Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution Read Online Free

folded. But no
one quit working for the UFW because they were not paid.
The union survived and made up for loss of dues money with
mostly small donations from supporters, which still help sustain
it.
     
    The fourth innovation might have been the most important.
Preparing to create the UFW in 1962, Cesar, Dolores Huerta,
Gilbert Padilla, and the other early organizers had a unique
vision of what a union could be. From studying why previous
organizing endeavors had failed, they were persuaded that
things had to be done differently.
    Cesar recognized that workers are not just workers. Only a
union could remedy the economic abuses that they endured
at work. But he was convinced that it would take more than a
union to overcome the exploitation and prejudice that farm
workers confronted in the community; it would take a
movement. In that 1969 letter to the California Grape and Tree
Fruit League, Cesar wrote, “The color of our skins, the
languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal
education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the
numbers of our slain in recent wars—all these burdens
generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to
break our human spirit.”
    He adopted the social unionism of the American labor
movement in the early twentieth century. He patterned the
UFW after unions from that time that had also comprised
impoverished immigrants, such as Italians, Irish, Poles, and
Russian Jews. These groups too had often encountered
discrimination, didn’t speak English, didn’t know much about
American civic or political systems, and faced many dilemmas
outside the workplace in their communities. So the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers, for instance, organized cooperative
housing, unemployment insurance, and a community bank.
    Most industrial unions didn’t need to provide such benefits
by the 1960s because their union members were assimilated.
Cesar’s constituency more closely resembled immigrant
workers in the early part of the century. So, long before he thought
that farm workers would win union contracts, Cesar
organized people by providing services: a death benefit plan, a
credit union, a co-op gas station, and service centers to help
people with their problems.
    Cesar was always a proud member of the labor movement,
but he couldn’t fathom the high pay and prosperous lifestyles
of some labor leaders. He occasionally parted ways with the
AFL-CIO and his labor colleagues by taking stands that were
unpopular even with his own people. Cesar strongly opposed
the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The UFW became the first
major union to oppose the employer sanction, the federal law
making it illegal to hire undocumented workers, in
1973—long before the AFL-CIO and other unions acted similarly.
Cesar backed gay rights in the 1970s; I was with him at
functions in San Francisco with Harvey Milk. The antiwar and gay
rights stances were not popular in the 1960s and 1970s with
many Latino farm workers. Cesar didn’t care. He believed
that leadership is about getting out in front of the crowd, not
following it.
    His novel approach to organizing, specifically the
insistence on nonviolence, sparked dissent within union ranks.
This was particularly so among some young men who,
discouraged by the apparent lack of progress after nearly three
years of the first grape walkouts, yearned to retaliate against
the violence and disrespect that the growers visited upon
them. When he addressed farm workers, Cesar often spoke
directly to the men and boys about what it means to be a
man—it isn’t getting drunk on Saturday night and coming
home to push around your wife or kids. In his statement at the
end of his twenty-five-day 1968 fast for nonviolence, Cesar
said, “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