From the Jaws of Victory
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From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement is the most comprehensive history ever written on the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of the United Farm Workers, the most successful farm labor union in United States history. Based on little-known sources and one-of-a-kind oral histories with many veterans of the farm worker movement, this book revises much of what we know about the UFW. Matt Garcia’s gripping account of the expansion of the union’s grape boycott reveals how the boycott, which UFW leader Cesar Chavez initially resisted, became the defining feature of the movement and drove the growers to sign labor contracts in 1970. Garcia vividly relates how, as the union expanded and the boycott spread across the United States, Canada, and Europe, Chavez found it more difficult to organize workers and fend off rival unions. Ultimately, the union was a victim of its own success and Chavez’s growing instability.From the Jaws of Victory delves deeply into Chavez’s attitudes and beliefs, and how they changed over time. Garcia also presents in-depth studies of other leaders in the UFW, including Gilbert Padilla, Marshall Ganz, Dolores Huerta, and Jerry Cohen. He introduces figures such as the co-coordinator of the boycott, Jerry Brown; the undisputed leader of the international boycott, Elaine Elinson; and Harry Kubo, the Japanese American farmer who led a successful campaign against the UFW in the mid-1970s.
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From the Jaws of Victory
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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Padilla joined a growing team of rural recruits, including Julio and Fina Hernandez and Roger Terronez from Corcoran; Tony and Rachel Orendain and Gil Flores from Hanford; and a loquacious and fiery single mother from Stockton, Dolores Huerta.28 Huerta had never worked in the fields, but she maintained a strong connection to labor unions and farm workers through her family. Her father had worked in the coalmines in Dawson, New Mexico, where she was born, and had belonged to the United Mine Workers.29 When Dolores was an infant, labor unrest in the mines forced her father to seek alternative work harvesting beets in Wyoming, Nebraska, and California. The family eventually settled in Stockton, California, where her father worked in the asparagus fields among a predominantly Filipino workforce. In the 1940s, he participated in a strike on the Zuckerman asparagus farm alongside Huerta’s future friend and Filipino activist, Philip Veracruz.30
Huerta clashed with her father over his “chauvinist” behavior and considered her mother, Alicia Margaret St. John Chavez, a stronger influence in her life. During the Great Depression, Alicia divorced Huerta’s father and raised Dolores and her sister on $5 per week from wages earned at the Richmond-Chase canneries and a local restaurant. In 1937, Alicia participated in a strike of the canneries as a member of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, which forced her to depend entirely on her earnings at the restaurant.31 In 1941 she opened a successful lunch counter with her second husband, James Richards. A year later the couple purchased a hotel from Japanese American owners who had to sell when the government relocated all Japanese Americans to internment camps. Alicia relied on her children to staff the restaurant and clean the hotel, providing Dolores with an invaluable cultural experience that strengthened her confidence and ability to organize in any community. She recalled the unique composition of their neighborhood and clientele: “The ethnic community where we lived was all mixed. It was Japanese, Chinese. The only Jewish families that lived in Stockton were there in our neighborhood.… There was the Filipino pool hall, the Filipino dance hall. It was [a] very colorful, multi-ethnic scene.”32 When the Richards’ relationship soured and the couple divorced, Alicia lost the restaurant but held on to the hotel. Dolores continued to help her mother and became friends with many of the Filipino farm workers who were their primary patrons. Later her mother met and married Juan “Fernando” Silva, a former bracero, who conveyed to Dolores his deep feelings of bitterness over his treatment at the hands of growers.33 These influences made her sympathetic to Chavez’s appeals to join the local CSO, which she accepted in 1960. In time she too would be as important to the new movement as Padilla and Chavez.
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