left his job as a psychiatric attendant at the nearby state mental hospital in order to earn his living helping Chavez and learning to be an organizer. They both were married with children, but spent a lot of time riding around Oxnard in Chavez’s 1953 Mercury, talking politics.
Soon after they met they discovered that they both had read the Alinsky biography of John L. Lewis. They both liked Lewis, but the two organizers’ political enthusiasms were not the same. Soria favored secular left politics. His mother, Luz, had been one of the better-known leaders of a major Ventura County lemon workers’ strike against Sunkist in 1941, and his strongest public memories growing up were of his Uncle Jesus, a socialist, talking politics in Oxnard’s barrio, La Colonia; of Sunday afternoon gatherings where men would read the Mexican papers and Los Angeles’ La Opinión; and of one 1938 fiesta in particular when the grown-ups threw their hats in the air and shouted praises to President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had just kicked the gringo oil companies out of Mexico. Like Chavez, Soria was an avid reader. The first book Chavez gave him was Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals.1
Cesar and John’s project was to build a Ventura County chapter of the Community Service Organization, to be based in La Colonia. Although supported by Alinsky’s foundation, the CSO did not follow Alinsky’s pattern as an organization of organizations. It was, instead, a direct-membership organization. In what has come to be seen as Fred Ross’s contribution to organizing theory, and one of the most enduring of neo-Alinskyite variations, people joined the local chapter of the CSO, paying $12 a year, not because some leader of theirs had joined first but as a result of the outside organizer’s skill at bringing individuals together, developing leaders from among them, and uniting them to address local matters while also advancing a centralized statewide agenda.
When Alinsky complained about this structural departure, Ross answered that California’s Mexican American barrios had no community groups comparable to the unions and the local Catholic parishes Alinsky knew in Chicago. Some people were in unions, but they did not control them. All of the major dioceses were controlled by white conservatives, and the local Mexican American parishes were not independent enough to help form a classic People’s Organization. What Mexican communities in the 1950s did have, Ross argued, was extended family groups. Thus, the house meeting, which someone in the community agreed to host and be responsible for inviting others to attend, was the standard building block of the CSO.2
In La Colonia, John went along to these meetings to watch how Cesar handled them. He listened as Chavez told stories in a soft, even voice about what CSO had accomplished in other areas: fighting police brutality, getting more services into the barrios, helping people become citizens so that they would be eligible for state disability and pension programs. When he finished, people asked questions, often about particular problems with welfare or immigration or their children’s schools. Chavez was expert at answering them. When the questions were about community problems, he explained again how people in other areas had formed their own CSO chapters. To handle individual complaints, he made appointments. Finally he asked if anyone in the room wanted to host another meeting. By pyramiding the house meetings, helping people with their individual problems, and keeping detailed records of his activities, he got a picture of the community.
Big John took it all in. He came to admire how well Cesar listened, how he gave people his full attention, how he never showed disappointment if only a few people had turned up. Cesar seemed very sure of himself, always upbeat. Soria also noted a standard answer Chavez would give to a typical kind of hard question, a complaint that could not be solved by a visit to a local agency or pressure on a politician. Once in Santa Paula, across the river from Oxnard, at a meeting at the Limoneira company’s labor camp, the local lemon pickers had complained that they had been swamped by braceros who were taking most of their work. Could CSO do anything about that? Sure, Chavez said, after we get organized, if people agree, we can make it the first item on the agenda. Then he urged people to sign up as an important step in making that happen.
On the way home, John asked Cesar how in hell were CSO and a couple of hundred local limoneros going to get rid of the thousands of braceros working in the trees? Chavez seemed mystified by Soria’s question. Soria was struck by the incongruity of it. Here they were, two guys with a limited budget, operating out of a donated office, driving through miles of lemon orchards where everything but the air was owned by the Sunkist Corporation: the trees, the bosses’ gated mansions, the labor camps where the workers lived, the packing sheds and the railroad spurs that led to them, the land, and the water. Unless you looked up in the sky, whatever you saw belonged to Teague, McKevett, Hardison, or Blanchard. Yet here was Chavez, having just told a small group of local limoneros in company-owned housing, some of whom were scared even to be seen in the meeting lest they be fingered by a Sunkist spy, that if they got organized they could throw the braceros out of the orchards. He had said it without flinching, swallowed up by the chair he was sitting in, characteristically pushing his lank, black Indian hair off his wide brown forehead. Now in the car, with nobody to overhear, John asked Cesar to come clean. Did he really believe it was possible to take the braceros away from the Sunkist Corporation?
Chavez, his hands on the wheel, turned to him and smiled. “Why not, John? If enough people get together they can do anything.”
Soria laughed. Then he took a long look at Chavez. Cesar meant it. He was not the least bit overwhelmed by the power that surrounded him. Soria thought it would be nice to feel that way, but he couldn’t. He thought Cesar was a little bit crazy. Not crazy like the people John had worked with at the mental hospital. Not sad and disfigured. Chavez was beautiful crazy.
Oxnard was an atypical CSO project. Usually Chavez would spend ninety days in a town and leave behind a new chapter when he moved on. But in Oxnard he was planning to stay an entire year because the project was co-sponsored by the United Packing House Workers of America (UPWA), the same union with which Saul Alinsky had had such success in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. Alinsky and the union had subsequently initiated other projects in several Midwestern states, where they tried to duplicate their Chicago experience—with mixed results. Oxnard was their first West Coast venture. The UPWA had won union representation elections in five Sunkist packing sheds there in 1952, but the growers had so far refused to sign contracts. The union president, Ralph Helstein, and Alinsky hoped that building a CSO chapter in La Colonia, where the lemon packers lived, would help the UPWA fight for contracts where the packers worked. Helstein agreed to pay the bills: $20,000 for the year’s expenses, including the salaries of Chavez and Soria.
By this time CSO had about twenty chapters across California, but Fred Ross had not built that network in conjunction with labor unions or with a particular emphasis on workers’ issues. Instead, his focus was more conventionally political. It was not true, as Ross told Alinsky in 1947, when he decided to organize Mexican Americans, that the community had no groups to call its own. In fact, Mexicans had small civic organizations all over California and a few influential large ones, like La Comisión Honorifica, a surviving mutualista. They just did not have the kind of organization that Ross wanted to build. They didn’t have a statewide organization whose goal was to win formal political power.
Ross, who was not Mexican, Catholic, nor Spanish-speaking, was in no position to lead such an organization, but he didn’t care: he did not want to lead the CSO, he wanted to organize it, and he had been organizing communities he was not a part of for a long time. Born into a middle-class Methodist family in San Francisco in 1910, he graduated from the University of Southern California with a teaching credential during the Depression and worked as a welfare case manager, finally getting a New Deal job with the Farm Security Administration. Working his way up, he eventually became head of community services at the seventeen FSA camps that housed displaced farm workers (mostly Dustbowl refugees) in California and Arizona. While managing the famous Arvin camp, which was the model for the “good” camp in The Grapes of Wrath, he met radical farm worker organizers and also Woody Guthrie, who came by with a sleeping bag, a guitar, and his songs. Ross always said he did his first organizing there as the camp director, encouraging the dispirited workers to establish
