I became suspicions about Richard Rodriguez’s Wilson Quarterly Winter 2010 essay, “Saint Cesar of Delano,” with the author’s recollection that when he first saw the UFW leader speak in the late 1960s, “Something about Chavez embarrassed me.” Embarrassed by Cesar Chavez? Chavez’s small physical stature and moderate voice often surprised those first seeing him, but Rodriquez’s feeling of embarrassment is unusual. It helps explain why he wrongly concludes that Cesar Chavez “died as a loser” and describes the UFW as “largely a failure.” 

Both history and current social movements defy Rodriquez’s conclusions.

Chavez and UFW’s Historic Success

Prior to Chavez’s launching his drive to create a farmworkers union, every previous effort had failed. California agribusiness dominated the fields, using government, law enforcement and the courts to suppress worker organizing. Agribusiness was so powerful that farmworkers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act and were denied the federal protections for union organizing afforded most other workers.

Cesar Chavez spent his teenage years in the fields, performing the stoop labor that left him with chronic back problems. He had seen workers come together to strike, only for the effort to quickly fail due to lack of organization and strategy. Chavez began his impossible quest without money or political connections, but with a strong background in community organizing and a deep religious faith. Cesar Chavez had so little money at the start that he and his wife Helen picked cotton from 6:00am to 2:00 p.m., after which he spent the balance of the afternoon and evening knocking on doors and meeting with farmworkers.

By the end of the 1960s, this man who Rodriquez now brands a “loser” had spawned the largest consumer boycott in United States history, and the broadest grassroots movement for farmworkers in history. Chavez became the first labor leader to actively recruit students to join a workers struggle, and he forged the most powerful labor-clergy alliance seen in decades. The UFW was also the only union of predominately male members that recruited and utilized woman organizers (with Dolores Huerta and Jessica Govea being two of the most prominent).

Cesar Chavez and the UFW built this grassroots movement amidst an extremely hostile political environment. In 1967, pro-grower Republican Ronald Reagan became Cali-fornia’s Governor. Reagan loved to be photographed eating non-union grapes and used his state’s resources to oppose the UFW grape boycott. Richard Nixon became President in 1969 and was another avowed UFW opponent. Nixon sought to combat the grape boycott’s success by having the Defense Department purchase 9.69 million pounds of grapes in 1969, three million more than the previous year (the Defense Department also tripled its purchases of non-union lettuce in 1971 in response to the UFW lettuce boycott).

Despite all of the political obstacles and powerful business interests aligned against it, the union that Rodriquez calls “largely a failure” won enactment in 1975  of the nation’s first Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA). To this day, the ALRA provides California’s farmworkers with far greater protections than elsewhere in the United States.

The UFW’s Decline

I set forth this brief history of Cesar Chavez and the UFW’s remarkable success because it is clear that Rodriquez is among those for whom it is unknown, forgotten or obscured by later events. These events, which tragically began soon after the enactment of the ALRA and escalated following the UFW’s great victory in the lettuce strike of 1979, have increasingly taken precedence over Cesar Chavez and the UFW’s accomplishments in the minds of revisionist critics.

Cesar Chavez’s responsibility for the UFW’s steady decline since 1982 is hardly news. It was first chronicled over 25 years ago and has since been discussed in many books and articles. New details emerge, but the basic storyline is unchanged: Chavez drove nearly all key UFW volunteers out of the union and shifted away from the strategies and tactics that brought the UFW success. It is a terrible tragedy, made worse by California farm-workers’ steadily declining living conditions, and the inability of farmworkers in other states to use the UFW’s strategic skills and power to win unionization and labor protections.

But frustration with the ongoing plight of workers in the fields, and the UFW’s declining membership, does not turn Cesar Chavez into a “loser,” or the most successful farm-workers union in the nation’s history into a “failure.”

To the contrary, as I argue in Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century, Cesar Chavez and the UFW’s legacy transcends current UFW membership rolls. Rather, this legacy is found in the wide-ranging social movements shaped by the UFW’s strategies and tactics, and in the many UFW alumni who have spent decades working for social justice.

The UFW’s Legacy

Consider a few examples:

When the Obama campaign was looking for models for grassroots voter outreach, it turned to the UFW’s strategies in California elections in 1972 and 1976 to get Latino and other low-income voters to the polls. The UFW developed an electoral outreach model in the 1970s that is chiefly responsible for sharply increased Latino voting in California since the late 1990s, and in Colorado, New Mexico, Florida and other states since 2006.

When SEIU was trying to figure out how to organize janitors in the 1980s, a UFW alum realized that janitors were like “farmworkers in highrises,” and the Justice for Janitors campaign was born. When the union UNITE HERE was looking for the best guidance in launching a nationwide hotel boycott in 2006, it showed slides of Cesar Chavez and the UFW grape boycott.

When the immigrant rights movement took to the streets in 2006, some of its key strategies—such as marchers waving American flags and publicly honoring U.S. military personnel—have their roots in the farmworkers movement. In fact, such UFW alumni as Fred Ross, Jr, Eliseo Medina and the late Miquel Contreras played important roles in the broadening of the immigrant rights cause to include labor and religious groups.

The UFW began advocating for “environmental justice” in the fields in 1969, before that term was even coined. The UFW’s actions preceded mainstream environmental groups even recognizing worker exposure to dangerous pesticides as an environmental issue, and it was the UFW whose campaign led to the abolition of DDT.

Nearly fifty years after Cesar Chavez set out to build a farmworkers union, and nearly thirty years after the union began its decline, the UFW’s spirit of “Si Se Puede” (adopted by Obama as “Yes We Can”) remains strong. The UFW was the leading training ground for young activists of its era, and a remarkable number continue to provide strategic leadership for progressive causes. The UFW failed to achieve the broader goals in the fields that activists aspired to in its heyday, but its strategies and tactics still provide the clearest roadmap for achieving greater social and economic justice in the United States.

Randy Shaw is an attorney, author and activist who lives in Berkeley, California. He is the Executive Director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that he co-founded in 1980. His Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century will be released in paperback this fall by the University of California Press. He is also the author of The Activist’s Handbook, and editor of the online progressive daily, www.BeyondChron.org. He can be contacted at Randy@thclinic.org