to earn a doctorate in political science, U.S. diplomat, and defeated organizer of California farm workers—had waged a documentation campaign superficially similar to the Oxnard effort. Outside of Marysville, he had gotten hundreds of domestic farm workers to sign affidavits saying that they were willing and able to work in the peach orchards and that braceros were working in their stead, and then submitted the documents to the Republican governor, Goodwin Knight, who ignored them.20 The CSO strategy of constant mobilization to pressure the new administration in Sacramento was more visible, more insistent, more dependent on the active participation of displaced farm workers. Nor did it hurt that the CSO had helped put the new Democratic governor into office.
By the spring, the CSO campaign had pressured some of the embattled growers to pick up their workers in front of the CSO office in La Colonia. Other local workers had their own arrangements with individual employers and were hired directly. This example of what was called “gate hiring” had been forced on the employers by a group of people who earlier had been refused work by those same bosses. It was a remarkable organizing achievement of more than just local significance.
Even as the employment committee was successfully exposing bracero fraud in the spring of 1959, things were getting sticky between Chavez and two UPWA organizers, Rachel Guajardo and Eddie Perez. The UPWA also had an office in La Colonia, around the block from CSO headquarters. Guajardo and Perez occasionally came to CSO employment committee meetings, and attended most of its demonstrations, marches, and big public events. Chavez was the lead organizer, but the understanding between Alinsky and the UPWA president, Helstein, back in Chicago was that after a year, Chavez would turn the employment committee over to the UPWA. Guajardo, who had come from the main UPWA office in Chicago, was well versed in the history of the epic slaughterhouse battles between workers and their bosses. Perez, a World War II vet from industrial Vernon, in East LA, was a veteran of CIO organizing drives. They both felt that Chavez consistently missed opportunities to educate people on the benefits of union contracts. Guajardo also argued that Chavez treated workers like children and did not engage them in open, adult political conversation.21
Chavez insisted that his criticisms of unions were only a reflection of the workers’ own suspicions, and that they had good reason to be cautious, because unions had never done much for farm workers. He also believed that Guajardo and Perez were strike-happy, overanxious to throw up a picket line in the middle of any dispute. He told Soria that they were lazy, always looking for shortcuts, unwilling to put in the time to be effective organizers.22
Soria, who Chavez eventually concluded was also too lazy to be a good organizer, felt that the relationship between Cesar and Rachel had got nasty. Chavez made fun of her big-city clothes, and Guajardo complained about Chavez’s “holier than thou act.” She took to calling him “the little priest” behind his back, and complained to Soria that working with Chavez could only mean working for him.
“Rachel and Eddie were willing to argue with workers, to try to convince them that the union way made sense,” Soria reported years later. “Chavez was more for engaging the workers in do-gooder projects, like health committees, welfare committees, and fundraising drives. CSO was more like a church organization than a labor union . . . and Chavez never argued with the workers. He just listened to them. He didn’t make enemies that way, like Rachel and Eddie did, but he never set anybody straight, either. He didn’t convince people of some idea. He won people over to him, Chavez.”23
Rather than being a joint venture, the bracero fraud project became a tug of war between the two groups. Chavez also began to have differences with Clive Knowles, who was above Guajardo and Perez in the UPWA hierarchy. Knowles, noting that Public Law 78 made it illegal for braceros to work at places where strikes were in process, believed that when domestic workers were on mixed crews with braceros, the locals should declare a strike as a way to force the Labor Department or the Mexican government to remove the braceros. If the braceros were removed, production would stop, and the locals’ leverage would increase.24
Chavez strongly disagreed. Premature strikes had a long history of failure in the California fields, he said, and would only demoralize the workers. At various points in the employment committee’s extended campaign, UPWA organizers wanted to set up picket lines and declare a strike. Chavez opposed those plans, and looked for ways to put pressure on growers and government officials without calling a strike. He had more influence with the workers and won the local debate.
But he didn’t win in the discussions back in Chicago. In the spring of 1959, Helstein and Alinsky agreed that it was time for the employment committee to be turned over to the Oxnard UPWA chapter. Chavez would return to helping people with their individual problems, the CSO’s English and citizenship classes, and another voter registration drive. On May 23, 1959, a month after the dramatic public burning of the referral cards, Chavez dryly noted in his daily Activity Report to Ross: “The employment committee has been turned over to the UPWA lock, stock, and barrel.”25
That June, Governor Brown announced a ten-point program to “strengthen controls over the state’s Farm Placement Service.” The program included longer hours for the FP offices, and no more issuing of out-of-date referral cards; a prevailing wage high enough to “attract and keep domestic workers”; “gate hire” and “day haul” arrangements for local workers “whenever practical”; consulting with and soliciting cooperation with unions and other public groups [like the CSO] who have a “legitimate interest in the program”; and all “complaints documented and followed up by necessary action.”26 The program, devised by John Carr, and U.S. Labor Department officials at the very time that they were intervening in the Oxnard fracas, was never implemented. Governor Brown was turned around in the middle of his term by the power of agribusiness, politically expressed by the rural, pro-grower Democrats who dominated the California State Senate. He went on to defend the Bracero Program up until its last days, even arguing for a special extension for California after the national program had been ended.
Nevertheless, the announcement of the regulatory plan was directly followed by the dismissal, forced retirement, or dishonorable resignation of several officials of the state’s Farm Placement Service, including the director, Edward Hayes. California agribusiness was on notice. Their beloved Bracero Program, which for twenty years had checked union organizing and stifled farm workers’ wages, might not be around much longer. It would be abandoned only later, when the contracted Mexican workers themselves became increasingly unruly, a flashpoint of labor trouble rather than an instrument to suppress it. Seven years after Chavez’s show of apparently wild optimism, there would be no more braceros anywhere in the United States. Enough people had gotten together and done it.
November ’60 to March ’62
The red sky in the east gave way to the full light of early morning, making visible a drama that had begun several hours earlier in total darkness. It was the second day of February, 1961, at the Dannenberg Ranch labor camp in the Imperial Valley. About a thousand men walked a picket line along a fence surrounding the camp in a strike called by the United Packinghouse Workers of America.1 Hundreds of braceros stood on the other side of the fence, watching the picket line. It was a flimsy wire fence, ten feet high, topped off by another three feet of barbed wire, which jutted out at an angle above the picketing men. The fence was meant to keep the braceros from running away, which they were wont to do, escaping into California to become undocumented but relatively free workers. On this morning, the picketing men also wanted to keep the braceros in the camp, away from the struck lettuce fields. The signs leaning on the demonstrators’ shoulders proclaimed the popular demand of the strike: “uno veinte cinco,” which stood for $1.25 an hour. Some men carried flags, mostly the red and black standards that the official Mexican labor movement had inherited from international anarchism; but there were a few red flags, too, homemade ones, scarlet fabric fastened to tomato stakes.
