programs with collective bargaining agreements was a central feature of Pope Leo XIII’s concept of Catholic unionism. The religious character of the FWA was written into its official Statement of Purpose, which begins: “As Christians and workers we wish to realize the ideals of the Church in our lives and in the world in which we live.” Most of what follows are quotes from Pope John XXIII: “Economic progress must be accompanied by a corresponding social progress”; “Workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner.” The Statement of Purpose emphasized that John “explicitly expressed his approval of labor unions.” The executive board even asserted for the FWA a retroactive endorsement from the departed pope: “Pope John reserved a special place in his thoughts . . . for Christian associations of workers who endure great difficulties in their endeavor to promote the material and moral interests of the working people. As members of the Farm Workers Association, we draw strength from his blessing.” The board members concluded with a one-paragraph summary of their program:
The Farm Workers Association has had experience in developing cooperative efforts among farm workers. It operates a credit union, an insurance plan, and a small consumer co-op for its members. In addition, the officers and staff have been authorized by the members to act as their representatives in negotiations with employers, although, unfortunately, employers have not responded to requests to negotiate.15
Most people joined the FWA as families. Jessie de la Cruz, daughter, wife, and mother of farm workers, who worked in the grapes and the cotton herself, was, along with her family, one of the first women members of the new association. She later became director of the Parlier field office and hiring hall, and her memory of how she was recruited to the FWA is typical.
We were living in Parlier at the time . . . There was a group of men who came to our house and one of them I later learned was Cesar Chavez. He started talking about the union, getting other members to join. I was in the kitchen making coffee to offer them, and he told my husband, “Your wife has to be here. She works out in the fields, too, so she needs to hear what we’re talking about.” So I got the coffee and then I sat down and I listened. And I liked what I heard. So after that I did join.
The experience could not have been more different from the way an AWOC organizer had treated her just a few years before. AWOC was also trying to recruit her husband, and only men were invited to the meetings, held in a bar in Fresno. One time Jessie drove to the meeting with her husband and had to wait in the car until the discussions were over.16
From the beginning, the FWA set out to organize the “home guard,” the Mexican American families whose roots went back to what is called “the first wave” of Mexican immigration to the United States, at the onset of the Mexican Revolution. These farm worker families of the Central Valley, who generally called themselves Mexicanos or Mexicans, had not been too active in the strikes of 1960–61. That upsurge had featured others: Anglo fruit tramps, both single men and families; Mexican and Filipino male workers, mostly migrant and either single or separated from home; and, on a few significant occasions, braceros, all males and all, by definition, away from home and family. The settled Mexican families who peopled the colonias and barrios of the Central Valley had held back. They had more to lose in strikes. Many of them didn’t migrate at all; some migrated short distances only during the summers, usually working for the same employer or the same group of employers year after year. If they struck and lost, they could more easily be blacklisted than their less-settled fellow workers because they were well known to their employers, foremen, and contractors. If blacklisted, they would have to uproot themselves and move to other areas, and moving around, following the crops, was precisely what this particular group of people had stopped doing. Moreover, many of these families had participated in strikes in the early 1950s, and still felt the effects of those defeats. Perhaps most important of all, in these families the mother and wife had enormous authority and influence, and as their first commitment was to the well-being of their families, these women often restrained their men. It is not that the women were less militant than the men; once they committed to a struggle, they were likely to be dogged in pursuing it. But the farm worker women tended to be more cautious, as did the men whose families were working alongside them in the fields, or whose families were close by. Chavez’s decision to focus on the families meant that he would have to take these mothers and wives seriously, and that success or failure would depend, among other things, on his ability to recruit significant numbers of women.
It is symbolically perfect that two out of four on Cesar’s original team—Helen Chavez and Dolores Huerta—were women. They were not mere feminist window dressing. True, Huerta would later become an important part of the UFW’s appeal to its middle-class feminist supporters, but in 1962 there was no women’s movement to consider. And Helen Chavez hardly ever allowed herself to be put forward to dress up anything; she preferred to take a back seat. These two women presented two contrasting modes of female participation in the FWA and were its authentic cofounders. Without them there would have been no initial attempt to organize the association, just as without the support of women farm workers the FWA might have died in its infancy.17
Leaving the CSO, like many of Chavez’s other sacrifices for the good of the cause, was harder on his wife than it was on him. Although he gave up considerable status and resources, Cesar continued to do what he had done before: organize, travel from one community to another, talk to people. More was required of Helen. When the family moved to Delano, she went back to work in the fields. She was thirty-four years old, and twelve years had passed since she had picked her last string bean in a field outside of San Jose. In the intervening years she had had eight children. Although Chavez’s CSO salary allowed her to remain at home to manage the household, her husband was often away and was not much help. And “home” kept shifting. In the CSO years, the Chavez family lived in six different cities: San Jose, Madera, Bakersfield, Hanford, Oxnard, and Los Angeles. In each new place it was left to Helen, with several young children in tow, to establish a home. With the loss of the CSO salary, and only their meager savings and Chavez’s unemployment checks to sustain them, the family needed money, so it was back to the fields for Helen, back to the life of a farm worker mom: getting up at 4 a.m. to lay out breakfast and lunch for the kids; carrying Birdy, the youngest, still asleep, over to his aunt Teresa’s; arriving in the fields by six for a full day of physical labor; going back to Teresa’s to pick up Birdy; returning home to make dinner; cleaning up the kitchen; getting everyone ready for bed.
The only way she could do it was by moving to Delano, where her two sisters and two brothers still lived. Helen, not Cesar, was the one who chose Delano.18 Chavez’s brother, Richard, lived there, and that was part of the reason for the move, but Delano had been just another stop on the road for Chavez’s parents, who had finally established a permanent residence in San Jose, while Helen’s family, the Fabelas, had made Delano their home. As young adults they had come from Mexico in the mass immigration of the 1920s, and had settled there in the early thirties, after stops in Brawley and McFarland. Helen, the second of their five children, started working in the Delano fields with her mother when she was seven years old and remembers walking to local ranches to pick cotton and grapes. When she was twelve her father died, and she and her older sister, Teresa, had to take on more responsibilities. A few years later they both quit school and became full-time field workers. When there was no work in the fields, Helen clerked in Delano stores. When she returned home in 1962 with her husband and eight children, Teresa was still in the vineyards working as a crew pusher (a low-level supervisory job that allowed her to watch Birdy while she worked), while their younger sister, Petra, labored regularly in the table grapes.
Through the years, most of Chavez’s family had gotten out of the fields, but Helen’s had not. Even though her return to the fields did not last long—a year later she was working full-time as the FWA bookkeeper for $50 a week—she always remained much more a part of Delano farm worker life and culture than her husband. Cesar’s class position had shifted throughout his life, first down, and then up. Helen’s family had never risen high enough to own land, and never fallen low enough to be true migrants. They were settled Delano
