Starting a major organizing drive without outside funding was one clear departure from the Alinsky protocal; so was Chavez’s early emphasis on avoiding conflict and publicity, and so, especially, was the role of principal organizer.
Soon after setting up house in Delano in the spring of 1962, Chavez started driving up and down the Central Valley, visiting old contacts and making new ones. He urged some of the old CSO activists to join this new effort. He surveyed workers on what wages they wanted to earn. He collected relatively high dues of $3.50 a month ($1 of which would pay for members’ life insurance premiums as soon as he could sign up three hundred people), and he helped the new members with the various problems they had with government agencies. Chavez was an organizer, in the most direct sense of that word: he was trying to put together an organization. At the first FWA convention, held in Fresno in September 1962, about six months after the organizing effort began, the group had fewer than fifty voting members. Chavez, running unopposed, received sixteen votes for the position of head of staff, or general director.7 Jesus Martinez, like a typical bombastic leader in Chavez’s menagerie of political types, gave a dynamic, charismatic speech, and was elected president. But when he failed to show up at the next two executive board meetings, the board, acknowledging that Chavez was not only the organizer but also the leader of this barely surviving outfit, abolished the position of general director and named Chavez president. Three months later a second, even smaller, National Farm Workers Association convention approved the change.8
It seemed reasonable. As Gilbert Padilla later explained, “We weren’t going to do that CSO thing again where we were the organizers, we did all the work, but we weren’t the leaders of the organization.”9 Less than a year had passed since Chavez had left the CSO, disappointed in the people who had refused to follow his direction. Often taking jobs a few steps up from the fields—as railroad workers, small shop owners, low-level government employees—the CSO leaders, Chavez felt, had turned their backs on the bulk of the people in their communities. Some had even taken jobs in the new Pat Brown administration. Now, cut off from all the resources of the CSO, he was starting a new, still fragile organization, and he was not about to turn over the leadership to some slacker just because he had given a good speech at a meeting.
Nevertheless, Chavez was defensive about merging the positions of general director and president. He always left out that detail when he recounted the history of the UFW, claiming he had been elected at the first convention. He wasn’t so worried about the lack of a formal vote; what bothered him was the problem of developing leadership in his new organization. Identifying and developing new leaders had been his most important job in the CSO. But now, so early in the FWA game, could he both lead and stand back enough to allow new leaders to emerge? For the previous ten years he had been schooled by Alinsky and Ross to believe that that would be very hard to do.
Such questions were much in the air in 1962. Similar discussions were going on within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and activist church organizations. Henry Anderson, who had worked with Norman Smith to keep AWOC going after the AFL-CIO cut its funding, wrote a long paper, “To Build a Union: Comments on the Organization of Farm Workers,” mimeographed copies of which were circulated among the various groups trying to organize in the fields at the time. Anderson, a democratic socialist, insisted that any successful farm worker union had to be democratically structured, with independent locals and in control of its own destiny. The organizers could legitimately come from outside the farm worker community, he argued, but the leadership of the new union must come from the farm workers themselves. Anderson had not read Alinsky, but nevertheless he argued in classic Alinsky style that the organizers must find and develop the leaders and then move on: “What is needed is someone to alter conditions in such a way that the natural leadership of the farm labor force is liberated. This someone must be keenly sensitive to the danger of his overstaying his visit. He must be as nearly without personal ambition as one can be and still be human.”10
Thus, Anderson, too, based his democratic theory—the hope that common people can collectively run their own lives—on the existence of a most uncommon organizer, one who was without ambition, almost a saint. Soon enough, however, Anderson, enthusiastic about Chavez’s leadership of the new farm worker movement, abandoned some of his earlier formulation. With Joan London he wrote a book in 1970, So Shall Ye Reap, celebrating the new leader’s arrival. The farm worker organization was democratic, they argued, because Chavez and other leaders had been farm workers, and because they were independent and not beholden to other union officials. Chavez was fully in control and indispensable, Anderson reported, but still looked forward to a time when he could “go to the mountains or some place where it’s quiet, and read all the classics in Spanish and English.” Not wanting to stay around (even as he did) was a good indication that Chavez sought power not for himself but for farm workers. And, besides, how could such a man be power-hungry:
He enters a public meeting so unobtrusively that one is hardly aware of his presence until he is introduced to speak. He never raises his voice in public utterances, any more than private. He brushes a persistent shock of hair from his forehead, and talks conversationally whether the gathering is large or small, broadcast, televised, or unrecorded. He makes little jokes as he goes along, but unless one is familiar with the farm workers’ universe of discourse, one may not realize they are jokes, they are invariably understated.11
Chavez was precisely the kind of leader who could build a space where other leaders could thrive, because “in the course of becoming a man himself, Cesar Chavez has been a maker of men.”12
In retrospect it is not surprising that Chavez and the FWA would wander off the established organizational charts when it came to the relationship between leaders and organizers, as the whole nature of the new association was unmapped and somewhat vague. No one thought of the FWA as an organizational stepping stone—a transitional form—on the road to becoming a regular American union. Such a union was understood as something to be avoided. Chavez shared the Alinskyite critique of postwar unionism, and he had not been happy with what he had seen of the United Packinghouse Workers Association in Oxnard or of the 1960–61 lettuce strike in the Imperial Valley. Dolores Huerta had spent a short time working in Norman Smith’s early AWOC, and had left in disgust over his organizing methods and lack of interest in Stockton’s Mexican American community. Unions, they agreed, were too bureaucratic, too focused on the workers’ experience on the job while ignoring other problems, and too caught up in a culture of strikes and confrontation. Besides, unions had a mixed legacy in the fields. They had a long history of either ignoring the struggles of farm workers or of getting involved only intermittently, of being here today and gone tomorrow. Worse, contemporary union efforts in the fields were being led by Anglos, most of whom didn’t speak Spanish and some of whom were out and out racists. Early on, the FWA leaders came to consider the revived AWOC, under the leadership of Al Green, to be a primary adversary. A conventional union was not the goal, it was, as currently constituted, a rival form of organization.
The FWA had a stamp, used on many of its leaflets: “The Farm Workers Association is not a Union.” Other leaflets began with the admonition: “Este movimiento se hace enteramente por los trabajadores y no es afiliado a ninguna unión, sindicato, or partido político: “This movement is made entirely by workers and is affiliated with no union or political party.”13 Certainly Chavez wanted the FWA eventually to sign collective bargaining agreements—in a letter to Dolores Huerta before the first FWA convention, he called such agreements his “main purpose.” Yet labor contracts did not represent the essence of what he was building. The emphasis was on self-help and mutual assistance; the FWA’s first program, the group life insurance policy, was exemplary of the kind of programs the FWA had in mind.14
Likewise, the FWA’s founders did not casually choose the term “association.” If they had wanted a new mutualista, they would have called the group a sociedad. The closest model for what they were trying to build was probably the Agricultural Workers Association of Father MacDonnell and Father McCullough, which enjoyed a brief life from the fall of 1958 to the spring of 1959. The FWA was not
