Cesar Chevez, Dolores Huerta, and La Causa

The period of September 15 to October 15 is Latino Heritage Month. It’s therefore appropriate to devote this column to Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the movement they founded that still fights to improve the lives of farmworkers today. Fifty years ago, Chavez quit his job and moved his growing family to the small Central Valley town of Delano with a vision of starting a union to negotiate better pay and working conditions for agricultural workers. Soon after, Dolores Huerta joined him. No one believed it was possible to organize farmworkers. But they said, “Si, se puede” (It is possible) which became the motto of the union.

One Sonoma County resident was there at their side during the early years of the union’s battles. In this column, I share some of his memories of Cesar, Dolores and the early battles in the struggle for farmworkers’ rights. It’s a story of how a small but determined group of people, with few resources and facing violent opposition, brought about profound social change. “I can count on my right hand the big things in my life that I can look back on and know they were 100 percent right,” says Forestville resident Ed Frankel. Going to Delano and working on the farmworkers' strike is one of them.”

Ed is a retired UCLA professor of English and an award-winning poet and writer. But, in 1965, he was an 18-year-old kid from Philadelphia who went by “Eddie” and came to the Central Valley of California to volunteer for the movement to organize the farmworkers that ultimately became the United Farm Workers (“UFW”). Ed knew some Spanish from his uncle, a refugee from Russia who had lived in Argentina. His roots were in liberal causes championed by his parents and extended family: the labor movement of the 1930’s, the Spanish Civil War, the resistance to McCarthyism in the 1950s.

Ed would spend the next three years with the fledgling farmworkers’ organization, working only for room and board. As such, he was witness to the birth of a movement to gain power for a population that was largely powerless; an itinerant work force that was working long hours for less than survival wages, in fields poisoned with pesticide, often without bathroom facilities or water. When he left in 1968, the UFW was already a force to be reckoned with and working and living conditions had improved markedly for their members.

“I went to Delano to help in the farmworkers’ struggle, I wound up with the kind of education I would never have gotten in college”, Ed says nostalgically. “I learned so much, perhaps more than I tried to give, and in those days, like so many people who saw the winds of change rustling the wings and blowing up the robes of the Angel of History, I was prepared and willing to give a lot.”

The initial strike in Delano

In September 1965, the largest farmworkers strike in years broke out in the Central Valley, and Cesar Chavez was at the center of it. He had started a nascent organization then known as National Farm Workers Association that provided loans, health care and other assistance to farm workers. He had intended to transition his group to a union later but the strike forced the issue.

Soon, many idealistic people with special talents joined the effort. Luis Valdez, who later became known for his films “Zoot Suit“ and ”La Bamba,“ came to Delano and founded Teatro Campesino to entertain and inspire the striking workers. Various clergy came to volunteer their skills and support. College students and other youth like Ed helped maintain the picket lines, recruit new members, and organize boycotts of the growers’ products around the country.

Dolores

Also among the most charismatic of the group’s leaders was Dolores Huerta. She left her own stable job in Stockton, moved with her 7 children (she ultimately had 11 children) to the Central Valley and became one of the faces of the movement. At the union, she earned a salary of five dollars per week and survived on donations of food and clothing. “Dolores was unstoppable,” Ed remembers. “She begged, argued, cajoled, and took whatever she could get. In 15 minutes, Dolores Huerta could have the toughest roomful of union guys wiping their eyes and reaching for their wallets. She would walk out of a local meeting with $2000 stuffed into her long secondhand winter coat. I had stars in my eyes for Dolores. I suppose I always will.”

By the winter, the strike had some other allies – the AFL-CIO, clergy from the Catholic Church and Robert Kennedy, who came to Delano in March 1966. With national TV cameras filming, Kennedy famously dressed down a Kern County sheriff for his illegal arrests of non-violent strikers by suggesting he read the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The boycott and the march

For the first few months of the strike, the growers formed a united front, refusing to negotiate with the union. They hired replacement workers from Mexico and elsewhere, often promising them green cards.

Just before Christmas, Cesar decided to organize what would become the first nationwide grape boycott. He asked Ed if he would go to Detroit to organize the boycott there. “I was just 21 and I felt like had been selected to go to the moon for NASA.” Given $100 and gas money, Ed and several others stuffed their car trunk with leaflets and drove 3000 miles to organize boycotts back East. His future wife, Ida Cousino, went to Cleveland. Others went to Boston and Philadelphia.

In the spring, the organization announced a march of 300 miles from Delano to Sacramento. “Filing past the vineyards they had struck six months earlier, the farmworkers trudged north as the hot sun poured down upon them. They held aloft portraits of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the matron saint of Mexico and the movement’s adopted symbol of hope.” The Fight in the Fields, Susan Ferris and Ricardo Sandoval, p. 119 (“The Fight”). It was the longest protest march in U.S. history and it got the attention of the press. “Newsreels captured Cesar leading the march, limping on blistered feet… As the walkers approached each new town, their ranks would swell, sometimes stretching for two miles.” The Fight, p. 119. Public support for the strikers grew.

The march finished on Easter Sunday, 1966. A few days before, one of the largest growers, Schenley Industries, called offering to negotiate. Within days, Cesar and Schenley were signing the first agreement ever recognizing a union of U.S. farmworkers—the first of many to come.

“When the boycott finished and Schenley signed, the union sent us plane tickets home … we were so high, so elated, we could have flown back without the plane. I can’t think of too many times when I felt happier, more complete, or more fulfilled—proud, somehow, to be part of something bigger and more important than myself.”

A union is born

The fight continued, as most other Central Valley growers still resisted recognizing the UFW. Within months, the union expanded its activities to the desert community of Coachella, as well as Salinas and surrounding farmland in Monterey County.

Two weeks later Ed was back east again leading the boycott of DiGiorgio grapes, another large grower up north. This time it was St. Louis. He found himself negotiating for financial and other support with AFL-CIO representatives there. A letter from Cesar served as Ed’s credentials. He would later go to Marysville and Yuba City to organize on the DiGiorgio Ranch with Cesar’s cousin, Manual Chavez.

Later in the year, the Union sent him to Los Angeles to picket growers’ products at the large markets there. He went to negotiate with Mexican unions in Tamaulipas to try to get them to stop strike-breakers from coming across the border. Later, at age 22, he became the union rep for the Gallo, Novitiate and Franzia ranches.

But perhaps most dangerous was his work in Texas, where Ed was arrested and threatened with harm on multiple occasions by the Texas Rangers. Ed was sent to help organize the melon strike there in 1967. He and his colleagues from the union were arrested within days because it was supposedly illegal in Texas to strike. “What’s a Jew-boy like you doing down here?” one Texas ranger asked him threateningly. “You felt like you were in a John Wayne movie set in the 1800s, except in Rio Grande, the Lone Ranger was not your friend.”

"I gained a son“

In the winter of 1967, Ed’s mother read that Cesar Chavez was going to speak in Philadelphia at a church downtown. “My father was working nights driving a cab. It was a very cold night. She puts on a little makeup and lipstick, then a heavy dress, long overcoat, headscarf, and gloves.” Mrs. Frankel took a bus and then the subway downtown, and then walked the six blocks to the church. After Cesar’s speech, when the crowd began to thin out and Cesar is getting ready to leave, she makes her way up to him. Mrs. Frankel is a small, shy woman. She touches Cesar’s arm and he turns to her. She introduces herself.

“You know, Mr. Chavez, I lost my son to you.”

Cesar takes her hand. “But I gained a son, Mrs. Frankel.”

The legacy of a ragtag group constellated around Cesar

Ultimately, the battles of those first three years were largely won but the cost was high. Many farmworkers were arrested. A large number were fired, usually in violation of labor laws. Many of the union’s members were beaten up—by thugs hired by the growers and even by Sheriff’s deputies. Several were shot to death on the picket line. Cesar Chavez largely ruined his health during his various fasts.

However, against all odds, the union survived. The UFW organized thousands of the farmworking laborers in California, Arizona and Texas, among others. Working conditions changed. Wages went up, health and safety of the workers improved, pesticide was banned from many worksites. Most importantly, new state and federal laws protected the workers’ right to collective bargain—which gave them long-term power over their lives and work.

Today, 50 years later, the UFW is still active in the fight to improve the working conditions of the farmworker. Just last month, the union repeated the famous march on Sacramento from 1965 in order to lobby Governor Newsom to sign legislation making it easier for farmworkers to vote.

The lessons of that extraordinary time in Delano stay with Ed to this day.

“I am reminded that quantum social changes are possible. I am reminded how quickly class lines can be blurred, social borders erased and moved. I am reminded what can happen when one person doesn’t move to the back of the bus, when one young man stands up on the roof of a car outside of Sproul Hall in Berkeley, when four children walk a gauntlet of hate into a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

I am reminded how a ragtag collection of people who constellated around Cesar Chavez and the NFWA at the perfect historical moment could court and then spark significant cultural change.“

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NOTE: Professor Frankel has written a powerful essay entitled “In the Lap of the Angel of History” of his experiences with the farmworkers union that I have drawn from substantially in this article. You can read the entire essay at: https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/essays/essays/013%20Frankel_Ed.pdf