in Delano, the first thing I did was draw a map by hand of all the towns between Arvin and Stockton, eighty-six of them, including farming camps. I decided to hit them all. I wanted to see the San Joaquin Valley as I’d never seen it before, all put together. Of course, I knew the area, but I never had seen it with the idea of organizing it.
—Cesar Chavez, 1975
If, as John Soria believed, Cesar Chavez was a little crazy to think that he could organize Ventura County, then trying to organize the entire Central Valley would have to be judged absolute madness. In Ventura a few families seemed to own everything in sight—but everything was in sight; the place was small, it had edges. But 250 miles separate Arvin from Stockton, in a valley sixty miles wide at its midsection—an area so vast that John Muir did not call it a valley at all but named it the Great Central Plain. Hundreds of thousands of people worked the fields of the Central Valley, but just how many hundreds of thousands nobody knew for sure.1 And although power there was shared among many more farm corporations and farm families than in Ventura, those corporations and families, taken together, had nearly complete control over the provincial politics of the small agricultural towns. Oil was agriculture’s only economic rival in the Great Central Plain, and it was a measure of the awesome power of Chavez’s chosen adversary that the extensive oil fields around Bakersfield were but a minor money-maker compared with the the cotton, tomatoes, grapes, and orchards of the Central Valley.
If enough people get together they can do anything, Chavez had told Soria driving down the road in Ventura. In the Central Valley in the spring of 1962, he had another driving companion: Jim Drake, whose Renault and gasoline credit card had been made available to Chavez by Chris Hartmire of the California Migrant Ministry. Developed nationally out of liberal Protestant charity work during the Depression and later coordinated by the National Council of Churches as part of its nascent civil rights mission, the CMM had, since the mid-1950s, become increasingly frustrated with what it viewed as the limits of Christian charity. Rather than continue to alleviate the symptoms of poverty, its small paid staff in California wanted to change the social structures that made people poor. They were not sure how to do that, but decided to start by trying to organize farm workers. Drake had just been hired, at $500 a month, by the CMM to set up a community organization in the small town of Goshen, less than fifty miles up Highway 99 from Delano. Hartmire, whom Chavez had helped train a few years earlier, knew that Chavez would put the car, the driver, and the credit card to good use.
Jim Drake was one of many Christian activists educated at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. His father, also a UTS graduate, worked in a public school in the oil-field country outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he taught the children of migrant families, who followed the wells. In 1947, when Jim was ten, the family moved to Thermal, California, in the Coachella Valley, where his father taught in the local junior high school. All of the growers’ kids were in one class, and the Mexicans, Negroes, and Okies were together in the remedial class. Drake’s dad taught the remedials. Like his father, Drake did not want to be a minister—“I didn’t want to be separated from the people,” he said—and soon after he earned his degree he and his wife, Susan, moved back to California to organize farm workers.2
“I really thought Cesar was crazy,” he told Jacques Levy. “Everybody did except Helen [Chavez ’s wife]. They had so many children and so little to eat, and that old 1953 Mercury station wagon gobbled up gas and oil. Everything he wanted to do seemed impossible.”3
“Crazy” back then was a measure of the Chavez will—and his will was part of the reason so many men and women circled around him. People, poor people especially, are not going to throw in their lot with one who is easily deterred. To lead one must be steadfast, even when unyielding determination may seem somewhat ridiculous. And Chavez’s will was no less powerful, seemed no less outrageous to his compatriots, than did the will of his famous contemporary in the Caribbean, Fidel Castro. Castro’s wild boast that “the days of the dictatorship are numbered” to a dozen would-be guerrilla fighters in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra after sixty-eight of their comrades had just been gunned down was nearly matched by Chavez’s quiet plans to change the face of California agribusiness as he rode around the Central Valley with hardly enough money to buy his own dinner.
Whence this confidence and will? Gandhi was born into the prosperous merchant caste. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the son of a preacher with his own established church. Che Guevara was from the solid middle class with a medical degree in his pocket. Fidel Castro, perhaps the most willful and confident of them all, was from a wealthy, land-owning family, a light-skinned man in a world where whiteness mattered, a successful lawyer, and an excellent athlete. But Chavez? Chavez was a victim of the migrant trail, a small dark-skinned man, a failure in school who lacked the athletic prowess that could have impressed his childhood peers. He did have his faith, however, his sure belief in the righteousness of his cause, and by the age of thirty-five, when he decided to “organize the San Joaquin,” he had a long string of adult successes to sustain him. He had worked himself out of the fields. He had been the director of the most powerful Mexican American organization in the United States. He had earned enough money, $150 a week, so that Helen did not have to work outside the house. He was no longer a worker; he was a professional organizer.
And was his project really so mad? A new wind was blowing. Chavez and his cohorts could feel it at their back. The whole country was alive with possibility, led by the young African American demonstrators who were battering down the walls of segregation in the South. Chavez was not the only man thinking big. And those thinking about farm workers were particularly optimistic. Paul Taylor and Varden Fuller, at the time the two most respected scholars of agriculture in California, believed that the growers were now on the defensive, that farm worker unions were on the way.4 And Chavez had a plan. He would organize the home guard, farm workers who had been ignored by AWOC: the Mexican American families who worked the fields and made their homes in the Central Valley. And rather than organize them primarily at the point of production, around the issues they faced at work, he would organize them in their communities, around the issues they confronted off the job. Sustained by his religious convictions, using the techniques of community organizing that he had perfected over the previous ten years in the CSO, he set out to build something new, part union, part mutualista—a Central Valley Farm Workers Association.
“We always thought it would be different from a union,” said Jim Drake. “If somebody died, the family was going to be helped. If somebody needed tires, the association could help. If they were having trouble with immigration or welfare, the association would help. We would have a radio program. El Malcriado would be a community paper, not a union paper . . . ‘Union’ was not a popular word. We wanted to be much broader than that. We wanted the whole family to be part of the union.”5
The organizers of this new Farm Workers Association were quite conscious of the role the mutualistas had played in Mexican American history, particularly in the 1920s and early ’30s. Chavez had read about them in the few books he could find about farm worker history, but he and the other founders didn’t need books to know about mutualistas, as some were still around. Gilbert Padilla was even a member of one of the oldest groups, Sociedad Progresista, which had started in nineteenth-century Mexico but by the 1960s was little more than a burial society. “We had groups in Selma, Hanford, Tulare and Visalia,” Padilla recalled, “and when a member died the Progresistas would give the family one hundred dollars and send over a uniformed honor guard to stand watch at the funeral. It was the same sort of thing we were trying to do with the FWA life insurance plan.”6 The one other early FWA program, the credit union, was also a more up-to-date version of the loan policy maintained by many mutualistas in the 1920s, and the entire approach of the new association was based on the old mutualista idea of building community and power through mutual self-help.
But Chavez was nothing if not eclectic and pragmatic, and the association was not merely a new mutualista, or a new version of the CSO. This was three years after the Oxnard effort. Chavez was no longer supervised by Fred Ross or paid by
