asserted, had two tasks, “to help low income people deal with their own problems in organizations of their own; and to provide continuous interpretation of the needs and actions of the low income people to established citizens (churchmen and others) so they may understand and respond humanely.”26
Part of what made Hartmire so happy about this formula was the particular presence of Chavez. Religious folks could trust him. He was a trained community organizer, and he was also an authentically religious person. The progressive middle-class church would have little trouble understanding and appreciating his organizing efforts. Church activists put up with Alinsky’s vulgar style because he seemed to have an organizing theory that worked, and they suspected that their own Christian ethics were not completely adequate for dealing with the political world. But Alinsky was not an appealing figure. Hartmire called him a “loudmouth bitcher and complainer.”27 How different was Chavez’s style: just as calculating and skilled as Alinsky, but also deeply spiritual. Telling the world about Cesar Chavez, explaining his efforts at organizing farm workers to “established citizens,” would be an easy, welcome task. For Hartmire, Cesar Chavez was the answer to a prayer, and he gave Chavez nearly unconditional support, rarely questioning his judgment and never meddling in internal FWA affairs. “The Church is the one group that isn’t expecting anything from us,” Chavez later told the writer John Gregory Dunne. “They’re not doing any politicking among us. All the other groups, the unions, the civil-rights groups, they all want something in return for their support. Not the Church.”28
Although the FWA was a family affair, there was always a first family: Chavez, Helen, Richard, Manuel . . . and Dolores Huerta. Dolores would seem to be out of place in the early years, as she was a Chavez by neither blood nor marriage. Close to Cesar, she nonetheless held a position similar to that of Gilbert Padilla: a cherished associate with whom Chavez had worked for ten years before he founded the FWA. But even at the beginning, Dolores got closer to the Chavez family than Gilbert. Padilla was married, and his first wife was dubious about all the time he put into politics; she was certainly not part of the organizing team, and she kept her husband away from the Chavez family. Huerta was mostly estranged from her two husbands in the CSO years, and she divorced the second one as she joined the FWA in Delano in 1964. Then, in 1972, she married Richard Chavez, after what had been, to insiders, a scandalous affair begun while Richard was still married. Sally, Richard’s wife was a friend of Helen’s, and she complained to Cesar, who could do nothing to stop the virtually open liaison. Besides, it made perfect political sense. Dolores was part of the inner core but the only nonfamily member; Richard was married to a woman who resented all the time he spent working for the union. Both problems were solved simultaneously by shuffling the marital deck.29
Richard, two years younger than Cesar, was his true lifetime companion. As children they had planted and cultivated their first garden, trapped gophers, worked at their father’s gas station, gotten in and out of trouble on the homestead, watched as it was destroyed, experienced the migrant trail, shined shoes, collected tin foil, worked in the movie house, shelled walnuts, picked raisins, and done all manner of farmwork. After World War II they got married within two months of each other, moved their new families into the same house, tried sharecropping together, moved to Crescent City together, and eventually settled across the street from each other in San Jose. In all their lives, it was only in the CSO years, from 1952 to 1962, that Cesar and Richard Chavez voluntarily spent any significant amount of time away from each other. Even then, Richard became a local leader of the CSO in Delano, where he worked as a journeyman carpenter. And although Cesar’s regular explanation for his decision to start the association in Delano—that he knew Richard wouldn’t let him starve there—was mostly a fiction, the core truth of it was that moving there meant Cesar and Richard would be reunited.
It also meant the return of cousin Manuel, who was two years older than Cesar. Manuel Chavez had been a late-comer to the childhood union of Richard and his brother. Manuel’s family lived near Cesar and Richard’s in Arizona, but the three boys didn’t become close until Manuel’s mother died when he was twelve. He was the youngest child, much younger than his brothers and sisters, who were already married, and at first he was passed around among some of his elder siblings. That didn’t work out—Manuel was troublesome even then—and soon he was living with Richard and Cesar. Their household was already in crisis when Manuel arrived, and he became a guide for the boys to life’s harsh realities—not a big brother, for Cesar was already that, but a wild, more worldly-wise junior partner. The three stayed together through the migrant years, with Manuel often getting into trouble and even spending time in jail for fighting. He went into the Navy before Cesar, came out as Cesar went in, and then joined the two brothers for the move to Crescent City. After that he went to the Mexican border and became a petty thief and con man, doing time in county jails for assault, disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, auto theft, and nearly two years in federal prison for selling marijuana. He left his most legitimate job, selling used cars, which he did off and on, to become an organizer for the FWA.30
The three of them made a handsome picture, their faces revealing nearly the full racial heritage of the Mexican American people. Manuel was a güero, white, taller than the other two, with the looks of the European conquerors. Cesar was an Indio, with dark skin, high cheekbones, straight black hair, and a short, thick body. Richard was taller than his older brother, and his face suggested an even earlier heritage: his eyes became a horizontal line when he smiled, and for many years he sported a stringy, Fu Manchu mustache and beard. But their physical differences only hinted at the moral and political drama embedded in the way these three companions had learned, over time, to get along and to not get along. Cesar in the lead: practical and imaginative, moral and cunning. Richard only practical, so deep into the way things are that he couldn’t imagine a different way that they might be. Manuel was only cunning. Together, though, they lacked few political skills or sensibilities.
Richard was a careful, likable man—“sweet, sweet Richard,” as one staff member called him. So sweet that he couldn’t say no to Cesar, who could say no to just about anyone. While Cesar was organizing the CSO, Richard learned to build houses and built one for himself, which Cesar later used as collateral on a loan to start the credit union. Richard was reluctant but went along. It wasn’t that he was worried about losing his house (he could build another); he just didn’t take to all the commotion, preferring a quieter life and never asking too much of himself or of others. It was his great weakness as an organizer. Richard always thought that Cesar expected too much of ordinary human beings, that Cesar tried to get more out of people through moral persuasion than people were willing to give. Cesar often said that he couldn’t understand how a man would choose to spend his free time cutting the lawn when there were so many more important things to do. Richard liked to cut the lawn himself, and he even took up golf. Richard counseled Cesar to be more conservative about his hopes, and he always pushed for what he called “realism,” for keeping the association’s, and then the union’s, goals practical, sensible, down to earth.
Nobody ever called Manuel “sweet, sweet Manuel.” Chris Hartmire called him a “charming scoundrel.” Virginia Hirsch dubbed him “one of the great bullshitters of all time.” And even some who never took to him—such as Gilbert Padilla, who finally concluded that he was “just a petty crook,” or Marshall Ganz, who eventually called him the “evil twin in a Shakespearean drama”—spent a good deal of time sitting right beside him, scheming, listening, joking, plotting. No one was ever sure which of his stories to believe, and everyone knew that most of his tales involved wild exaggerations. Typical was his oft-stated boast that he had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy for punching an officer, although his Navy record states that he was discharged honorably.31
Manuel got in more than enough trouble with the law to back up his expertly crafted, humorously malevolent self-portrait. Typical was the scrape that sent him to jail in the spring of 1964, while he was a part-time organizer for the FWA. Working for a Bakersfield company, he delivered produce to local markets in Taft, and instead of turning in all the checks he received, he forged the endorsements on some of them and cashed them at a local bar and low-ball club. Records
