Supporters held a round-the-clock vigil outside. Visitors included Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, and Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy. Ethel joined a rally that featured a Catholic Mass and drew local counter-protesters who opposed leftist activism in their community. The California Supreme Court then dissolved key parts of the injunction and ordered Chavez released.

  Chavez now wanted a more remote base than Forty Acres, one where he could try out ideas about communal living. The Hollywood producer Edward Lewis, a wealthy supporter, fronted the purchase of an old tuberculosis sanatorium in Keene, in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains. Chavez named it Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz, or "Our Lady Queen of Peace," though everyone called it La Paz. He drew on Gandhi's ashrams in India and imagined three-day retreats for workers modeled on the Catholic cursillo.

  La Paz became the union's headquarters, which backers and funders criticized because of its remote location. Chavez replied that he needed it for his security, citing allegations of a plot against his life. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter at night. Life there was often chaotic, and frustrated critics called it "Magic Mountain." In October 1971, Itliong resigned, frustrated with Chavez's leadership.

  Arizona became the first state to pass a bill designed to keep the union out, criminalizing boycotts and making farmworker union elections almost impossible. In 1972, Chavez drove there and demanded a meeting with Governor Jack Williams, who refused. The union launched a campaign to recall Williams, its first major farm worker campaign outside California. Chavez fasted at the Santa Rita Center, a hall used by a local Chicano group. On the nineteenth day he was hospitalized.

  He broke the fast at a memorial Mass on the anniversary of Robert Kennedy's death, joined by the folk singer Joan Baez. During this campaign, Huerta introduced the slogan "Sí Se Puede," meaning "Yes it can be done," which became the union's rallying cry and later its official motto. Chavez then pushed the union to go national, with token offices in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Texas and Florida. Some members worried about overstretching.

  The AFL-CIO had asked Chavez to suspend the Salinas boycott, and eight months later he prepared to relaunch it. Its president, George Meany, feared the AFL-CIO could be held liable if the union broke the law by extending the boycott to supermarket chains. Chavez therefore asked for a charter that would make his union independent, though it meant losing the AFL-CIO subsidy.

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• 7. Border and Ballot

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  In early 1972, Chavez's brother Richard, who ran the union's work in Delano, brought him bad news. Members were losing faith, and the contracts might not be renewed. Monthly dues bothered workers whose jobs were seasonal, and a voluntary $1-a-week fund for Salinas strikers caused frustration. Inexperienced, mostly English-speaking volunteers staffed the hiring halls, and growers complained they were hostile. Union branches ordered members to miss work for rallies and picket lines.

  Chavez moved Richard away from Delano and dismissed other warnings as grower propaganda. In late 1972, Richard and Huerta briefly left the union in frustration. California growers put Proposition 22 on the November 1972 ballot to ban boycotts in the state. Chavez had Chatfield run the opposition, and the measure lost, 58 percent to 42 percent.

  In April 1973, the union's contracts with Delano-area grape growers expired. Chavez called a strike in the Coachella Valley, and the Teamsters saw a chance to take over. Their picketers were often armed, and violent clashes with union members followed. The union used the Teamster violence to win public sympathy. Meany promised renewed support if the union pushed for state legislation on farmworker organizing, and the AFL-CIO gave it $1.6 million. Strikers in Salinas received $75 and later $90 a week.

  During the Delano strike, a union striker, the Yemeni migrant Nagi Moshin Daifullah, died after an altercation with a police officer who was breaking up a bar fight. The union portrayed him as a martyr, and over 5,000 people marched at his funeral while Chavez fasted for three days. Chavez then called off the Delano strike, but the government believed this concealed the strike's financial strain. By then the union had lost most of its membership and California contracts to the Teamsters. Many workers found that the Teamsters did not demand weekends of rallies and boycotts.

  The union's first constitutional convention met in Fresno in September 1973. A new constitution gave the president, Chavez, significant powers, because he feared more democracy would paralyze the group. Monthly fees were replaced by 2 percent of annual income, and volunteers who had served more than six months could become voting members. By 1974 the union was broke again, and The New York Times Magazine ran a headline asking, "Is Chavez Beaten?" Chavez flew to Europe to urge unions to block imported goods, visiting cities from London to Paris. He found the unions cautious, but in Rome Pope Paul VI commended his activism.

  Chavez increasingly blamed strikebreakers who had crossed the border illegally. He made the unsubstantiated claim that the CIA was part of a plot to bring migrants in to undermine his union. He launched an "Illegals Campaign" to identify such migrants for deportation and put Liza Hirsch in charge. He said that "if we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight." Huerta urged him not to use the word "illegals," and he refused. Some field offices would not take part, and the National Lawyers Guild refused to let its interns work on it, so he cut ties with the guild.

  While Chavez was in Europe, his cousin Manuel set up a union patrol, or "wet line," along Arizona's border with Mexico. Rumors spread that it beat and robbed migrants. A Mexican investigation concluded that the union had bribed officials in San Luis to keep them from interfering. The Confederation of Mexican Workers broke its links with the union. Chavez dismissed the reports as smears by paid provocateurs, and many supporters believed him. When the activist Bert Corona protested the wet line, Chavez told Cohen to investigate the funding of Corona's group.

  In February 1975, after announcing a boycott of the Gallo Wine company, the union organized a four-day march from San Francisco to Gallo's headquarters in Modesto. About 10,000 protesters gathered, hoping to revive the spirit of the late 1960s. By then Jerry Brown had been elected governor in November 1974. He and Chavez agreed on a plan. Brown would introduce a farmworker bill, the union would back a more radical alternative, and Brown would then negotiate a law that included the union's bottom lines.

  Brown signed the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act into law in June 1975. It guaranteed farmworkers a secret ballot to choose which union, if any, would represent them, and many saw it as a victory. Chavez worried that the movement would lose "the essential fight of recognition, which is the one that appeals to the human mind and the heart." The law created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and Brown appointed a five-person board that included the former union official Chatfield.

  The union hired 500 organizers, many of them farmworkers, and won more elections than it lost. Where it faced the Teamsters directly, however, the Teamsters won, notably in the Delano vineyards. Chavez attacked the board's general counsel, Walter Kintz, and demanded his resignation. In 1976 the board ran out of money for the year and closed. Union activists then proposed Proposition 14, to write farmworkers' rights into the California constitution.

  Chavez thought it had little chance and feared the cost. Brown warned it would polarize communities. Ross urged the union to back it, and the executive board voted to join the "vote yes" campaign. Growers answered with a well-funded media campaign claiming the measure would let unions trespass on private property. In November 1976, voters rejected Proposition 14 by two to one. The defeat did little real damage to the union, but Chavez took it as a personal rejection.

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• 8. Purges and Reckoning

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  Nick Jones, the union's national boycott director, had been the only staff member to voice doubts about Proposition 14 in public. Chavez blamed him for the defeat and claimed that Jones and the New York boycott director, Charlie March, were part of a far-left conspiracy. Jones resigned in November 1976, writing to the executive board that he was "deeply concerned" about where Chavez was taking the union. Chavez also fired Joe Smith, the editor of El Malcriado, and sent Ross and Ganz to interrogate everyone who had worked on the campaign. Many staff compared the mood to McCarthyism, and the press noticed.

  Chavez answered criticism with more purges, inspired by those of China's Cultural Revolution. He insisted a far-left conspiracy was working against the union. At a meeting at La Paz in April 1977, later called "the Monday Night Massacre," he gathered people he denounced as malcontents or spies. Board members verbally abused them, and they were expelled from the community. He later accused Philip Vera Cruz, the oldest member of the executive board, of joining the conspiracy and forced him out. The consultant Crosby Milne, who had restructured the union, left La Paz, and Chavez later alleged he had been part of a conspiracy too.

  Around then Cohen negotiated with the Teamsters. The union would stop suing the Teamsters if they stopped operating among farmworkers altogether. The Teamsters agreed because farmworkers were a marginal group for them, and their low incomes did not justify costly fights with the union. That left Chavez's union as the dominant force in the fields.

  In February 1977, Chavez took the executive board to Synanon, a drug-treatment organization that had declared itself a religion in 1975 and operated from a compound east of Fresno. He admired its leader, Charles Dederich, calling him "a genius in terms of people." At Synanon, board members played "the Game," in which each player in turn received harsh, profane criticism from the rest. Dederich told Chavez the Game was the key to reshaping the union.

  Chavez had everyone at La Paz play it on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. At its height, about 100 people took part each week. It was used to shape behavior and punish nonconformity, and many found it humiliating and traumatic. Chavez called it "a good tool to fine-tune the union." His wife and Richard refused to play, and the farmworkers were not told about it. Visiting clergy and long-term supporters left alarmed. Synanon gave the union $100,000 worth of cars and materials.

  Following Dederich's advice, Chavez began grooming young people raised in the movement and gave them a curriculum that included the Game. Having refused government money before, he applied for over $500,000 in grants for a school and other projects. Every resident of La Paz had to wear a union button or pay a fine. After a course in Los Angeles, he began claiming he could heal people by laying on his hands.

  In 1977, Chavez traveled to the Philippines as the guest of President Ferdinand Marcos, hoping to win over Filipino American workers who had largely rebuffed the union. He was treated as a high-ranking dignitary and received an award from Marcos and an honorary doctorate from the Far Eastern University in Manila. He spoke positively about Marcos's martial law to a reporter from The Washington Post. Religious groups, a key constituency, protested that he overlooked human rights abuses, and their support eroded.

  Time magazine then reported on violence and child abuse at Synanon and called it a "kooky cult." Synanon boycotted Time, and Chavez urged the union to join. Los Angeles police raided the compound and found evidence that Dederich had approved violence against critics and ex-members. Soon afterward, the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones and closely linked with California's left, ended in mass suicide at Jonestown. A Democratic assemblyman compared the cult around Chavez to the Peoples Temple, and the union stopped using the Game.

  A dispute over pay followed. When the union's few paid lawyers asked for raises, the executive committee debated whether to pay everyone or stay a volunteer organization. It split along generational lines, and the volunteer side narrowly won. Medina, one of two former farmworkers on the board, resigned, and so did Drake. Half the lawyers left at once and the rest within weeks. Inexperienced volunteers replaced them. Contributions to the union's political fund also became mandatory that year.

  In June 1978, Chavez joined a picket in Yuma during his cousin Manuel's Arizona melon strike. He broke an injunction and spent a night in the county jail. Vegetable workers were angry about the union's incompetence, especially in running its medical plan. Of the 22 farmworker elections held between June and September 1978, the union lost two-thirds. Chavez launched the Plan de Flote to win back vegetable pickers and called a wage strike in January 1979, days after contracts expired. Eleven lettuce growers in the Salinas and Imperial Valleys were involved, and lettuce prices soared.

  Picketers entered the Mario Saikhon company's fields to drive off workers. A foreman and other employees opened fire, and a picketer named Rufino Contreras was killed. Chavez urged restraint and, with Contreras's father, led a three-mile candlelit procession attended by 7000 people. In June, Ganz and other organizers planned a show of strength in which strikers rushed a Salinas field. Stabbings and 75 arrests followed, and growers accused Chavez of terrorism. He criticized Ganz for acting without his approval, then led a 12-day march from San Francisco to San Jose, fasting from the sixth day.

  The strike cost the union between $300,000 and $400,000 a month. Chavez argued for ending it and switching to a boycott, but strike leaders disagreed. In August and September, several growers signed contracts, though many held out and the union was broke. He suggested using alcoholics from the cities to run a boycott, and the board rejected the idea. In May 1980, he brought the new paid workers' representatives to La Paz for a five-day training session.

  The union's membership dwindled in the 1980s. Chavez turned to campaigns against pesticides and moved into real-estate development, which stirred controversy because he used non-unionized laborers. After his death, labor and leftist groups treated him as an icon. His birthday was proclaimed a federal commemorative holiday in 2014 and is a state holiday in multiple states, and several places are named after him. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

  Critics of the union raised concerns about his autocratic control, the purges of those he deemed disloyal and the personality cult built around him. In 2026, allegations surfaced that he sexually abused Huerta, other women and minors. As a result, many tributes to and celebrations of him have been removed or canceled.

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