Cesar's Ghost (Page 5)

Philip Vera Cruz, onetime vice president of the union, who worked in the grapes for twenty years before Chavez came along, is the only staff member who put his criticism into print. Vera Cruz, who could not be guilt-tripped into silence, describes in an oral history, taken by Craig Scharlin and Lilia Villanueva, a U.F.W. staff where "power was held by Cesar alone." His conclusion is straightforward:

One thing the union would never allow was for people to criticize Cesar. If a union leader is built up as a symbol and he talks like he was God, then there is no way you can have true democracy in the union because the members are just generally deprived of their right to reason for themselves.

The most crucial U.F.W. purge was not against the union staff but against its own farmworker members--people who dared to give the union some alternative, middle-level leadership. The trouble began when the 1979 contracts provided for full-time union grievers, elected by the workers, to handle specific complaints from the work crews. Some of the people elected in Salinas, the first workers in the hierarchy to have any real power independent of Chavez, regularly criticized several internal union policies.

At the union's 1981 convention in Fresno these men and women supported three independent candidates, not previously approved by Chavez, for election to the U.F.W.'s executive board. Afterward, they were fired from their jobs back in Salinas. Although they eventually won a nearly five-year court battle against Chavez and the union, the damage was done. No secondary leadership emerging from the ranks would be tolerated in the U.F.W.

I talked to one of the men, Aristeo Zambrano, a few weeks after the funeral. Aristeo was one of eleven children born to a farmworker family in Chavinda, Michoacán. His father worked as a bracero between 1945 and 1960, and after getting his papers fixed, he brought his son, then 14, to Hayward, California, in 1982. Aristeo moved to Salinas in 1974 and got a job cutting broccoli at a U.F.W.-organized company--Associated Produce. He was elected to the ranch committee in 1976; for the next six years he was an active unionist, re-elected to the committee every year and then to the position of paid representative, until he was fired by Chavez.

I asked him the same question I had asked Roberto Fernandez. What went wrong? How did the union fall so far so fast? His answer took several hours. Here are a few minutes of it.

"The problem developed way before we were fired in 1982. In the mid-seventies, when I became an activist, Chavez was making every decision in the union. If a car in Salinas needed a new tire, we had to check with Cesar in La Paz. He controlled every detail of union business. And nobody was allowed to say Chavez made a mistake, even when he had. And when you talked to him you had to humble yourself, as if he were a King or the Pope....

"I remember in particular a closed meeting during the strike, just before the Salinas convention in 1979. He called together about twenty of us--the elected picket captains and strike coordinators--and told us that he was going to call off the strike and send us on the boycott. We refused, and we told him so. We thought the strike should be extended, not called off. And we damn sure were not going on any boycott.

"Well, he couldn't call off the strike without our support, and we did continue to fight and we won. Which made us stronger. That meeting, and its aftermath, was a political challenge to Cesar. It meant that the situation in the union had changed. He was going to have to deal with us--with the direct representatives of the workers--and, in some way or other, share power with us.

"And that was what he couldn't do. He was incapable of sharing power. So after the 1982 convention-the first U.F.W. convention that was not simply a staged show, the first convention where true disagreements came to the floor--he fired us. First he tried to organize recall elections, so that farmworkers would replace us. But he couldn't do it. We had too much support in the fields.

"We went back to the fields, and tried to continue organizing, but it was impossible. The damage had been done. People were scared or gave up on the union. They could see that the union did not belong to the workers, that it was Chavez's own personal business, and that he would run his business as he pleased. Farmworkers were good for boycotting, or walking the picket lines, or paying union dues, but not for leading our union....

"Chavez built the union and then he destroyed it. The U.F.W. self-destructed. When the Republicans came back in the 1980s and the growers moved against the union, there wasn't any farmworker movement left."

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