“Viva la causa!” The limits of this cause
weren’t spelled out, which left room as
his ambitions grew.
C
havez’s flagrant humility and as-
ceticism were jujitsu-type moves.
If disempowerment and overwork were
all farmworkers had, then casting both
as moral virtues elevated the terms of
dispossession into marks of special
strength. By the fall of 1964, the union
had put down roots. It had a few hun-
dred members, an insurance program,
a credit union, and a newspaper. Chavez
built slowly to retain control. “Cesar
had studied the structure of the C.S.O.,
and he tried to correct its mistakes in
his organization,” Dolores Huerta, his
long-term collaborator, told Peter Mat-
thiessen for a two-part Profile of Chavez
in The New Yorker, in 1969. (Matthies-
sen helped establish Chavez’s national
reputation, joining a flock of enthralled
writers. According to Pawel, Matthies-
sen offered to buy Chavez a hot tub
while reporting the article and ended
up installing a nine-hundred-dollar
heating system in a pool for his use;
the writer later donated his payment
to the union.)
When the first stirrings of a grape
workers’ strike arose, Chavez didn’t want
to join. A strike he’d led in the spring
of 1965 had been modest; the Delano
grape fields were a behemoth, and he
was afraid of getting in over his head.
In September, though, Filipino farm-
workers in the other union failed to
show up for work, and growers tried to
recruit Farm Worker members to re-
place them, forcing a response. Although
Chavez worried that his union wasn’t
ready, he took a vote. His members unan-
imously voted to strike.
The confrontation that followed
lasted for five years. When workers left
the picket lines to take jobs elsewhere,
urbanites and college kids took their
places. When an amendment to the
National Labor Relations Act came up
for review in early 1966, Senator Rob-
ert F. Kennedy arrived for hearings and
grilled the county sheriff, who had ar-
rested strikers on flimsy pretexts, sug-
gesting that the officer review the U.S.
Constitution during his lunch break.
Chavez was eager to take advantage of
the spotlight, and the next morning he
launched a march from Delano to Sac-
ramento, some three hundred miles,
under the slogan “Peregrinación, peni-
tencia, revolución” (“Pilgrimage, pen-
ance, revolution”).
The grape boycotts ramped up.
Chavez merged his union with the Fil-
ipinos’, a year into the strike, to create
the United Farm Workers Organizing
Committee. As his influence grew, so
did political opposition. Governor Ron-
ald Reagan called the strike “immoral”
and snacked on grapes in public; Pres-
ident Richard Nixon later increased the
Defense Department’s grape purchases,
tripling orders for Vietnam soldiers.
(Chavez was ambivalent about the war—
he refused to support his son’s consci-
entious-objector application—but Nix-
on’s move helped align the growers with
an unpopular cause.) In 1968, Chavez
began his first public fast, declining to
eat for twenty-five days in “penance” and
“prayer.” Flyers read “He sacrifices for
us!” It marked his transformation into
something more than a labor organizer.
It also helped sear his image into
public memory. In 1969, Chavez got a
Time cover (not, as Luna’s movie has it,
a Man of the Year award). The strike
officially ended in the summer of 1970,
when Delano grape growers en masse
agreed to sign contracts with the union.
Most accounts fade to black with these
victories. Dunne leaves the strike in 1967.
Luna’s film ends with the signing. Levy
trails its aftermath to the mid-seven-
ties. Pawel presses on, though, through
the years beyond. Her story must be
one of the strangest in the history of
American labor.
A
s the union grew more influential,
it got more complex. Before long,
it was struggling to serve a member-
ship of tens of thousands. Its contracts
required workers to be chosen through
a “hiring hall,” by union seniority—a
measure that caused strife, since some
workers found themselves too junior
to reclaim their regular gigs. Members
had to pay dues even when they weren’t
working in California, and if the union
called for them to skip work for a rally
or a picket, they could lose seniority
for noncompliance. Some wondered
whether the new system was more hin-
drance than help. Growers bridled.
Chavez’s associates enjoined him to
figure out something better than the
hiring hall, and yet he seemed to re-
sent the suggestion.
Despite the union’s expansion,
Chavez still did much of its work.
“Though one of his great gifts was en-
listing support, he delegated little, not
trusting others to get the work done,”
