By Duane E. Campbell
 |
| Cesar Chavez |
On March 31, 2015, Eleven
states and numerous cities will
hold holidays celebrating labor and
Latino Leader Cesar Chavez. Conferences, marches and celebrations will occur in
numerous cities this weekend. See the
prior post on the UCD conference. A recent film Cesar Chavez: An American
Hero, starring Michael Peña as Cesar
Chavez and Rosario Dawson as Dolores
Huerta presents important parts of this story and shows how Chavez was lied
about and attacked by Ronald Reagan, the Nixon Administration, the Republican
Party and numerous right wing forces.
Meanwhile, in March
of 2015 hundreds of farmworkers have
walked off their jobs in Baja California, Mexico, from the agricultural fields just
a few miles from the U.S. border , fields developed to provide a harvest to the
U.S. markets. Farm labor strikes and
violence against strikers remains a volatile issue. Farm workers deserve dignity, respect, and
fair wages. Achieving these goals will
require a union. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-baja-farmworkers-20150325-story.html
The current UFW
leadership, as well as former UFW leaders
and current DSA Honorary Chairs
Eliseo Medina and Dolores Huerta
are recognized leaders in the ongoing efforts to achieve comprehensive
immigration reform in the nation.
On immigration, UFW President Arturo Rodriquez
says, “We urge Republicans to abandon their political games that hurt millions
of hard-working, taxpaying immigrants and their families, and help us finish
the job by passing legislation such as the comprehensive reform bill that was
approved by the Senate on a bipartisan vote in June 2013,”
 |
| Aruturo Rodriguez |
What Chavez, Huerta did accomplish along with Philip Vera Cruz , Marshall Ganz, LeRoy Chatfield, Gil Padilla,
Eliseo Medina and hundreds of others was
to organize in California the first
successful farm worker union against overwhelming odds.
Prior to the creation of the UFW as a union in the 1960’s, attempts to organize a farm worker union had been
destroyed by racism and corporate power. Chavez, Huerta, Philip
Vera Cruz, and the others deliberately
created a multiracial union; Mexican,
Mexican American, Filipino, African-American, Dominican, Puerto Rican
and Arab workers, among others, have been part of the UFW. This cross racial organizing was essential in order to combat the prior divisions and exploitations of workers
based upon race and language. Dividing the workers on racial and language lines, as well as immigration status always left the corporations the winners. See
more on the UFW at www.MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org
Let us be clear.
Chavez was religious, but he was not a saint. Neither were the growers,
their Teamster collaborators, nor corporate agribusiness saints. Celebrations should not be about hero worship
or uncritical praise, nor should we ignore the present oppression of farm
workers .
The violent assaults
on the farmworkers and UFW from 1960- 1980 along with the current reconquest of power in
the fields by corporate agriculture are
examples of strategic racism as described by Ian Haney López in Dog
Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked
the Middle Class ( 2014) . It is the development and implementation of racial practices because they benefit a group
or a class.
Chávez chose to build a union that incorporated the
strategies of social movements and community organizing. They allied the union with churches,
students, and organized labor. The successful creation of the UFW
changed the nature of labor organizing in the Southwest and
contributed significantly to the growth
of Latino politics in the U.S.
The UFW and Chavez and Huerta have always had severe critics
from the Right and from corporate
agriculture. Just as Martin Luther King
Jr. had severe critics in the African American community of his time, Chavez
faced fierce criticism from within the Mexican and Mexican American
communities. Dolores Huerta has been banned from the history text books in Texas
and Arizona as too radical. As they did
with Chavez, they accuse her of being a communist. Both also have critics from
the left.
What the left critics allege,
Frank Bardacke’s Trampling
Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.
(2011), Verso. is the view of a well- informed observer who
worked in the lettuce fields near Salinas as is Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work
and Struggle in the Fields of California (2012) by Bruce
Neuberger. These books, along with
Pawell’s have been reviewed in prior posts . http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2011/12/trampling-out-vintage.html
These books argue a
peculiar point of view: they strongly and persistently imply that the current
problems of exploitation of workers
in farm labor was caused by the destructive behavior of Cesar Chavez,
his instability, and his ego -
not by corporate agriculture; not by the racist state in rural California
 |
| Dolores Huerta |
On the other hand Cesar Chavez was given the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1994, and Dolores Huerta ( A DSA Honorary
Chair) was given the Medal of Freedom in 2012.
See more on Dolores at http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2013/03/cesar-chavez-and-dolores-huerta.html
Teaching materials
and videos have been made recording their work.
Schools, scholarships, foundations,
organizing institutes and political organizations have been named after them. Few
labor or Latino leaders have
achieved such positive recognition.
When writers take this view,
they then need to explain why and
how the parallel decline of the Teamsters, the ILGWU, the Auto Workers , the
Steelworkers, the IAM, and other unions
occurred during this same era. Compare
the period of decline of 1977-1986 in the UFW to the complex battles of the Reuther Brothers to gain control and to
keep control of the United Auto Workers,
including the UAW’s relationship with the AFL-CIO . (1949-1970). The UAW went from 1.5 million members in 1979
to 390,000 in 2010, and the United Steelworkers and other unions suffered similar declines.
It doesn’t require a theory of emotional instability and personal
interventions to explain that the
smaller, less established, less well funded union – the UFW- suffered dramatic declines
from racial oppression and the brutal
assault on the union in the
fields of Texas, Arizona and California.
The right wing critics under play the role of the corporate
assault on unions, and in particular the assault on a union led by Mexican American leaders. This was, after
all, the era when Ronald Reagan came to power in California along
with the organization of the forces that came to be called neo-liberalism. It was also a time of consolidation of racial power in
agriculture.
Marshall Ganz, who was a leader in the union and a
participant in the internal struggles, tells a more complex and more complete
story in his book, Why David Sometimes
Wins. (2009) See the review in
Talking Union http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/why-david-sometimes-wins-marshall-ganz/
In addition to the assault from corporate agriculture, the
Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, neoliberalism and racism, the UFW was
confronted with internal union struggles
for democracy, an intra union assault by
the Teamsters, and with the tumultuous
and disruptive politics on the left in
the 60’s and 70’s.
In my opinion, Bardacke, Pawell, and Neuberger under analyze
the nature of the racial state and the
interaction of racial and economic oppression in the fields. And, these critics significantly failed
to see the they dynamics of the
struggle for Chicano/Mexican American
self determination within the UFW.
The role of racism, and the individual reactions to systemic
structural racial oppression are complex and
vary in part based upon the differences in experiences of the
participants. As the Chicano movement
argued at its core- the experiences of U.S. born and reared Mexican Americans and Chicanos were different
than the experiences and the perceptions of racism of Mexican immigrants, both
documented and undocumented. There are
a diversity of racisms and a diversity in the manner in which workers learn to respond to oppression. Chicanos and Mexican Americans grew up, were
educated, and worked in an internal colony.
Their schools, their unions, and their political experiences were
structured along racial lines. They learned colonized structures. The authors do not sufficiently acknowledge
the struggle of the UFW and the Chicano Movement in breaking this
colonial legacy.
Marshall Ganz in Why
David Sometimes Wins, does a
better job of describing the internal dynamics of UFW organizing- after all he
was there. He describes some of the racial fault lines of farm worker organizing. Ganz was the director of organizing for the UFW in Salinas and a long time member
of the UFW executive board.
Chavez knew well some of
the failings of unions in the
1960’s, including the problems of a
growing internal bureaucracy, but the UFW in the 1980’s was not able to create a viable democratic union movement. Marshall Ganz
argues that Chavez deconstructed the organizational strength of the UFW
in the 1979 -1981 period in an effort to keep personal control of the
union. (Ganz, p. 247 )
The critics who blame
individuals for the union’s decline also
miss the important rise of Latino politics in the Southwest today. Chavez and the UFW played a significant role by training generations of future leaders as organizers
as is well described in Randy Shaw’s, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW,
and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st. Century. The UFW was a place
where hundreds learned organizing skills, politics, discipline, and how
to work in multi racial movement
politics – skills needed by many on the left.
Today hundreds of union community leaders and legislators, particularly
in California, are veterans, trained in for the long distance struggle of the UFW.
The Current Situation – Strategic Racism
The
movement led by Cesar Chavez , Dolores Huerta and others
created a union and reduced the oppression of farm workers for a
time. Workers learned to not accept
poor jobs, poor pay, unsafe working
conditions as natural or inevitable.
Then the corporations and the Right Wing forces adapted their strategies
of oppression and counter attacked.
The assault on the UFW and the current reconquest of power
in the fields are examples of strategic racism, that is a system of racial
oppression created and enforced because it benefits the over class- in this
case corporate agriculture and farm owners. Strategic racism includes a complex structure of institutions and
individuals from police and sheriffs, to immigration authorities and anti
immigrant activists, and elected officials and their support networks. These groups foster and promote inter racial
conflict, job competition, and anti union organizing, as strategies to keep wages and benefits low and to promote
their continuing white supremacy in rural California.
As
the union was weakened by the Right Wing corporate assault, the conditions in
the fields returned almost to their prior level of exploitation. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act had it
budget cut by 30 % for years under
Governor Deukmejian in 1982- 1986 along with other assaults on the law. Now,
thousands of new immigrants harvest the crops and only a small percent are protected
by union contracts. Over 200,000 indigenous workers, mostly from
Mexico, harvest the crops in the Southwest.
They are Mixtec, Zapotec, Triqui and more. They do have a few health, safety and wage
protection by California labor laws, along with the right to farm worker collective bargaining elections
and binding arbitration established
significantly by the political activity of the current UFW – more than farm
workers have in any other state.
Beyond the conflicts
over the Chavez and Huerta legacy, the
more important points are the current conditions of farmworkers in the U.S. and
in Mexico. Labor journalist David Bacon
has written important pieces on this
including , his, Illegal People: How
Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Migrants, (2008) The Children of Nafta, and The
Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration. (2013). See review here https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/the-right-to-stay-home-how-u-s-policy-drives-mexican-migration/. Also
see https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/linking-trade-work-and-migration/ and
his recent piece, “Grapes of Wrath:
California farmworkers fight to unionize,
on Al Jazeera (2015) which
explains the important current battle of the UFW.
Although the children of
Mexican, Mexican American and Latino parents currently make up over 52% of all
the school age children in California,
There is only a little about their
history in the state textbooks. A campaign
is under way to change this inappropriate situation. http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2015/03/write-chicano-history-into-california.html.
Portions of this piece were previously posted on Talking Union. https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/cesar-chavez-the-ufw-and-strategic-racism/
Portions of this piece were previously posted on Talking Union. https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/cesar-chavez-the-ufw-and-strategic-racism/
The author and Cesar Chavez. 1972
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