Cesar Chavez and Immigration Reform
Cesar Chavez and Immigration Reform
Twenty years after his death, Cesar Chavez, the legendary United Farm Workers Union leader, is again in the news. This time, the charge is that Chavez was anti-immigrant. What’s made the charge newsworthy is the publicity surrounding Chavez, a forthcoming film by Diego Luna, in combination with the fierce fight in Congress over immigration reform. In reality, Chavez’s thinking on immigration was far more thoughtful and humane than his critics, past and present, allow. I got to see that complexity firsthand when I worked for the UFW in California in the summer of 1967 at the start of the union’s strike against the Giumarra Company and later when I joined grape boycott teams in Boston and New York.
Giumarra was the most powerful grower the UFW had ever faced. But the union’s effort to reach workers, led by New Deal veteran Fred Ross, overcame obstacle after obstacle. Ross assigned organizers different crews to bring over to the union’s side. By August 3, when the strike officially began, our success was clear. A vast majority of Giumarra field workers had signed authorization cards saying they wanted a union. The workers who had signed union cards were, to be sure, worried over what lay ahead for them. The night of the official strike vote, I remember feeling their nervousness, even as the strike meeting ended with the loudest singing I have heard of “Nosotros Venceremos” (“We Shall Overcome”).
The nervousness did not get in the way of the strike. The first day of the strike, at sunrise (the ideal time in the day for picking grapes), the Giumarra fields were essentially empty. Even workers thought to be undecided had come over to the union’s side. I can still recall driving four workers who joined the strike at the last minute home at five in the morning in the car I shared with another organizer.
The real trouble came in the days following the start of the strike. The Giumarra Company began busing in workers from towns along both sides of the United States-Mexico border. Once in the fields, the new workers presented a huge organizing problem. Many of the workers had not been told there was a strike. Many did not have legal work permits. Most had little money with them and no transportation to get home, even if they wanted to leave the fields on their own. Using a bullhorn to reach these workers and persuade them to come out of the fields was nearly impossible. The fields were private property. Only the roads bordering them were accessible for the union. We were, for the most part, limited to shouting “la huelga” (strike) and making it clear to the workers that they had come into a tense labor battle.
Under these circumstances, Chavez and the UFW called on Immigration and Nationalization Service and the Department of Labor to enforce the law and check on the immigration status of the new Giumarra workers. Unprotected by the New Deal-era National Labor Relations Act, which excluded agricultural workers and domestic workers from collective bargaining protection, the Farm Workers were vulnerable to strike-breaking tactics that industrial unions had not faced since the early 1930s. The national grape boycott, in which consumers were asked to stop buying grapes from Giumarra and other growers that let Giumarra use their labels, was an outgrowth of this unique situation. The boycott helped turn a local strike into la causa, a crusade for social justice that the whole country could take part in.
Saying that Chavez’s opposition to the use of undocumented workers to break a strike amounts to his being anti-immigrant turns basic facts on their head. Chavez was not being anti-immigrant during the Giumarra strike, nor earlier when he opposed the notorious bracero labor program, which originally supplied the United States with guest workers from Mexico during the labor shortage of the Second World War. Chavez’s quarrel with the bracero program stemmed from its continuation into the 1960s, when the program solely benefited growers, who got a steady supply of seasonal Mexican laborers in no position to make contract demands (Congress ended the program in 1964). It was no accident than in 1986, seven years before his death, Chavez supported the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted legal status to around three million undocumented workers. Then, as before, he was worrying about families like the one he grew up in, who had struggled all their lives to find steady employment. At last he had the opportunity to endorse legislation that brought undocumented workers out of the shadows and made them better able to bargain with their employers.
Chavez had many flaws. He personalized his leadership of the United Farm Workers to such an extent that he finally drove away many of the union’s best organizers. The union today is a shadow of its former self. But being anti-immigrant was not part of Chavez’s character. To suggest otherwise is just another way of obstructing the current battle for immigration reform.
For more on Chavez and the UFW, read Nicolaus Mills’s 1973 Dissent report on the grape strike, “The Whip and the Bee.”
Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of The Triumph of Meanness: America’s War Against Its Better Self.
