of a small national executive board—threatened to compromise the jobs of thousands of workers and volunteers who sacrificed their time and their bodies in the pursuit of Chavez’s vision of justice. This awesome responsibility weighed heavily on him, but his propensity—in the beginning—to seek counsel from trusted advisors helped distribute this burden.
This book shows that the task of striking a balance between cultivating creativity among organizers and providing strong, timely leadership ultimately was a challenge too great for Chavez to sustain. After achieving the first collective bargaining agreements for farm workers in California in 1970, Chavez made a series of missteps that compromised the health of the union. Initially, his encouragement of debate among organizers produced inventive solutions to new problems that arose throughout the first half of the 1970s. Yet the failure to channel this ad hoc democracy into a permanent structure of governance eventually led to personal and systematic failure. As some of his closest advisors and friends testify, Chavez became increasingly invested in his power to dictate the strategies and priorities of the union as the decade wore on. His isolation in a communal living arrangement at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, augmented his infatuation with control over the organization and the individuals who composed it. According to advisors and staff members who worked alongside Chavez during this period, the living arrangements separated him from farm workers and union staff in the field at a time when he needed to incorporate more perspectives into solving an increasingly complex situation.2 Chavez’s physical and emotional distance contributed to an alarming lack of accountability to union members and allowed him to abandon the principles of democracy preached by his mentor and friend, Fred Ross. Ironically, Chavez abused power and manipulated the powerless like the employers and the state he had become so critical of. Sadly, by the end of the 1970s, he had alienated most of his early allies and compromised most of the gains made during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Unlike the overwhelming majority of authors who have written about the United Farm Workers, I explain how and why the union achieved most of its goals through 1970, and how and why it failed to live up to its tremendous potential after that. Most historians writing about the union have celebrated its triumphs only and, in the process, canonized Chavez as a leader who could do no wrong. Mario T. García, for example, recently declared Chavez “one of the great figures in the history of the United States” for “accomplish[ing] what no other U.S. labor leader had been able to do: successfully organize farm workers.”3 While Chavez accomplished much, I believe his legacy is far more complicated. To begin with, his success is debatable if we consider that by the end of the decade the union lost most of the contracts it had gained in 1970. Some authors have depicted Chavez and the UFW as helpless victims of the Teamsters union or hostile Republican administrations in Washington and Sacramento to explain these shortcomings. Although these wealthier and more powerful foes created barriers to UFW growth, their influence alone cannot explain the union’s rapid decline during the late 1970s.
What is missing is a consideration of how Chavez employed strategies and management techniques that compromised the union. Such self-inflicted wounds were particularly damaging in the late 1970s, when Chavez benefited from the support of a sympathetic California governor, Edmund “Jerry” Brown, and enjoyed the fruits of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a state law that gave California farm workers collective bargaining rights starting in 1975. From the mid-1970s through the end of the decade, Chavez squandered political advantages and the esprit de corps he and other leaders had cultivated. In interviews with organizers and volunteers, I found that many veterans of the movement hold Chavez accountable for these failures. My oral histories are corroborated by findings from the Farm Worker Documentation Project, including a valuable archive of listserv discussions in 2004–5 among people who lived through these tumultuous years. I also consulted previously uncatalogued archival material in the United Farm Workers Collections at the Walter Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University that include rarely heard recordings of the union’s national executive board meetings during the mid- and late 1970s. Taken together, these sources reveal that Chavez had much more to do with the union’s decline than previously acknowledged.
Chavez’s mishandling of the boycott and his failure to replace it with an equally effective strategy was among his most important strategic blunders. From 1965 until January 31, 1978, union volunteers extended the reach and power of the UFW through a successful boycott of grapes and, to a lesser extent, lettuce and wine. Described by Chavez as “capitalism in reverse,” the boycott emerged as the sine qua non of the movement, expanding the struggle beyond the fields in rural California to urban storefronts across the United States and Canada and docks and union halls all over Europe. Such consumer activism falls within an American political tradition dating as far back as the Boston Tea Party, although, as most consumer historians note, the vast majority of boycotts have been “putative failures.”4 In some cases, U.S. companies, in a fit of economic nationalism, encouraged the boycott of foreign products that served corporate rather than worker interests.5 The United Farm Workers, on the other hand, maintained firm control of their grape boycott campaign, driving growers to the bargaining table in 1970 and keeping their adversaries in check throughout the first half of the decade. In doing so, they bucked the trend of unions before them who had mostly treated the boycott as a supplement to strikes and picket lines at the workplace.6
The United Farm Workers distinguished their use of the boycott in three primary ways. First, Chavez expanded the use of the boycott by appealing to consumers to participate in the pursuit of social justice.7 Prior to the farm worker movement, most unions had used the boycott to create class solidarity by asking fellow laborers not to purchase a particular product linked to the unfair treatment of workers.8 Chavez, however, transformed his campaign into a social movement akin to that of the abolitionists who appealed to northern consumers not to buy southern-made textiles as a protest against slavery, or that of the Montgomery bus boycotters who asked blacks and white allies not to use public transportation until the segregation of buses ended. The UFW’s insistence on presenting the campaign in a social justice framework irritated national union sponsors, although Chavez and other UFW leaders understood the potential of the civil rights moment and its influence on the farm workers’ struggle. In hopes of capitalizing on a heightened civil rights consciousness in the nation, Chavez used the boycott to draw attention to the injustices of a farm labor system that employed mostly Mexican and Filipino laborers. By matching long marches in rural California with picket lines at urban markets, he drew a connection between the conditions of farm laborers and the buying habits of urban consumers. To the surprise of traditional union leaders, his tactic mostly succeeded. In doing so, the United Farm Workers articulated the possibilities of uniting protest for social justice with labor organizing in a new social movement that renewed faith in labor unions across America.9
Second, although initially Chavez and a handful of union leaders started the boycott to occupy volunteers’ time between harvests, he and union leaders eventually came to regard the boycott with at least as much respect as they did strikes and marches. Here, however, Chavez had to be convinced. Throughout most of the boycott’s first year, he remained focused on building membership in the fields. Nevertheless, many young, mostly white (and several Jewish) volunteers believed in the power of the boycott and campaigned to make it a stronger component of la causa. At a time when Chavez listened to advice, his acceptance of their opinions paid tremendous dividends. From 1966 to 1968, young college students joined with veteran organizers and aggrieved farm workers to build an effective boycott network that stretched across North America. Key to this network were the many boycott houses where people from all walks of life took up residence and formulated the best strategy for appealing to local consumers. In these cities, far from the front lines of the rural struggle, volunteers often cut their teeth as organizers, learning how to build a farm worker justice movement where none had previously existed. Many applied tactics borrowed from a variety of sources, including the counterculture group the Youth International Party, or Yippies; fellow civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); and local unions who supported the UFW. In short, boycott house volunteers adopted a “by any means necessary” approach
