by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 p.m. I watched a quite compelling
documentary called Dolores about Dolores
Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers with César Chávez and one of the
most compelling figures in radical American politics in my lifetime. The film
was directed by Peter Bratt (brother of actor Benjamin Bratt, who’s listed as
a “consulting producer”) and produced by, of all people, Latin-American rock
musician Carlos Santana — and though Mark Kilian is credited with the music I’m
sure Santana had a hand in it. The story is a familiar one to me and one I
literally grew up with; in the mid-1960’s my mother subscribed to the United
Farm Workers’ newsletter, El Malcriado (literally “The Bad Worker”), and I got to follow the story — their
side of it, anyway — as it was happening. The story of the formation of the UFW
is a bit more complicated than the version told here, and I give PBS a lot of credit for filling out the two-hour time slot
with a short documentary called The Delano Manongs (“manongs” is “old men” in the Filipino language
Tagalog), which showcased the third and least acknowledged individual in the
union’s formation, Larry Itliong. What really happened is that beginning in the 1930’s the big
growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley brought in Filipino men to work in
the grape fields. They worked alongside the Mexicans who were already there,
but were never allowed to mix with them; separate Mexican and Filipino crews
worked in different areas of the giant agribusiness plantations, deliberately
kept apart by the growers so they could use classic divide-and-conquer
strategies against them. One of the reasons the growers wanted a workforce of
two different, and mutually antagonistic, nationalities was so that if the
Filipinos went on strike, the Mexicans could be hired as strikebreakers; and if
the Mexicans went on strike, the Filipinos would scab on them and break their strike.
In 1962 the AFL-CIO officially formed the
Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (AWOC), along the model the original
CIO had used to form the big industrial unions in the 1930’s: appoint an
“organizing committee” to unite workers in an unorganized industry, then if
they were successful in winning at least one collective bargaining contract
with an employer, they could take the words “organizing committee” off the end
of their name and be admitted to the CIO as a full-fledged union. Larry Itliong
was the head of AWOC, but it only recruited Filipinos. In 1963, César Chávez
and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA) and
started holding private meetings in workers’ homes, following a strategy Huerta
had learned in doing community organizing for a mostly white group called the
Community Services Organization under a man named Fred Ross. At the time Huerta
had six children and had been through two divorces, but in spite of that she
was living a relatively comfortable life in Stockton and was able to pursue her
avocations, music and dance, frequently attending jazz concerts. (One later
sequence intercuts the UFW’s work in the fields with a clip from a
jazz-festival performance by Dizzy Gillespie, playing his Latin-jazz classic
“Manteca.”) The original idea of Huerta and Chávez was to build support among
farmworkers slowly until the NFWA had enough members and outside donors and
supporters to sustain a strike, but Itliong and the AWOC jumped the gun: on
September 6, 1965 they held a meeting at the Filipino Community Center in
Delano, California (the building not only still exists but looks pretty much
the way it did then) and called an immediate strike vote. Ten days later — by
coincidence (or maybe not) also Mexico’s Independence Day, September 16 —
Chávez, Huerta and the NFWA called a meeting at a church in Delano where the
attendees voted to have the NFWA join the AWOC’s strike, so for the first time
Mexicans and Filipinos joined together in a labor action and the growers didn’t
have the option they’d had before of playing one group against the other.
Chávez and Huerta brought Itliong into their group and made him executive
vice-president of the NFWA, later merging NFWA and AWOC into one union under
AFL-CIO auspices as the United Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee (UFWOC).
Of
course the show also portrays Robert Kennedy’s doomed campaign for President in
1968 and shows that one of the names he called out for special thanks in the
victory speech he gave at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (which now has
been converted into a high school but which I find memorable not only because
it was where Bing Crosby made it as a solo artist — and though it was deserted
the day I was there I walked through the Coconut Grove nightclub space and got
to see it before it ceased to exist — but was also the place where I lost my
virginity at 19 with a young woman from the same delegation from the College of
Marin for a youth journalism conference; I didn’t have sex again until I was
24, and that time it was with a man) just minutes before he was killed. The
documentary includes footage of RFK’s famous confrontation with the Delano
sheriff, who like most people in company towns were used to being enforcers for
the bosses against the workers, when he told a Senate committee Kennedy was
chairing that he had arrested the UFWOC pickets not because they’d actually
broken any laws but because it looked like they were about to — to which
Kennedy famously replied, “While we take our lunch break, I would suggest the
sheriff read the Constitution of the United States.”
The film treats Kennedy
sympathetically — ironically, as strongly as my mom and I supported the
farmworkers at the time, she couldn’t stand Robert Kennedy and her hatred of
him got passed down to me (indeed, when my mom came down so viciously against
Barack Obama and called him the worst president of all time, I remembered how
much she’d hated RFK as well), and though the film presents him as a
presidential candidate whose attacks on corporations and their privileges would
never be heard in a major-party presidential campaign today (memo to Peter
Bratt: does the name “Bernie Sanders” mean anything to you?), it also seems to
make the assumption a lot of the
progressive books and films about the period do: that Robert Kennedy would have
won the Democratic nomination and the presidency had he lived. No way: at that
time there were only 14 out of 50 states that had primaries, and the Democratic
Party bosses were even more in control of the nominating process than they were
in 2016 when they shafted Bernie Sanders and forced the doomed loser Hillary
Clinton on the party — and Donald Trump on the country. Once Hubert Humphrey
announced for President, essentially as Lyndon Johnson’s surrogate, he was able
to nail down all the bosses and get the nomination sewn up without having to
enter a single primary — though what I think would have happened had Kennedy
lived to the Democratic Convention was that Humphrey would have likely offered
him the vice-presidential
nomination as a gesture of party unity, and that RFK would have accepted —
thereby alienating and trashing himself with his progressive base, who would
have walked away from him and thought, “Just another politician, after all,”
for his willingness to run on the bottom half of the ticket with someone who
was a strong public supporter of the Viet Nam war.
One issue that doesn’t get
discussed in this film is that Chávez and Huerta were both strongly
anti-immigration; they knew that one of the ways the big farm owners had of
breaking any union activity was by being able to bring in fresh workers from
Mexico to replace any who went on strike. They didn’t even try a walkout until the expiration of the U.S.
government’s bracero program,
which had initially been passed in 1942 as a war emergency measure to bring
Mexicans in to work the fields of California while the U.S. citizens were
fighting the war, but it lasted until 1964 and gave growers a safety valve in
case of labor unrest. (The bracero
program was so notoriously exploitative that when I went on one of the big
immigrant-rights marches in 2006 among the speakers were former braceros who said they were still owed back pay for their work under the program, even
though it had ended 42 years earlier! Incidentally, the bracero program is also responsible for inventing the burrito:
knowing that they had to feed the workers something but not wanting to spend too much money doing so,
the growers came up with a cheap, easily made concoction of beans wrapped in a
flour tortilla, figuring it would look and taste enough like real Mexican food
the workers would be O.K. with it.)
Another issue that doesn’t get mentioned in
this film is that in 1935 the U.S. government had passed the National Labor
Relations Act (NLRA), which officially gave American workers the right to form
unions and bargain collectively with their employers, but because the
Democratic Party then relied on votes from the South to maintain their
Congressional majorities and win national elections (one reason the New Deal
coalition collapsed in 1968 and the Republicans became the dominant party in
U.S. politics was that with the “flip” in the two major parties’ positions on
civil rights in general and African-American rights in particular, the “Solid
South” eventually changed from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican — one
reason George W. Bush became President was he was able to win all the former
Confederate states, and Donald Trump won them all except Virginia, largely
because Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, was Virginian), the Southern
planters who had effectively re-enslaved the Black agricultural population
through sharecropping insisted that farm workers not be covered under the NLRA. So even if the UFWOC
could get the majority of workers on a particular farm to vote for union
representation, there was no legal way they could compel the grower actually to
bargain with them until California passed its own law, the Agricultural Labor
Relations Act (ALRA), in 1975. But not being covered by the NLRA wasn’t all bad
for the UFWOC: in 1947 a Republican Congress had passed the Taft-Hartley Act
over Democratic President Harry Truman’s vetoes, and that had amended the NLRA
to forbid unions covered by it from organizing boycotts of their employers’
products. Not being bound by that restriction, the UFWOC was able to organize a
nationwide boycott of table grapes, which was successful to the point where one
of the ways you could tell the political orientation of the people who’d
invited you into their home was whether or not they served grapes. (It’s been
decades since the grape boycott ended and I still have an odd feeling every time I eat grapes.)
Campaigning for the boycott nationwide was the issue that took Dolores Huerta
out into the broader community and flung her in the middle of the great ferment
of political and social issues in the 1960’s — not only the civil-rights
demands of African-Americans and other communities of color but the anti-war
movement, the feminist movement and the Queer movement. At first Huerta was
unwilling to refer to herself as a feminist and to embrace the women’s movement
because as a Roman Catholic she was intensely opposed to abortion (though being
a Roman Catholic hadn’t stopped her from going through two divorces and
eventually having an affair with, and having children by, César Chávez’s
brother Roberto even though he was still married to someone else), but
eventually she mellowed out on the issue and accepted the pro-choice position
on that ground that it had been her
choice to have 11 children but it was a legitimate choice for another woman to
have none. Also the United Farm Workers, like the rest of the labor movement,
slowly moved away from their original opposition to immigration: I remember
reading in 2000 that the AFL-CIO had just passed a resolution endorsing the
rights of undocumented immigrants, and none of the people reporting this, even the ones for
independent progressive media, seemed to be aware that this was a huge change of position for a U.S. labor movement that
for years — over a century, in fact — had fiercely tried to limit immigration
on the ground that more immigrants meant a higher supply of workers and
therefore lower wages. In 1970 the UFW finally won a series of contracts with
California growers — only when the contracts expired three years later the
growers signed sweetheart deals with the Teamsters Union instead, and there was
more labor unrest in the fields as the big, bad Teamsters that had got expelled
from the AFL-CIO both for poaching on other unions’ territories and for their
Mafia connections tried all their own classic intimidation tactics, as well as
the growers’ classic intimidation tactics, to try to break the UFW once and for
all.
The fortunes of the UFW soared upwards when the California legislature
passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) — one of the top priorities
of recently elected Governor Jerry Brown in 1975 — and Brown appointed strongly
union-sympathetic members to the board. Chávez and Huerta also launched a
nationwide campaign in the 1970’s targeting the growers’ use of pesticides,
which they applied to their crops in massive doses, often while workers were
actually in the field without protective clothing, threatening the health not
only of farm workers but also of consumers who would someday buy these products
and eat them. I remember seeing Chávez speak at the National March on
Washington for Lesbian/Gay Rights in 1987 (obviously this was before the
legitimate demands of Bisexual, Transgender, and other subgroups for inclusion
led to the ridiculous non-solution of referring to us by an ever-growing set of
initials — “LGBT,” “LGBTQ” and in one horrible example, the UCSD student
groupo, “LGBTQQIAA” — for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer,
Questioning, Intersex — the people with indeterminate genitalia formerly known
as hermaphrodites — Asexual and Allies, the last being the term of art for
straight people committed to Queer rights) and listening to him go on and on
and on about pesticides, until I
realized he was doing something extraordinarily radical even for him: traditionally
unions had seen their role as winning better wages and benefits for their
members, not questioning the
techniques their employers used in actual production unless they posed a direct
and dramatic threat to the health and safety of the workers involved in
production. What Chávez was doing was framing his argument against pesticides
in terms of a warning to consumers
— essentially telling people, “The stuff we grow is unsafe for you, so don’t buy it until our employers clean up their
act” — and he got criticized for it within the labor movement as well as from
outside.
Dolores ends sadly, not
only with the near-fatal beating she got from San Francisco police officers
while participating in an ACT UP anti-AIDS demonstration in 1988 (she was laid
up in hospital for several months — and the fact that Huerta was out there
picketing on behalf of Gay men with AIDS is yet another indication that, well
before that horrible word “intersectionality” was coined, she was living it)
but the way the board of the United Farm Workers passed her over for the union
presidency after César Chávez died. They kept her on the board but gave her
less and less to do until she reluctantly stepped down from the UFW in 2002 —
it’s interesting that this film does not address the flagging fortunes of the UFW since then and the criticism
that’s been made of its current president, Arturo Rodriguez (whom the board
elected after Chávez died in 1991 and who is still there) — though she’s still
active in various causes at 87 and she’s lived one of the most extraordinary
lives of all time. Charles and I saw Dolores Huerta as part of a lecture series
at UCSD in the 1990’s, and while I don’t remember much of what she actually
said (she seemed to be gratified to be around a group of people who were aware
of her importance — part of Peter Bratt’s agenda in making Dolores seems to have been to set the record straight and
establish that her role was equally significant to Chávez’s in organizing the
UFW, including the fact that it was she, not he, who coined the phrase “¡Si
se puede!” — but as I noted above, the
records I’ve seen acknowledge her importance and if anyone who was involved in forming the UFW has been
unjustly neglected in the historical record, it is Larry Itliong, mainly
because, despite Chávez’s and Huerta’s understanding that the UFW had to be a multi-racial movement to succeed,
Mexican-American progressives in general have claimed “ownership” of the UFW
and ignored the crucial role of Filipinos in the movement’s early days) I can
vividly recall the rock-star charisma with which she gripped a full-house
crowd. ¡Viva Dolores Huerta!
