Cesar Chavez and His Farmworker Movement

Cesar Chavez and His Farmworker Movement By LeRoy Chatfield Friend & Colleague 1963-1973 Dedication: To each volunteer in the farmworker movement who worked with such energy, dedication, and self-sacrifice to build the first farm labor union in the history of the United States. If I have anything to say about it, your good work will not go undocumented. Chapter One Interview with Professor Paul Henggeler In Memoriam: Paul R Henggeler Professor of History, University of Texas–Pan American December 12, 2004 I never met Professor Henggeler in person nor talked with him on the telephone. Our only communication was by way of letter and email. He first wrote in November of 2002, asking for my cooperation by answering some of his questions about Cesar Chavez. I agreed to do so, but only in writing. For the next six months he asked pages of questions, and I answered them. It was this exchange with Professor Henggeler that laid the groundwork for the creation of the farmworker documentation project, which began in May of 2003. Now, 20 months later, 188 essays have been written, several thousand emails have been exchanged, and almost 1000 former farmworker movement volunteers have been identified and contacted. All of this can be traced back to the research of one young academic historian. But now he is gone. Not yet 50 years old, he died of an apparent heart attack on July 22, 2004. What a great loss. I know nothing about him personally, except that he was married. I know from our correspondence that he spent the past six years of his life researching and writing about “Cesar Chavez’s leadership of the farmworker movement.” In one of my last communications with Paul, he wrote, “Hi, LeRoy: I can’t thank you enough for the CD-ROM (the essays) and your decision to get folks ‘talking’ about their experiences in the UFW before it all evaporates.” For my part, I cannot thank Paul enough for his support, and affirmation of the documentation project. I can only hope that his own historical research about the farmworker movement does not itself evaporate. May he rest in peace. Origin of the Documentation Project The Documentation Project began on November 25, 2002, with a letter from Professor Paul Henggeler, an associate professor of history at University of Texas–Pan American. He does not know this, and neither did I until I retraced its history. In his introductory letter to me he wrote, “For six years now, I have been researching material for a book that will examine Cesar Chavez’s leadership of the farmworker movement. Unlike previous works on Chavez, the information for this book is drawn almost exclusively from primary materials available at the UFW archives.” I wondered if Professor Henggeler had any notion about how the archives of the United Farm Workers began? I doubted it. Unless he read my unpublished journal, “Cesar, 1968” (September 1968 to March 1969), how could he know that on March 25, 1969, I was the one who rummaged through the closets of the union office, more commonly know as the “Pink House,” to find press clippings, correspondence, photographs, appointment books, and a variety of other documents—enough to fill three station wagons. How could he know that I was the one who sorted through these early union “primary materials” piece by piece, separated them into general categories, and threw away the scraps of paper that made no sense in order to make the contents of the boxes look more neat and presentable for the librarians at Wayne State University when they opened them? The founder of the union, Cesar Chavez, had made the decision that all union documents would be sent to the Wayne State University Labor Archives in Detroit for preservation and eventual public scrutiny. Yet, on this March day when most of the union leadership was out of Delano, and for no apparent reason except that I had some time to kill, I implemented Cesar’s decision. Now, 33 years later, a Texas history professor writes to tell me that he is the first historian who will write a book based solely on the examination of these primary materials. Life has many twists and turns. If I had not taken it upon myself to collect these early movement records, I can only suppose they would have been lost forever in the chaotic and hectic organizing campaigns that characterized so much of the union’s development in the late 1960s. Without either Professor Henggeler or my realizing it, his letter of introduction planted the seeds for the NFWA, etc. Documentation Project in my subconscious. UFW Interviews Unsatisfying After leaving the farmworker movement in August of 1973, I have been asked many times in the ensuing years to answer questions about Cesar Chavez and the farmworker movement. I have submitted countless times to one-on-one interviews with journalists and reporters from radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines; documentary filmmakers; academic researchers; and students writing a paper “due tomorrow.” I became sick of it. I felt like an actor trotted out onto the stage and told to “perform.” And as you might expect, there came a time when those interviewing me knew so little about Cesar and the farmworker movement that unless I provided them with enough background material, they could not even ask the questions to complete the interview. After each interview encounter, some lasting for several hours at a time, I felt washed out and left empty-handed. Hours, even days later, I would still be thinking about some of the questions I had been asked and my responses, and agonizing why I hadn’t included this or that point or, worse, why was I not able to better explain the points I wanted to make. In the end, I realized that very little was ever written or aired from my interviews, and even if something tangible did result, it was only a snippet or two. An hour of videotaping might lead to one headshot and one sentence. I stopped giving interviews. Trying hard not to disappoint a would-be interviewer, I would pawn them off onto other veterans of the farmworker wars or plead time pressures associated with my work at Loaves & Fishes. For most of the 1990s, I gave no interviews. But in 2002, Professor Henggeler’s interview request seemed to hold more promise. For one thing, my friend and former farmworker colleague, Jerry Cohen, urged me to answer Henggeler’s questions because Jerry had already spent a great deal of time briefing, explaining, and interpreting for him many of the primary materials in the archives about which he had numerous and detailed questions. And Jerry thought I should be the one to answer his questions about Cesar’s Fast for Non-Violence, and some of the earlier farmworker movement years. I was hesitant, but in the end, I agreed to answer Professor Henggeler’s questions on one condition: I would answer them only in writing. Question 1: What specific role did you play in the recruitment of Ganz and Cohen? In 1967, Jerry Cohen was a young, legal services attorney assigned to the McFarland office of California Rural Legal Services. Positive reports from the paralegals in the McFarland office about Jerry’s work made their way back to Cesar, and he asked me to meet with Jerry to see if he might want to come to work with the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) full time. I did so. Soon thereafter, Jerry joined the union to become its first in- house legal counsel. Up to this time, the NFWA had relied on volunteer attorneys from a number of labor and civil rights law firms in the San Francisco Bay Area. While their service was very much appreciated, it was primarily defensive, and not immediate enough to form an offensive legal front for the movement, which Cesar very much desired. I knew Marshall Ganz from my teaching days at Garces High School in Bakersfield. If I am not mistaken, and I might be, I first met him in 1958 during the course of my extracurricular work as speech and debate coach for Garces High School while Marshall was a student participant from Bakersfield High School. If this recollection is imprecise, I certainly knew him in 1964 during my second teaching assignment at Garces High School because he was active in the civil rights movement in Mississippi as a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He had come back to Bakersfield (his hometown) to raise funds to purchase a pickup truck and other materiel for his work in SNCC. During his stay in Bakersfield, he formed a chapter of SNCC, and I offered him the use of the Garces High School auditorium for the first public organizing meeting. As a result of Marshall’s civil rights activism, I joined the Bakersfield SNCC chapter, and we stayed in touch. After the table grape strike started in September of 1965 I relocated to Delano in October and began my work with Cesar. Some time thereafter, I have a recollection of a telephone call between Marshall and myself about the possibility of his working with the farmworkers’ union, and I encouraged him to do so. I had several talks with Cesar touting Marshall’s work in the civil rights movement, and my previous association with him. Not long after those conversations, Marshall joined the union full time. Question 2: When did you first take an active role in the FWA’s [sic] activities and what did you do? What memories do you have of the rent strike and JD Martin strike that might be useful? And how accurate is Cesar’s recollection? I don’t know how accurate Cesar’s recollection was because I don’t know from your question what his recollection was about.

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