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| Cesar Chavez & Duane Campbell. 1972 |
Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You
cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot
humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not
afraid anymore. Cesar Chávez. November 9, 1984.
On March 31, 2018, 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 and particularly in rural farm areas of the nation. 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.
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.
The current UFW
leadership, as well as former UFW leaders
and former 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,” Rodriguez
said. Similar compromise proposals, negotiated by the UFW and the
nation's major agricultural employer associations, have passed the U.S. Senate
multiple times over the last decade. The same proposal has won majority support
in the House of Representatives, even though House GOP leaders have refused to
permit a vote on the measure. “The UFW will not rest until the President's
deferred relief is enacted and a permanent immigration reform, including a path
to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants, is signed into law.” www.UFW.org
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.
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 in the U.S.
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. Dolores Huerta has been banned from the history text books in Texas
and Arizona as too radical. 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 on Talking Union. See review here. http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/its-a-long-way-from-delano-to-watsonville-a-review/
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
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.
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 above 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/
This isn’t to say that Chavez, Huerta and many on the UFW
Executive Board did not have
shortcomings. They did. Ganz describes several of these in his book and in interviews he participated in for
the new book, From the Jaws of Victory by Matt
Garcia (2012). Ganz provide some
well researched and insightful observations on the dynamics of a union trying
to transition from a movement to a union- or to something else. This
analysis is helpful to organizers trying to build unions.
There were conflicts and internal contradictions. Not many movements last for even ten years
let alone thirty. 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.
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. For a record of this period see David Bacon’s, The
Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (2013), and In the Fields of the North/ En Los Campos del Norte by David Bacon University
of California Press, 2017
The Times They are A Changing
!
Although the children of
Mexican, Mexican American and Latino parents currently make up over 52% of all
the school age children in California. At 2:45 PM July 14, 2016, the California State Board of
Education unanimously endorsed a new History /Social Science Framework for
California’s public schools that includes a substantial addition of
Chicano/Latino history, improved history of LGBT people, and improvements in
several other histories. The new books cover the histories of Cesar Chavez,
Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, and many more.
This completes a 6
year effort against substantial opposition to revise the California Framework. As
a result textbooks in California in 2017 will be the most inclusive ever
required, and all students will be taught an inclusive history. This has been
the major campaign of this blog and the Mexican American Digital History
project since 2009.
Duane Campbell
is a professor emeritus of bilingual multicultural education at California
State University Sacramento, a union activist, and a former chair of Sacramento DSA. He was a
volunteer for the UFW from 1972- 1977. He is the Director of the Mexican
American Digital History project. www.MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org
Photo, Cesar Chavez and Duane Campbell, 1972.
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