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They Miss the Point

The Son of a Farm Worker Looks at the UFW

BY JOSÉ MADERO

To many Latinos -- including myself -- César Chávez was the object of hero worship. His civil rights triumphs, his work for the farm workers of America, and Chávez's whole persona put him, for many Spanish-speaking Hispanics, right up there with Mother Teresa.

But now, after a series of stories which ran in the January Los Angeles Times that depicted the alleged moral decay of the United Farm Workers, the credibility of the union that Chávez founded in the early 1960s is in peril.

According to the Times series, the United Farm Workers has gone from being the ultimate civil rights organization for farm workers and Latinos to just one more entity based on money and ideology. The stories by reporter Miriam Pawel allege that the union has strayed from its roots and paint a dark portrait of Chávez that has little to do with the image of the beloved leader that many Mexican-Americans have of him.

Following the publication of the stories, the United Farm Workers struck back, claiming that Pawel's stories, as well as those of others like Marc Cooper's in the LA Weekly, are flawed. United Farm Workers spokes man Mark Grossman told me that the union is demanding a retraction from those newspapers and considering taking legal steps against them.

According to the Times' series, the United Farm Workers lobbies for an Indian casino and for same-sex marriage initiatives instead of furthering the rights of farm workers and Latinos -- and despite the fact that most Latinos seem not to back marriage between persons of the same sex.

When I asked Grossman about the union's support of homosexual rights, he told me that Chávez believed in homosexual rights and that his granddaughter, Christina Chávez, has been outspoken about them. He added, however, that the union has not spent money to support same-sex marriage initiatives. Christina Chávez took time off as the United Farm Workers' political director in 2005 to back a homosexual rights bill proposed by state assembly member Mark Leno, Grossman said. The "UFW endorsed the bill but didn't spend a dime in lobbying," Grossman said. "I am not apologizing for the position that we took"

Grossman said that the Times series is flawed and that Miriam Pawel's reporting was "sloppy journalism." The union's website claims the stories have "omissions and misrepresentations." The United Farm Workers has claimed that union officials spent more time with Pawell than with any other reporter in its history. They added that Pawell was given ample information and facts that proved that the Times stories were faulty.

Still, the Times' 20,000-word series is hard to dismiss, despite the United Farm Workers' mammoth, 81-page, point-for-point rebuttal that is available on the union's website. Grossman claimed that the union's side of the story is not felt in the Times story, a feeling that I have heard repeatedly by some of my colleagues in the Latino press who have read the series.

So, whom do you believe?

With all due respect to the Times' warranted credibility, to Pawel's impressive investigative and writing skills, and to the United Farm Workers' commendable history of civil rights activism, I think that both sides somehow miss the point.

In a nutshell, the Times series claims that the United Farm Workers, a symbol of "Latinity" if there ever was one, has morphed into an entirely new creature than the one envisioned by Latinos for the group that captured not only their minds but also their hearts and souls like few non-religious movements have done.

In other words, the Times series claims that the United Farm Workers sold out. It goes even further: it depicts Chávez as having been a practitioner of the cultish Synanon games and claims that, out of paranoia, he purged some of the union's best leaders during the 1970s. But hearing Grossman say that Chávez and his union were not given a fair chance in the Times series, one can't help but sympathize. Grossman is a man who has been with the United Farm Workers for over 35 years, who has seen countless strikes, and who knows the plight of farm workers.

In all of this, the real question is this: has the United Farm Workers, like most Latino politicians in California, lost its soul?

To me and to many others, the Times series touched close -- very close -- to home. My mother was a member of the union during the 1970s. A farm worker for more than 20 years, she picked everything from asparagus to onions; it was a brutal, backbreaking labor in which she toiled straight up till a few days before I was born. Pregnant and sore from fieldwork, my mother, an immigrant from the tropical state of Nayarit, sweated to the last. I was born with a hernia. Doctors told my mother that it was because she had picked vegetables far into her pregnancy, at a time when she should have been taking care of herself. She replied that she needed the money for her newborn son.

My mother recalls the United Farm Workers and Chávez vividly. She also recalls the '60s.

While mainstream baby boomers can say with pride that if you remember the '60s, it means that you weren't really there, my mother doesn't remember sex, drugs, or rock n' roll. She remembers that era as a time of hard work, when many restaurants still put up signs that said, "no dogs, blacks or Mexicans." Back then, for people like my mother, the United Farm Workers and Chávez were the only symbols that seemed able to drive the darkness of racism away. To them, it meant so much more than just a union.

Can most immigrant Latinos say that now about the UFW?

No. For immigrant Latinos, it is not the same UFW.

Like many Latino organizations that began during the civil rights era, and even before, the United Farm Workers seems to have changed with the times. There's no doubt that during the '60s, the union, motivated partly, perhaps indirectly, by the teachings of Leo XIII and Pius XI on the rights of workers and unions, was a force not only for social good but a for morals as well. Chávez and great women leaders like Dolores Huerta managed to better conditions for farm workers. Field work will always be the toughest work around, but thanks to the union, things improved for field workers in countless ways.

But the irony is that the Times stories claim that most of today's farm hands have never heard of the United Farm Workers or don't even know who Chávez was. Grossman said that this is because the union is now facing a very different type of farm worker than the kind that picked California's fields 20 years ago. Back then, most of the farm hands were either U.S.-born or green card-carrying Latinos, Grossman said. Now most are undocumented, mobile, and hard to organize; they represent a daunting challenge.

Up until the 1980s, the United Farm Workers' mystique was well known among immigrant Mexicans. Even the quintessential norteño band, Los Tigres del Norte, wrote Chávez a corrido (a narrative Mexican ballad). After Chávez's death in 1993, his name among newer immigrants started to fade. But field veterans like my mother will never forget him as long as they live.

Yet the divide between assimilated Latino union and political leaders and the newer immigrants has grown. Add to that the traditional rivalry between assimilated, English-speaking Latinos (especially Mexican-Americans) and immigrant Latinos, and there may lie one of the reasons that some immigrant farm hands may not know about the United Farm Workers' legacy.

Sure the union now -- contrary to the Chávez days -- supports the rights of undocumented immigrants. Good for them. But where support really matters, in an immigrant's family life, in his work places, and in his plight in a new, foreign country where he is often easily ensnared by drugs, alcoholism, depression, and a hedonist culture that spawns fatherless children and broken marriages, the influence of the United Farm Workers and other Latino organizations seems to be nil.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the Times series that seems to have been the key of the downfall of the United Farm Workers -- morally speaking -- was Chávez's involvement in the mid '70s with Synanon, a therapy cult founded and led by Charles Dietrich. Grossman said that, during that time, Dietrich, who had been a friend of Chávez since the 1950s, was respected for his methods. Chávez, who has been described as a devout Catholic, had been influenced by the Jesuit spirituality of the time and was "looking for ways to organize people around something other than dues," Grossman said.

Grossman acknowledged that the United Farm Workers had problems back then but that Chávez was in no way the angry, paranoid man which was depicted in Times series.

I cannot but help think that Chávez and the United Farm Workers would have benefited greatly had they received better moral support from the Church, had clerics (many of whom supported Chávez, including Cardinal Roger Mahony) not been in a state of moral decay. I can't help but think that with quality help, the union would have grown into the lay movement that is sorely needed among Latinos today.

What we have today is clear. The United Farm Workers now endorses a same-sex marriage initiative and has continually supported politicians who support abortion.

The Times' allegations of self-enrich ment by Chávez family members -- which Grossman denied -- and the union's anonymity among new immi grant farm hands, are really secondary. The main point is that the United Farm Workers has sold its soul to the spirit of the times. We are all against unjust prejudice, but would Chávez have gone so far as to support a same-sex marriage bill? A devout Catholic, would Chávez support abortion? And how many farm workers are for homosexual marriage? Is that a priority for them?

That is the real tragedy of our modern Latino leaders. They are often talented, charitable, and culled from the best in the Latino community. But when it comes down to it, they have caved in to political correctness and to the worst in progressive politics when they really didn't have to.

I hope the United Farm Workers changes its ways and becomes the labor movement that we all dreamed they would be. I'll pray for them.

You should too.

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