[Author]Roundtable conducted by David Bacon[/Author]
The new movie, César Chávez – History is Made One Step at a Time, directed by Diego Luna, tells the story of the Grape Strike of 1965.
This epic 5-year labor battle led to the organization of the United Farm Workers, and made César Chávez a social movement hero. The movie has provoked controversy over its depiction of his role, and the accuracy of the history it recounts of those events.
In this roundtable, labor journalist David Bacon, a former organizer for the UFW and other unions, explores these themes with four guests.
Eliseo Medina was a farm worker when the strike started, and became a noted labor organizer, first in the UFW and later in the Service Employees Union.
Doug Adair was an activist in the 1965 strike, and then worked the rest of his life as a farm laborer in the grapes in the Coachella Valley.
Dawn Mabalon is a professor of history at San Francisco State University, and an authority of the history of Filipinos in California.
Rosalinda Guillen comes from a farm worker family in Washington State, worked as a UFW organizer, and today organizes farm labor in Skagit and Whatcom Counties, north of Seattle, with Community2Community.
David: How did the movie square with your memories of the grape strike as a participant?
Eliseo: It’s a good time for this movie to come out and show not only the challenges immigrants face, but also the fact that they’re willing to struggle and that when they do they can win, regardless of the power structure. It could’ve done a much better job of telling the full story, but it’s impossible to tell 10 years worth of history in 2 hours.
David: The film presents the UFW as a movement mostly of Chicanos and Mexicanos, but it was also a multinational union, including African-Americans, Arab, and even white people. That doesn’t come through as much.
Eliseo: When I was a farm worker, before the strike began, we lived in different worlds — the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world. I do wish that that had been more explicit because certainly the contribution that was made by the Filipino workers to the strike and the movement was an incredible part of the success of the union. The fact that we also had Caucasians and African-Americans participating in the strike never even gets brought up.
David: There has been criticism of the movie’s portrayal of Filipino workers. How do you feel about that?
Dawn: Filipinos had been organizing, not just that year, but for decades before. The growers had always divided Mexicans and Filipinos. What was so powerful about that moment in Delano was that those two groups defied this. But the way they came together was downplayed. There was so little context that there’s no understanding that it was these other people, in particular Larry Itliong, who really sparked the strike.
Larry went to Delano in the early 1960s, sent by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the AFL-CIO union founded in Stockton. He already had decades of labor experience with the Alaskan salmon cannery union. He organized a failed strike of asparagus workers in Stockton in 1948 and a successful strike in 1949. He had more experience than everyone, Dolores Huerta and Cesar included.
Doug: The original spark in Delano was when Filipinos workers began sitting in at the camps. It wasn’t a strike with picket lines, but a sit-in and refusing to go to work. Larry began going around to the camps seeing if he could use the sit-ins to negotiate better wages.
David: The film did show the sit-in in the camps, which surprised me. Not many people know that happened, and it’s a very important part of history. The movie starts with a little section where Cesar is the head of the Community Service Organization (CSO), but doesn’t show him organizing protests about the bracero program, in which growers were able to bring workers from Mexico under very abusive conditions, sending them back at the end of the season. Should the movie have said more about it?
Doug: Workers first went on strike in Coachella in the spring of 1965 because the bracero program was being phased out. With braceros, it was almost inevitable that strikes would lose. When the government said growers had to offer $1.40 an hour if they wanted to hire braceros AWOC demanded the same wage. That was the spark that set off the strike. Actually if it had been up to Cesar, there wouldn’t have been a strike in Delano because he didn’t feel our union was ready. There was no money in the bank, and he wanted to do more organizing. He used to say “we’re not a union, and we’re not gonna start strikes.”
David: The movie stops when the industry-wide grape contract gets signed. Did the contract and the union change life for farmworkers and was it a permanent change?
Doug: When I worked under that first contract our wages and benefits were over double the minimum wage of American workers. We had a health plan that was the envy of many other unions. We could sit down with the growers and negotiate over grievances. We wouldn’t always win, but we could negotiate our working conditions.
The movie did show that workers can join together in spite of appalling conditions and improve their wages and working conditions. That did come through. It is a possible to change history with concerted action, by getting together.
Rosalinda: Today farmworkers can organize because of the example of the farmworkers in the 60s and 70s in California. The movie shows clearly what it looks like to organize and come together. This is one of the legacies of César Chávez, this coming together of different workers with different religions and different political views.
Doug: But I think the movie did show the viciousness of the growers and their local power structure; district attorneys and the cops and thugs on the side of the growers. The whole local structure was against the union and the farmworkers.
Rosalinda: And it’s still like that.
Eliseo: Clearly the union was able to begin lifting workers out of poverty. They had paid holidays, vacations and health insurance. Unfortunately, at the time when we were poised to completely change these workers’ lives we lost focus. As a result, workers today are back where they were before the union. Most are working at minimum wage again. Employers are back to just trying to get the work done in the cheapest way possible, regardless of the impact on workers.
David: At one point the growers say they are going to bring in “illegals” – they use that word, not “undocumented” – by the truckload. Do you think this experience shaped how Cesar saw the question of immigration?
Eliseo: The growers knew very well that divide and conquer was an important strategy, so they were not above using workers to break the strike, whether they were documented or undocumented. And they certainly felt that having a captive work force would make it easier for them. What the union wanted was to make sure that no one was used to break the strike, regardless of their status. The union and the strike was a movement of documented and undocumented people. Some of the strongest and most active people were undocumented. In many cases when workers began to organize, growers would call in the Border Patrol to scare people and arrest and deport them.
DUE TO LACK OF SPACE, THIS ARTICLE WAS CUT. TO SEE THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW, PLEASE VISIT: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16701/what_cesar_chavez_missed
