JUNE 8, 1991
EL UVALDE TIMES
7
CESAR CHAVEZ:
A Man Who Refuses To Give Up
By Alfred Rodriguez Santos c/s
“When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So, it is how we use our lives that determines what hind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be me!”
Ceasar Chavez
Rarely in the course of our own lives are we able to witness the significance of our actions in the context of a social justice issue. For most of us, the struggles of poor people to improve their own lives, is an abstraction that we charge off to distance and a foreign language. Yet today, right here in America, the very people who work from sun-up to sundown to put food on the tables of millions, often go home only to find that there is nothing on their own tables. While some of us would call this nothing short of a national disgrace, the really important question is, what are we, as Americans, willing to do about it?
Ceasar Chavez, and the organization he heads, the United Farmworkers Union of America AFL-CIO, decided 27 years ago that they would attempt to organize the farmworkers. Despite the predictions by the odd makers in Las Vegas the organizing farmworkers had been tried many times before and was next to impossible, Chavez and his group decided to proceed anyway.
Now 65 years old, Chavez continues to hold together a union of farmworkers that has been the target of countless attempts by powerful growers and other agribusiness interests who see the unionization of farmworkers as a threat to their industry and lifestye.
The excerpts below are from a talk Chavez gave back in 1971. Because the month of May was designated National Farmworkers Month, it is appropriate to hear the words of Ceasar Chavez’s once again.
Ceasar Chavez on Money and Organizing
“What I’m going to say may not make much sense to you. On the other hand, it may make an awful lot of sense. This depends on where you are in terms of organizing and what your ideas are about that elusive and difficult task of getting people together-to act together and produce something.
Labor unions today have a heck of a time organizing workers. The church has a heck of a time organizing people. The govern
ment has a heck of a time organizing people. The Republican Party has a difficult time. So does the Democratic Party. So does almost any institution have a heck of a time organizing people. Why is it difficult?
Organizing is difficult because in our capitalist society we believe the only way things get done is with money. Let’s examine this assumption by using the farm worker struggle as an example. Since about 1898, there have been many efforts to organize farmworkers in California and other states. Almost invariably, at the end of each struggle someone would report, “The workers weren’t ready for it. They didn’t want the union They didn’t do their share to get organized.” But every report of organizing attempts also included more honest statement: “We had to stop the organizing drive, or we had to temporarily disband, because we ran out of money.” It is a shame.
There isn’t enough money to organize poor people. There is never enough money to organize anyone. If you put it on the basis of money, you’re not going to succeed. So when we started organizing our union, we knew we had to depend on something other than money. As soon as we announced that we were leaving the Community Service Organization (CSO), the group that I had worked with so many years, to organize field workers, there were people who wanted to give us money. In fact, one lady offered us $50,000 to organize workers. When I said, “No,” she was very hurt.” I told her, “If I take the money now that would be the worst thing that I could do. I don’t want the money. Some other time I will, but not now.” $50,000 wasn’t enough. The AFL-CIO had just spent a million and a half dollars and they failed. So why did we think we could do it with $50,000?
We started with two principles: First, since there wasn’t any money and the job had to be done there would have to be a lot of sacrificing. Second, no matter how poor the people, they had the responsibiity to help the union. If they had $2 for food, they had to give $1 to the union. Otherwise,
they would never get out of the trap of poverty. They would never have a union because they couldn’t afford to sacrifice a little bit more on top of the misery. The statement: “They’re so poor they can’t afford to contribute to the group,” is a great cop-out. You don’t organize people by being afraid of them. You never have. You never will. You can be afraid of them in a variety of ways. But one of the main ways is to patronize them. You know the attitude; blacks or browns or farmworkers are so poor that they can’t afford to have their own group. They hardly have enough money to eat. This makes it very easy for the organizer. He can always rationalize, “I haven’t failed. They can’t come up with the money so we are not going to organize them.”
We decided that workers wanted to be organized and could be organized. So the responsibility had to be upon ourselves, the organizers. If you send a man to dig a ditch 3 feet by 10 feet, you’ll know if he did it or not. Or if you get someone to write a letter, you’ll know if he wrote it or not. In most endeavors, you can see the results. In organizing, its different. You can see the results years later, but you can’t see them right away.
Money is not going to organize the disadvantaged, the powerless, or the poor. We need other weapons. That’s why the War on Poverty is such a miserable failure. You put on a big pot of money and all you do is fight over it. Then you run out the money and you run out troops. We’ll organize workers in this movement as long as we’re willing to sacrifice. The moment we stop sacrificing, we stop organizing.
Looking at the Boycott
When we first started talking about the boycott, everyone told us “You’ll never do it. Boycotts never work.” Every single union told Jim Drake, the first organizer of the boycott, “It can’t be done. We’ve tried it and we are a bigger union. And we a lot of money.” So we put a lot of manpower into cities around the country. At one time we had about 500 full-time people in the boycott, not counting a tremendous number of supporters. You know why we were helped? Because they knew our guys weren’t getting paid. So they didn’t mind doing the same. But you do mind helping if you know that the other guys are getting a big fat salary.
When you sacrifice, you force others to sacrifice. It’s an extremely powerful weapon. When somebody stops eating for a week
or ten days, people come and want to be a part of that experience. Someone goes to jail and people want to help him. You don’t buy that with money. That doesn’t have any price in terms of dollars.
Those who are willing to sacrifice and be of service have very little difficulty with people. They know what they are all about. People can’t help but want to be near them—to help them and work with them, that’s what love is all about. It starts with you and radiates out. You can’t phoney it.
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It just doesn’t go. When you work and sacrifice more than anyone else around you, you put others on the spot and they have to do at least a bit more than they have been doing, and that’s what puts it together.
These observations tie in directly with the whole question of organizing. Why do we have leaders? We put some people out in the field and all of a sudden they hit, they click. Everyone’s happy with them and they move
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RUDOLPHO RODRIGUEZ, JR.
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