took possession of his family’s farm, forcing them into the stream of itinerant farm laborers traveling throughout California during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Chavez’s wife, Helen Favela Chavez, also knew rural poverty; her family was dispersed throughout the Palo Verde, Imperial, and San Joaquin Valleys. Such intimate knowledge of rural California made Chavez sympathetic to the plight of farm workers and inspired him to move the CSO in the direction of farm worker justice.
As Chavez distinguished himself as a skilled organizer and became an officer within the CSO, he explored new solutions to the problems confronting rural communities. He began by recruiting members who shared his concerns and experiences, tapping activists in the many small towns familiar to him. Gilbert Padilla, who had been working part time as a dry cleaner and as a gleaner of onions and other crops grown in the Central Valley, was among his most important discoveries. Chavez found Padilla through his friend Pete García, a CSO affiliate who had invited him to a recruitment meeting at his home in Hanford. When Padilla declined out of a belief that the CSO was just another “social club,” Chavez and García met him after work, and the three men ended up talking late into the evening about their shared goal of improving farm worker conditions. Padilla appreciated Chavez’s desire to make community organizations more accountable to the needs of rural communities and agreed to become a member.25 Padilla and Chavez’s relationship would ultimately serve as the foundation for a new farm worker movement.
FIGURE 2. Members of the Community Service Organization, ca. 1950s. Second from right, Cesar Chavez; front row center, Fred Ross Sr.; far left, Saul Alinsky; third from the right in back, Helen Chavez. ALUA, UFW Collection, 330.
In 1959 Chavez exhibited his affinities with agricultural workers and unions by accepting a grant from the Packinghouse Workers of America to study the effects of the bracero program in Oxnard, California. He succeeded in forcing the Farm Labor Bureau to comply with a provision in the bilateral agreement that required growers to hire local farm workers before contracting Mexican nationals. He also helped local farm workers secure state unemployment insurance benefits during seasonal downturns. Such actions deviated from the CSO’s more familiar voter registration work and came closer to the services provided by unions.26 When Chavez became the national director of the CSO, he assigned Padilla to the CSO service center in Stockton, a predominantly farm worker community, and encouraged him to pursue grants like the one he held in Oxnard. To his delight, Padilla succeeded in securing a grant in 1961 from the Bishops’ Committee on Migratory Labor in Chicago to study housing conditions for local farm workers.27
FIGURE 3. Gilbert Padilla, 1966.
Padilla joined a growing team of rural recruits, including Julio and Fina Hernandez and Roger Terronez from Corcoran; Tony and Rachel Orendain and Gil Flores from Hanford; and a loquacious and fiery single mother from Stockton, Dolores Huerta.28 Huerta had never worked in the fields, but she maintained a strong connection to labor unions and farm workers through her family. Her father had worked in the coalmines in Dawson, New Mexico, where she was born, and had belonged to the United Mine Workers.29 When Dolores was an infant, labor unrest in the mines forced her father to seek alternative work harvesting beets in Wyoming, Nebraska, and California. The family eventually settled in Stockton, California, where her father worked in the asparagus fields among a predominantly Filipino workforce. In the 1940s, he participated in a strike on the Zuckerman asparagus farm alongside Huerta’s future friend and Filipino activist, Philip Veracruz.30
Huerta clashed with her father over his “chauvinist” behavior and considered her mother, Alicia Margaret St. John Chavez, a stronger influence in her life. During the Great Depression, Alicia divorced Huerta’s father and raised Dolores and her sister on $5 per week from wages earned at the Richmond-Chase canneries and a local restaurant. In 1937, Alicia participated in a strike of the canneries as a member of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, which forced her to depend entirely on her earnings at the restaurant.31 In 1941 she opened a successful lunch counter with her second husband, James Richards. A year later the couple purchased a hotel from Japanese American owners who had to sell when the government relocated all Japanese Americans to internment camps. Alicia relied on her children to staff the restaurant and clean the hotel, providing Dolores with an invaluable cultural experience that strengthened her confidence and ability to organize in any community. She recalled the unique composition of their neighborhood and clientele: “The ethnic community where we lived was all mixed. It was Japanese, Chinese. The only Jewish families that lived in Stockton were there in our neighborhood.… There was the Filipino pool hall, the Filipino dance hall. It was [a] very colorful, multi-ethnic scene.”32 When the Richards’ relationship soured and the couple divorced, Alicia lost the restaurant but held on to the hotel. Dolores continued to help her mother and became friends with many of the Filipino farm workers who were their primary patrons. Later her mother met and married Juan “Fernando” Silva, a former bracero, who conveyed to Dolores his deep feelings of bitterness over his treatment at the hands of growers.33 These influences made her sympathetic to Chavez’s appeals to join the local CSO, which she accepted in 1960. In time she too would be as important to the new movement as Padilla and Chavez.
The addition of rural chapters in the CSO and the new members’ success in bringing attention to the plight of farm workers compelled Chavez to call for the creation of a farm labor committee. According to Padilla, the decision should not have been controversial because the CSO already maintained committees on housing and education, although some members questioned whether Chavez’s new plan augured a more aggressive move toward labor organizing. Some members preferred to maintain a more nonpartisan image and believed that alignment with worker concerns would move the organization strongly to the left. Others objected to pursuing work that, they believed, duplicated AWOC’s efforts. Opponents of Chavez’s plan pointed out that AWOC, with funding from the AFL-CIO, had initiated the lettuce strike in Imperial Valley and made inroads in organizing Filipino workers in the Central Valley. Consequently, the CSO national committee chose to table the decision until the national convention in Calexico in March 1962, when they would discuss the matter in greater depth.34
In preparation for the conference, Chavez met with Padilla to share his plans. Padilla recalled, “[Cesar] said, ‘I am going to propose to the convention that every chapter should have a farm labor committee, and that we should start doing something for farm labor.… If they don’t approve this, I’m going to leave. I’m going to quit.’”35 Chavez also communicated his intentions to a number of members on the CSO board of directors, but no one took him seriously, given his successful recruitment of new members, his ability to get outside grants, and, most important, his dependence on the director position as the only source of funding for his family. “I didn’t believe him,” Padilla recalled, adding, “because he’s the one that built all the chapters.” Like Chavez, Padilla also supported an entire family on his CSO salary, partially covered by the grant from the Bishops’ Committee. Although the grant was set to expire in June, Padilla had hopes of applying for an extension and had already secured a promise from the local chapter to continue paying him.36
Chavez attended the Calexico meeting flanked by his new staff, including Padilla and Huerta, optimistic that a deal could be struck with his fellow board members. One of the founding members and his friend, Tony Rios, had been a member of the Electrical Union, and two other board members, Jay Rodriguez and Gil Anaya, had belonged to the Butchers Union and Steelworkers, respectively. In addition to these men, Chavez believed he could count on other board members who understood the power of a union and could see the value of his proposal. To his chagrin, however, they rebuffed Chavez. Those with union experience argued that AWOC’s failed strike in the lettuce fields demonstrated the difficulty
