kind of outsider here: both organizer and highest community authority; both the “self-effacing . . . behind the scenes” player, as he was described in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the boss. Moving on to the War Relocation Authority, Ross managed a Japanese internment camp in Idaho and worked to resettle and find jobs for Japanese Americans. Next, at the Council on Race Relations, he began working with Mexican Americans in Southern California and developed the idea of the new kind of organization that CSO would become.3
Ross began by attaching himself to a group in East LA that was part of a general movement to elect Mexican Americans to local office. Great changes were happening in American politics in 1947, and before the group would accept Ross’s voluntary help, its members had to assure themselves that he neither was a Communist nor had Communist sympathies. Through a daisy chain of connections beginning with Alinsky, Ross got a letter from an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles verifying his anti-Communist status.4 He then helped build the CSO partially as a rival to other local groups, especially those that were close to the Communist Party, then active in East LA, and to unions that had been expelled from the CIO because aledgedly they were dominated by reds.
Ross and the CSO organizers had their own particular brand of anti-Communism. Their aim was to “out-organize the Communists” but they never spearheaded the red-baiting campaign that would lead to McCarthyism, devastate the Communist Party and the entire left in the 1950s, and continue to reverberate for years, even within the UFW. But they were not beyond using the anti-Communism of the times to achieve their aims. “Ross was a heavy red baiter,” said Bill Chandler, UFW volunteer, who first got to know him in a CSO registration drive and who otherwise was a great admirer of the man he considered a master organizer.5 Bert Corona, a longtime Mexican American activist and an early member of CSO in Northern California, also criticized Ross: “One thing I didn’t like . . . was that one of its stated reasons for organizing was to keep the ‘reds’ from establishing a base in the communities. I knew that when they referred to ‘reds’ they meant those Mexicans who were either working with the CP or involved with ANMA, the Asociación Nacional México-Americana.”6
The CSO’s brand of anti-Communism meshed smoothly with its own narrow definition of politics, one that took no positions on the big questions of the day—for instance, the Taft Hartley Act’s rollback of labor rights—but maintained a careful focus on community action, voter registration, and voter participation.7 On those terms, the CSO was wildly successful, more so than both more conservative and more conventionally left Mexican American organizations. By 1962 it would have thirty-two chapters from Sacramento to Calexico that had registered 400,000 new voters. Before the CSO’s drives, no serious statewide attempt at voter registration had ever been made among California’s Mexican Americans, and nothing like it would be seen again until the 1990s. Far more than any other organization, the CSO was responsible for the more than one hundred Mexican American politicians who won California local elections in the 1950s and early ’60s.8
It achieved its presence on the state’s conventional political stage through a remarkable series of organizing innovations. Its paid organizers—starting with Ross, adding Chavez in 1952, and eventually the other future founders of the UFW, Gilbert Padilla and Dolores Huerta—combined the idea of naturalization and registration with specific struggles for improvements in the Mexican and Mexican American barrios. They linked CSO membership to access to services at CSO Service Centers, where translation, immigration, workmen’s compensation, and welfare problems were either free for CSO members or significantly cheaper than the those of the competing accountants, lawyers, and notary publics. The CSO often got initial entry into communities through either the Catholic Church or a union, and then organized those communities through the system of pyramiding house meetings. They pressured local adult schools into providing teachers for CSO-sponsored English and citizenship classes, and they took great advantage of their knowledge of the details of immigration and welfare law to teach people about the concrete benefits of becoming citizens and registering to vote.9
Chavez arrived in Oxnard in the midst of all this success in September of 1958, and began doing what he already knew how to do well. The UPWA might be signing the checks, but its agenda would have to wait, as a get-out-the-vote campaign for the November elections was his first order of business. He had to operate faster than he liked, but he had no choice, as a good showing in the local elections would increase CSO power with the local politicians and within all the local social agencies where Chavez would need leverage. He and Soria put the names of all of La Colonia’s 1,400 registered voters on index cards, recruited a team of volunteers, and borrowed the Latin American Veterans Hall for Election Day. Days before the election, Cesar put his portable sound system on top of his car and drove through the neighborhood urging people to vote. As CSO had done in other areas to combat widespread cynicism about politicians, he and John patiently explained to people that the important thing was to show up at the polls and cast a ballot; it could be a blank ballot, if they wished. What mattered was the number of voters, because with a big enough turnout, as Ross said, “the CSO leaders . . . could approach the politicians as the official spokesmen for a powerful new constituency, which they could use as a club over the heads of those politicians.”10
The campaign was a success. More than a thousand people from La Colonia went to the polls, more than double the turnout at the previous election, which prompted the Oxnard Press Courier to editorialize that CSO was starting to build a “political machine” in La Colonia.11 Although the CSO was officially nonpartisan, no one doubted the Democratic Party identification of most of its members. These 1958 elections marked a decisive turn in California politics, as Democrats took control of the governorship, the state senate, and the state assembly for the first time in eighty years. Moreover, the victory of the liberal Edmund G. (Pat) Brown over conservative William Knowland for governor was relatively ideological, by U.S. standards. Knowland ran an anti-union campaign and endorsed a “right-to-work” proposition on the ballot. Brown opposed it, and won the active support of organized labor, whose members and their families then constituted one-third of all registered voters in the state. Labor’s efforts were matched by the equally successful efforts of the Catholic Church against a proposition to end the tax-exempt status for private and church schools. Brown—Democrat, Catholic, pro-labor—was the big victor.12
Chavez was one of the little ones. La Colonia had voted a straight Democratic ticket, and Cesar was ebullient about the victories, both local and statewide. Here was the shape of a possible future. Here was the promise of a large coalition that might possibly be bigger than even the Sunkist Corporation.
He and Soria wasted no time celebrating. Two days after the election they held a mass meeting to formalize the establishment of CSO’s Ventura County chapter. An Oxnard priest, impressed by CSO’s ability to turn out the vote, gave the invocation. The speakers who followed included Tony Del Buono, of a preexisting local Mexican civic group that was now going to merge with CSO; Jimmy Flores, from the local Laborers Union; Rachel Guajardo, of the UPWA; Joe Piña, of the Latin American Veterans; Fred Brown, of the local NAACP; the Reverends Washington and Zamora of Trinity Baptist and First Mexican Baptist churches; and Tony Rios, president of the statewide CSO. People voted unanimously to set up a CSO chapter. Cesar announced that a CSO Service Center would open, which meant that Chavez and Soria wouldn’t have to handle everybody’s individual problems personally. Eventually the service center would be staffed by thirty volunteers and operate eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. People came to celebrate on the day of its opening, and they kept coming. Some kind of mass movement was building in La Colonia. The Oxnard Press Courier reported that the Friday night following the CSO celebration, 3,500 people walked through La Colonia, candles in hand, behind a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, from one bracero labor camp to another. The march was a mixture of La Colonia residents and braceros. Chavez joined in.13
In house meetings during the voter drive Chavez had continued to listen for the “key issue” that could unite large numbers of people, just as Ross and Alinsky had taught him. In his Activity Report to Ross of October 24, 1958, he identified that issue:
One
