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

to
suffer for others. God help us to be men.” Some union staff and
members left in disagreement with Cesar over nonviolence,
but most people’s hearts and minds changed after this fast.
    An equally divisive internal political battle erupted on the
union’s executive board in the late 1970s after the passage of
the farm labor law, over the direction that the UFW would
take. There were legitimate differences of opinions. Some
board members wanted a traditional business union,
concentrating on wages, hours, and benefits for members. Cesar’s
vision for the UFW was more transformational. Of course he
knew that the union had to produce economic progress. But
he also envisioned the UFW as leading a universal movement
to take on problems confronting farm workers and a larger,
developing community of Latino working families and other
poor people. As in the fight over nonviolence in the 1960s,
Cesar’s vision prevailed then too, although critics still
condemn him for it. Most Americans today would probably take
Cesar’s side. If the UFW had been a conventional business
union, would seventeen million Americans have boycotted
grapes in 1975?
    The UFW under Cesar also won many practical
breakthroughs for farm workers that were unimaginable a short
time before:
The first successful farm workers union.
The first real union contracts in farm labor.
Contracts guaranteeing rest periods, toilets, clean
drinking water, and hand-washing facilities.
Protections against pesticide poisoning. The first time
that DDT was outlawed in the United States was in a
UFW contract with a grape grower in 1967, before the
U.S. government’s ban in 1972.
The first family medical coverage—and later dental and
vision benefits—for farm workers and their dependents,
through a plan named for Robert Kennedy.
America’s first—and still only—working pension
program for farm workers.
The outlawing of sexual harassment and discrimination
based on race or ethnicity.
Seniority or other job security which ensures that
workers no longer must beg the foreperson or crew boss for
jobs with hat in hand—which too often means paying
bribes or performing sexual favors. Instead they are
hired, laid off, or promoted to better-paying jobs based
solely on their years of service at the company and
ability to do the work.
Add to these collective bargaining firsts legislative and
regulatory victories: from the abolition of the hated
short-handled hoe that debilitated generations of field
laborers, through the coverage of California farm
workers under disability and workers’ compensation and
unemployment insurance, to the federal legalization of
immigrants in 1986—and to the Agricultural Labor
Relations Act of 1975, the first, and still the only, state law
in the nation that lets farm workers organize, freely
choose their union representatives, and bargain with
their employers.
    Transferring the movement’s headquarters from the Forty
Acres, a parcel west of Delano named for its size, to Nuestra
Señora Reina de La Paz (Our lady queen of peace) in 1971 let
Cesar strategize, plan, and run union operations amid 187
acres of oaks and spectacular rock outcroppings in California’s
Tehachapi Mountains. That was hard to accomplish in the
hustle and bustle of Delano, with its constant conflicts and
many farm workers now working under union contract,
making legitimate demands for services and bringing Cesar their
problems. He worried that as long as he and other union
leaders were available to resolve issues there, then the
development of indigenous local leadership would be impeded and
not enough attention would be paid to worker demands
elsewhere in the country.
    La Paz was where the daily work happened, including the
planning and coordination of organizing, boycotting, contract
bargaining, and contract administration. Centrally located, it
was five hours from both the Imperial Valley in the south and
the Salinas Valley in the north.
    But La Paz was more for Cesar. It was