Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 14

6 The Organizer in Oxnard

September ’58 to June ’59

John Soria, at six foot two and 220 pounds, was eight inches taller and seventy pounds heavier than his traveling companion, Cesar Chavez. Big John and Little Cesar, some people playfully dubbed them in Oxnard, California, in 1958. They both came from farm worker families, where Soria had once been Juan, and Cesar’s name had been pronounced as the softer, more melodious “Sáyzar.” Chavez, thirty-one, was the senior organizer who had been making a living doing Mexican American community politics for six years. Soria, twenty-three, was the apprentice who had recently left his job as a psychiatric attendant at the nearby state mental hospital in order to earn his living helping Chavez and learning to be an organizer. They both were married with children, but spent a lot of time riding around Oxnard in Chavez’s 1953 Mercury, talking politics.

Soon after they met they discovered that they both had read the Alinsky biography of John L. Lewis. They both liked Lewis, but the two organizers’ political enthusiasms were not the same. Soria favored secular left politics. His mother, Luz, had been one of the better-known leaders of a major Ventura County lemon workers’ strike against Sunkist in 1941, and his strongest public memories growing up were of his Uncle Jesus, a socialist, talking politics in Oxnard’s barrio, La Colonia; of Sunday afternoon gatherings where men would read the Mexican papers and Los Angeles’ La Opinión; and of one 1938 fiesta in particular when the grown-ups threw their hats in the air and shouted praises to President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had just kicked the gringo oil companies out of Mexico. Like Chavez, Soria was an avid reader. The first book Chavez gave him was Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals.¹

Cesar and John’s project was to build a Ventura County chapter of the Community Service Organization, to be based in La Colonia. Although supported by Alinsky’s foundation, the CSO did not follow Alinsky’s pattern as an organization of organizations. It was, instead, a direct-membership organization. In what has come to be seen as Fred Ross’s contribution to organizing theory, and one of the most enduring of neo-Alinskyite variations, people joined the local chapter of the CSO, paying $12 a year, not because some leader of theirs had joined first but as a result of the outside organizer’s skill at bringing individuals together, developing leaders from among them, and uniting them to address local matters while also advancing a centralized statewide agenda.

When Alinsky complained about this structural departure, Ross answered that California’s Mexican American barrios had no community groups comparable to the unions and the local Catholic parishes Alinsky knew in Chicago. Some people were in unions, but they did not control them. All of the major dioceses were controlled by white conservatives, and the local Mexican American parishes were not independent enough to help form a classic People’s Organization. What Mexican communities in the 1950s did have, Ross argued, was extended family groups. Thus, the house meeting, which someone in the community agreed to host and be responsible for inviting others to attend, was the standard building block of the CSO.²

In La Colonia, John went along to these meetings to watch how Cesar handled them. He listened as Chavez told stories in a soft, even voice about what CSO had accomplished in other areas: fighting police brutality, getting more services into the barrios, helping people become citizens so that they would be eligible for state disability and pension programs. When he finished, people asked questions, often about particular problems with welfare or immigration or their children’s schools. Chavez was expert at answering them. When the questions were about community problems, he explained again how people in other areas had formed their own CSO chapters. To handle individual complaints, he made appointments. Finally he asked if anyone in the room wanted to host another meeting. By pyramiding the house meetings, helping people with their individual problems, and keeping detailed records of his activities, he got a picture of the community.

Big John took it all in. He came to admire how well Cesar listened, how he gave people his full attention, how he never showed disappointment if only a few people had turned up. Cesar seemed very sure of himself, always upbeat. Soria also noted a standard answer Chavez would give to a typical kind of hard question, a complaint that could not be solved by a visit to a local agency or pressure on a politician. Once in Santa Paula, across the river from Oxnard, at a meeting at the Limoneira company’s labor camp, the local lemon pickers had complained that they had been swamped by braceros who were taking most of their work. Could CSO do anything about that? Sure, Chavez said, after we get organized, if people agree, we can make it the first item on the agenda. Then he urged people to sign up as an important step in making that happen.

On the way home, John asked Cesar how in hell were CSO and a couple of hundred local limoneros going to get rid of the thousands of braceros working in the trees? Chavez seemed mystified by Soria’s question. Soria was struck by the incongruity of it. Here they were, two guys with a limited budget, operating out of a donated office, driving through miles of lemon orchards where everything but the air was owned by the Sunkist Corporation: the trees, the bosses’ gated mansions, the labor camps where the workers lived, the packing sheds and the railroad spurs that led to them, the land, and the water. Unless you looked up in the sky, whatever you saw belonged to Teague, McKevett, Hardison, or Blanchard. Yet here was Chavez, having just told a small group of local limoneros in company-owned housing, some of whom were scared even to be seen in the meeting lest they be fingered by a Sunkist spy, that if they got organized they could throw the braceros out of the orchards. He had said it without flinching, swallowed up by the chair he was sitting in, characteristically pushing his lank, black Indian hair off his wide brown forehead. Now in the car, with nobody to overhear, John asked Cesar to come clean. Did he really believe it was possible to take the braceros away from the Sunkist Corporation?

Chavez, his hands on the wheel, turned to him and smiled. “Why not, John? If enough people get together they can do anything.”

Soria laughed. Then he took a long look at Chavez. Cesar meant it. He was not the least bit overwhelmed by the power that surrounded him. Soria thought it would be nice to feel that way, but he couldn’t. He thought Cesar was a little bit crazy. Not crazy like the people John had worked with at the mental hospital. Not sad and disfigured. Chavez was beautiful crazy.

Oxnard was an atypical CSO project. Usually Chavez would spend ninety days in a town and leave behind a new chapter when he moved on. But in Oxnard he was planning to stay an entire year because the project was co-sponsored by the United Packing House Workers of America (UPWA), the same union with which Saul Alinsky had had such success in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. Alinsky and the union had subsequently initiated other projects in several Midwestern states, where they tried to duplicate their Chicago experience—with mixed results. Oxnard was their first West Coast venture. The UPWA had won union representation elections in five Sunkist packing sheds there in 1952, but the growers had so far refused to sign contracts. The union president, Ralph Helstein, and Alinsky hoped that building a CSO chapter in La Colonia, where the lemon packers lived, would help the UPWA fight for contracts where the packers worked. Helstein agreed to pay the bills: $20,000 for the year’s expenses, including the salaries of Chavez and Soria.

By this time CSO had about twenty chapters across California, but Fred Ross had not built that network in conjunction with labor unions or with a particular emphasis on workers’ issues. Instead, his focus was more conventionally political. It was not true, as Ross told Alinsky in 1947, when he decided to organize Mexican Americans, that the community had no groups to call its own. In fact, Mexicans had small civic organizations all over California and a few influential large ones, like La Comisión Honorifica, a surviving mutualista. They just did not have the kind of organization that Ross wanted to build. They didn’t have a statewide organization whose goal was to win formal political power.

Ross, who was not Mexican, Catholic, nor Spanish-speaking, was in no position to lead such an organization, but he didn’t care: he did not want to lead the CSO, he wanted to organize it, and he had been organizing communities he was not a part of for a long time. Born into a middle-class Methodist family in San Francisco in 1910, he graduated from the University of Southern California with a teaching credential during the Depression and worked as a welfare case manager, finally getting a New Deal job with the Farm Security Administration. Working his way up, he eventually became head of community services at the seventeen FSA camps that housed displaced farm workers (mostly Dustbowl refugees) in California and Arizona. While managing the famous Arvin camp, which was the model for the “good” camp in The Grapes of Wrath, he met radical farm worker organizers and also Woody Guthrie, who came by with a sleeping bag, a guitar, and his songs. Ross always said he did his first organizing there as the camp director, encouraging the dispirited workers to establish the self-governing councils that so impressed Steinbeck. Ross was a very special kind of outsider here: both organizer and highest community authority; both the “self-effacing . . . behind the scenes” player, as he was described in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the boss. Moving on to the War Relocation Authority, Ross managed a Japanese internment camp in Idaho and worked to resettle and find jobs for Japanese Americans. Next, at the Council on Race Relations, he began working with Mexican Americans in Southern California and developed the idea of the new kind of organization that CSO would become.³

Ross began by attaching himself to a group in East LA that was part of a general movement to elect Mexican Americans to local office. Great changes were happening in American politics in 1947, and before the group would accept Ross’s voluntary help, its members had to assure themselves that he neither was a Communist nor had Communist sympathies. Through a daisy chain of connections beginning with Alinsky, Ross got a letter from an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles verifying his anti-Communist status.⁴ He then helped build the CSO partially as a rival to other local groups, especially those that were close to the Communist Party, then active in East LA, and to unions that had been expelled from the CIO because aledgedly they were dominated by reds.

Ross and the CSO organizers had their own particular brand of anti-Communism. Their aim was to “out-organize the Communists” but they never spearheaded the red-baiting campaign that would lead to McCarthyism, devastate the Communist Party and the entire left in the 1950s, and continue to reverberate for years, even within the UFW. But they were not beyond using the anti-Communism of the times to achieve their aims. “Ross was a heavy red baiter,” said Bill Chandler, UFW volunteer, who first got to know him in a CSO registration drive and who otherwise was a great admirer of the man he considered a master organizer.⁵ Bert Corona, a longtime Mexican American activist and an early member of CSO in Northern California, also criticized Ross: “One thing I didn’t like . . . was that one of its stated reasons for organizing was to keep the ‘reds’ from establishing a base in the communities. I knew that when they referred to ‘reds’ they meant those Mexicans who were either working with the CP or involved with ANMA, the Asociación Nacional México-Americana.”⁶

The CSO’s brand of anti-Communism meshed smoothly with its own narrow definition of politics, one that took no positions on the big questions of the day—for instance, the Taft Hartley Act’s rollback of labor rights—but maintained a careful focus on community action, voter registration, and voter participation.⁷ On those terms, the CSO was wildly successful, more so than both more conservative and more conventionally left Mexican American organizations. By 1962 it would have thirty-two chapters from Sacramento to Calexico that had registered 400,000 new voters. Before the CSO’s drives, no serious statewide attempt at voter registration had ever been made among California’s Mexican Americans, and nothing like it would be seen again until the 1990s. Far more than any other organization, the CSO was responsible for the more than one hundred Mexican American politicians who won California local elections in the 1950s and early ’60s.⁸

It achieved its presence on the state’s conventional political stage through a remarkable series of organizing innovations. Its paid organizers—starting with Ross, adding Chavez in 1952, and eventually the other future founders of the UFW, Gilbert Padilla and Dolores Huerta—combined the idea of naturalization and registration with specific struggles for improvements in the Mexican and Mexican American barrios. They linked CSO membership to access to services at CSO Service Centers, where translation, immigration, workmen’s compensation, and welfare problems were either free for CSO members or significantly cheaper than the those of the competing accountants, lawyers, and notary publics. The CSO often got initial entry into communities through either the Catholic Church or a union, and then organized those communities through the system of pyramiding house meetings. They pressured local adult schools into providing teachers for CSO-sponsored English and citizenship classes, and they took great advantage of their knowledge of the details of immigration and welfare law to teach people about the concrete benefits of becoming citizens and registering to vote.⁹

Chavez arrived in Oxnard in the midst of all this success in September of 1958, and began doing what he already knew how to do well. The UPWA might be signing the checks, but its agenda would have to wait, as a get-out-the-vote campaign for the November elections was his first order of business. He had to operate faster than he liked, but he had no choice, as a good showing in the local elections would increase CSO power with the local politicians and within all the local social agencies where Chavez would need leverage. He and Soria put the names of all of La Colonia’s 1,400 registered voters on index cards, recruited a team of volunteers, and borrowed the Latin American Veterans Hall for Election Day. Days before the election, Cesar put his portable sound system on top of his car and drove through the neighborhood urging people to vote. As CSO had done in other areas to combat widespread cynicism about politicians, he and John patiently explained to people that the important thing was to show up at the polls and cast a ballot; it could be a blank ballot, if they wished. What mattered was the number of voters, because with a big enough turnout, as Ross said, “the CSO leaders . . . could approach the politicians as the official spokesmen for a powerful new constituency, which they could use as a club over the heads of those politicians.”¹⁰

The campaign was a success. More than a thousand people from La Colonia went to the polls, more than double the turnout at the previous election, which prompted the Oxnard Press Courier to editorialize that CSO was starting to build a “political machine” in La Colonia.¹¹ Although the CSO was officially nonpartisan, no one doubted the Democratic Party identification of most of its members. These 1958 elections marked a decisive turn in California politics, as Democrats took control of the governorship, the state senate, and the state assembly for the first time in eighty years. Moreover, the victory of the liberal Edmund G. (Pat) Brown over conservative William Knowland for governor was relatively ideological, by U.S. standards. Knowland ran an anti-union campaign and endorsed a “right-to-work” proposition on the ballot. Brown opposed it, and won the active support of organized labor, whose members and their families then constituted one-third of all registered voters in the state. Labor’s efforts were matched by the equally successful efforts of the Catholic Church against a proposition to end the tax-exempt status for private and church schools. Brown—Democrat, Catholic, pro-labor—was the big victor.¹²

Chavez was one of the little ones. La Colonia had voted a straight Democratic ticket, and Cesar was ebullient about the victories, both local and statewide. Here was the shape of a possible future. Here was the promise of a large coalition that might possibly be bigger than even the Sunkist Corporation.

He and Soria wasted no time celebrating. Two days after the election they held a mass meeting to formalize the establishment of CSO’s Ventura County chapter. An Oxnard priest, impressed by CSO’s ability to turn out the vote, gave the invocation. The speakers who followed included Tony Del Buono, of a preexisting local Mexican civic group that was now going to merge with CSO; Jimmy Flores, from the local Laborers Union; Rachel Guajardo, of the UPWA; Joe Piña, of the Latin American Veterans; Fred Brown, of the local NAACP; the Reverends Washington and Zamora of Trinity Baptist and First Mexican Baptist churches; and Tony Rios, president of the statewide CSO. People voted unanimously to set up a CSO chapter. Cesar announced that a CSO Service Center would open, which meant that Chavez and Soria wouldn’t have to handle everybody’s individual problems personally. Eventually the service center would be staffed by thirty volunteers and operate eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. People came to celebrate on the day of its opening, and they kept coming. Some kind of mass movement was building in La Colonia. The Oxnard Press Courier reported that the Friday night following the CSO celebration, 3,500 people walked through La Colonia, candles in hand, behind a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, from one bracero labor camp to another. The march was a mixture of La Colonia residents and braceros. Chavez joined in.¹³

In house meetings during the voter drive Chavez had continued to listen for the “key issue” that could unite large numbers of people, just as Ross and Alinsky had taught him. In his Activity Report to Ross of October 24, 1958, he identified that issue:

One that seems to be the most urgent at the time is the unemployment of the local workers in the area due to the Braceros. Have had reports in the house meetings where whole crews of locals have been displaced from their jobs to hire Braceros. The most recent experience was the one where a labor contractor, Eleuterio Gonzales, had a local crew of about forty men and about three weeks ago he was asked by his employer to lay off these men and go pick up Braceros at the camp the following morning. So forty locals were displaced at once because there are plenty of Braceros in the area. I happened to have talked to one of these men at one of the house meetings and believe me he was fighting mad when he was telling me about the problem. At the meeting after I got through giving them the CSO history he wanted to know what if anything could the CSO do to help them. My only answer was that we would try to do something after we were organized. And again at all, most all, the house meetings, the same question is asked of me. In discussing this with Tony Rios I was asking him for advice and also for permission to commit the organization in this line of action.¹⁴

The question of braceros had not come up in Chavez ’s earlier CSO work, and although there were some farm workers in other chapters, braceros did not dominate the local fields as they did in Oxnard. Braceros were not evenly distributed throughout California agriculture. They were contracted by the biggest and best-organized growers and grower associations and became the primary labor force in some crops but not others. When Chavez arrived in 1958, Ventura County growers enjoyed the use of 6,140 braceros during the peak harvest period; 2,500 were concentrated in the lemon orchards, with only 150 local workers sprinkled among them.¹⁵

The braceros had changed the landscape of Ventura County agriculture. Before the program that brought them into the fields during World War II, the picture was simple: along the narrow Santa Clara River valley thousands of lemon trees were controlled by a few big and many medium-sized ranches. Through their ownership of the processing sheds and distribution services, a few of the biggest farmers became very big indeed, masters of the company town of Santa Paula, and some of the most important businessmen in California. On the southeast side of the river in the large Oxnard coastal plain, production was mostly sugar beets, which had replaced the first cash crop, lima beans, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sugar beet farmers were much smaller than the big boys across the river, and most of the sugar beet profits went to the Oxnard brothers, whose antecedents had generously given the town its name. Their descendents still owned the huge sugar refinery that sat on the southeast border of La Colonia.

Both the well-organized lemon bosses and the smaller, relatively unorganized farmers of the plain were blessed by Ventura County’s unique combination of deep alluvial soils, abundant ground water, mild climate, and coastal fog. When the braceros were added to the mix as something other than a temporary answer to a wartime labor shortage, the lemon baron C. C. Teague and his partners built the Sunkist Corporation into one of the most powerful agricultural associations in the world, and the farmers of the Oxnard plain expanded acreage and diversified production, moving away from sugar beets and into more profitable, labor-intensive crops such as celery, broccoli, strawberries, and cut flowers. In 1948, Ventura County’s total farm receipts had been less than $40 million. In 1958, agricultural sales topped $100 million.¹⁶

Local workers were the big losers. In a period when agriculture was booming and agricultural employment climbing, there was less work for locals and at lower wages. A small group of local farm workers held on, finding work mostly in the vegetables from the spring to the fall. Meanwhile, real wages of braceros actually declined during this remarkable decade of growth: the nominal wage in lemons, the best paid of all local agricultural jobs, was ninety-five cents an hour in 1947, and just ninety-seven cents an hour in 1959.¹⁷ Lots of people made money off the braceros. The men who ran the labor camps overcharged them for meals that were so bad they often went uneaten. Small businesses that catered to the bracero trade flourished, not only legal establishments such as bars and cafés, and grocery, clothing, bicycle and appliance stores but also plenty of what the Mexicans called transa, dirty business, including bogus public accountants, who sold counterfeit documents, and women who sold their favors to the men who had left wives and girlfriends back in Mexico.¹⁸

During the year he spent in Oxnard, Chavez could do nothing about getting UPWA contracts in the lemon sheds or getting the braceros out of the trees. But CSO’s employment committee did contribute to the growing pressure against the entire Bracero Program. About a dozen workers, mostly middle-aged men, attended the weekly Friday night meetings. They began documenting the particular way that the local Farm Placement Service (FP, as it was called) got around Public Law 78, which contained a legal guarantee that the Bracero Program would not “adversely affect” domestic labor and decreed that braceros could not be contracted to a job if there was enough domestic labor to do it. The scam in Ventura County worked like this: in order for a local to get dispatched to a job, he first had to go to the FP for a referral card. Then he had to take that card to the Farm Labor Association, where workers were sent out every morning to the fields. The problem was that the FP office didn’t open until eight in the morning, while the braceros, who did not need referral cards, were all dispatched by six. And here is the clincher: one day’s referral card was not good for the next day’s work, so the cards that were issued in the morning by the FP were obsolete before they were written.

Chavez and three or four members of the employment committee made the useless twenty-four-mile round trip to the FP office several times a week, making copies of all the worthless forms they were issued. Meanwhile, Chavez cashed in some of his CSO voter registration chips. After Edward Hayes, the state director of the Farm Placement Service, ignored his telephone call, Chavez sent a telegram to Governor Brown with a copy to the CSO president, Tony Rios, describing the problem and reminding him that over the previous few years CSO had registered 300,000 new voters in the state, most of them Mexican American Democrats. Brown wired back, saying that he would direct Hayes to investigate. The telegram from the governor produced high excitement in the little CSO Oxnard office, but Chavez, who had been taught by Ross and Alinsky not to be limited by what politicians were willing to give but rather to push them to deliver what he wanted to get, sent another telegram: “Hayes unacceptable.” Brown wired back that he would put Hayes’s immediate boss, the state’s employment director, John Carr, on the case instead. Carr called the CSO office directly and urged Chavez to get as much documentation as he could.

It was quite a boost to the employment committee. More people made the trek to the FP office to document the fraud, and the committee took a census of unemployed farm workers in Oxnard. By then it was fully winter, and the list of the unemployed had grown to nearly one thousand. Chavez followed up his calls to the state officials by making contacts with federal bureaucrats, developing relationships with people in the Labor Department and in the Bureau of Employment Services. His relationship with Carr became increasingly close.

Nor were Little Cesar and Big John content just to establish a paper trail. They organized increasing numbers of unemployed workers to go out to the fields to claim the jobs where braceros were working. They pressured local, state, and federal officials into coming to large meetings where farm workers told their stories. They organized a march in front of television cameras where the angry workers burned their useless referral cards.¹⁹

Nothing on this scale had ever been done before to combat the Bracero Program, although everywhere that the program operated the fiction had to be maintained that there were not enough locals to do the work. That was not the only fraud essential to the game. By law braceros had to be paid the “prevailing wage” in the crops and area where they worked. In a giant sham, grower associations throughout California announced the “prevailing wage” at the beginning of the season and then, with that wage fixed at a level below the minimum wage, the various state farm employment services certified farm labor shortages. It was a fixed wage, fixed at a level that would not attract significant numbers of domestic workers.

Even at the fixed wage, however, there were locals who wanted the jobs. Since the late 1940s farm workers had made various attempts to get them and to expose Bracero Program fraud. Just the year before, in 1957, the remarkable Ernesto Galarza—farm worker, novelist, pamphleteer, the first Mexican American to earn a doctorate in political science, U.S. diplomat, and defeated organizer of California farm workers—had waged a documentation campaign superficially similar to the Oxnard effort. Outside of Marysville, he had gotten hundreds of domestic farm workers to sign affidavits saying that they were willing and able to work in the peach orchards and that braceros were working in their stead, and then submitted the documents to the Republican governor, Goodwin Knight, who ignored them.²⁰ The CSO strategy of constant mobilization to pressure the new administration in Sacramento was more visible, more insistent, more dependent on the active participation of displaced farm workers. Nor did it hurt that the CSO had helped put the new Democratic governor into office.

By the spring, the CSO campaign had pressured some of the embattled growers to pick up their workers in front of the CSO office in La Colonia. Other local workers had their own arrangements with individual employers and were hired directly. This example of what was called “gate hiring” had been forced on the employers by a group of people who earlier had been refused work by those same bosses. It was a remarkable organizing achievement of more than just local significance.

Even as the employment committee was successfully exposing bracero fraud in the spring of 1959, things were getting sticky between Chavez and two UPWA organizers, Rachel Guajardo and Eddie Perez. The UPWA also had an office in La Colonia, around the block from CSO headquarters. Guajardo and Perez occasionally came to CSO employment committee meetings, and attended most of its demonstrations, marches, and big public events. Chavez was the lead organizer, but the understanding between Alinsky and the UPWA president, Helstein, back in Chicago was that after a year, Chavez would turn the employment committee over to the UPWA. Guajardo, who had come from the main UPWA office in Chicago, was well versed in the history of the epic slaughterhouse battles between workers and their bosses. Perez, a World War II vet from industrial Vernon, in East LA, was a veteran of CIO organizing drives. They both felt that Chavez consistently missed opportunities to educate people on the benefits of union contracts. Guajardo also argued that Chavez treated workers like children and did not engage them in open, adult political conversation.²¹

Chavez insisted that his criticisms of unions were only a reflection of the workers’ own suspicions, and that they had good reason to be cautious, because unions had never done much for farm workers. He also believed that Guajardo and Perez were strike-happy, overanxious to throw up a picket line in the middle of any dispute. He told Soria that they were lazy, always looking for shortcuts, unwilling to put in the time to be effective organizers.²²

Soria, who Chavez eventually concluded was also too lazy to be a good organizer, felt that the relationship between Cesar and Rachel had got nasty. Chavez made fun of her big-city clothes, and Guajardo complained about Chavez’s “holier than thou act.” She took to calling him “the little priest” behind his back, and complained to Soria that working with Chavez could only mean working for him.

“Rachel and Eddie were willing to argue with workers, to try to convince them that the union way made sense,” Soria reported years later. “Chavez was more for engaging the workers in do-gooder projects, like health committees, welfare committees, and fundraising drives. CSO was more like a church organization than a labor union . . . and Chavez never argued with the workers. He just listened to them. He didn’t make enemies that way, like Rachel and Eddie did, but he never set anybody straight, either. He didn’t convince people of some idea. He won people over to him, Chavez.”²³

Rather than being a joint venture, the bracero fraud project became a tug of war between the two groups. Chavez also began to have differences with Clive Knowles, who was above Guajardo and Perez in the UPWA hierarchy. Knowles, noting that Public Law 78 made it illegal for braceros to work at places where strikes were in process, believed that when domestic workers were on mixed crews with braceros, the locals should declare a strike as a way to force the Labor Department or the Mexican government to remove the braceros. If the braceros were removed, production would stop, and the locals’ leverage would increase.²⁴

Chavez strongly disagreed. Premature strikes had a long history of failure in the California fields, he said, and would only demoralize the workers. At various points in the employment committee’s extended campaign, UPWA organizers wanted to set up picket lines and declare a strike. Chavez opposed those plans, and looked for ways to put pressure on growers and government officials without calling a strike. He had more influence with the workers and won the local debate.

But he didn’t win in the discussions back in Chicago. In the spring of 1959, Helstein and Alinsky agreed that it was time for the employment committee to be turned over to the Oxnard UPWA chapter. Chavez would return to helping people with their individual problems, the CSO’s English and citizenship classes, and another voter registration drive. On May 23, 1959, a month after the dramatic public burning of the referral cards, Chavez dryly noted in his daily Activity Report to Ross: “The employment committee has been turned over to the UPWA lock, stock, and barrel.”²⁵

That June, Governor Brown announced a ten-point program to “strengthen controls over the state’s Farm Placement Service.” The program included longer hours for the FP offices, and no more issuing of out-of-date referral cards; a prevailing wage high enough to “attract and keep domestic workers”; “gate hire” and “day haul” arrangements for local workers “whenever practical”; consulting with and soliciting cooperation with unions and other public groups [like the CSO] who have a “legitimate interest in the program”; and all “complaints documented and followed up by necessary action.”²⁶ The program, devised by John Carr, and U.S. Labor Department officials at the very time that they were intervening in the Oxnard fracas, was never implemented. Governor Brown was turned around in the middle of his term by the power of agribusiness, politically expressed by the rural, pro-grower Democrats who dominated the California State Senate. He went on to defend the Bracero Program up until its last days, even arguing for a special extension for California after the national program had been ended.

Nevertheless, the announcement of the regulatory plan was directly followed by the dismissal, forced retirement, or dishonorable resignation of several officials of the state’s Farm Placement Service, including the director, Edward Hayes. California agribusiness was on notice. Their beloved Bracero Program, which for twenty years had checked union organizing and stifled farm workers’ wages, might not be around much longer. It would be abandoned only later, when the contracted Mexican workers themselves became increasingly unruly, a flashpoint of labor trouble rather than an instrument to suppress it. Seven years after Chavez’s show of apparently wild optimism, there would be no more braceros anywhere in the United States. Enough people had gotten together and done it.