Book details faith foundation of farmworker movement, author says

Social Justice News
December 10, 2008

Book details faith foundation of farmworker movement, author says
Mark Pattison, Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A new book on Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union shows not only how the tactics they adopted to win contracts have been used by other social movements since then, but also the faith foundations of the union itself, according to its author.

"There's a lot of impact that I think that the Catholic Church and the whole religious community had on the farmworker movement and the labor movement and the immigrant rights movement that I think is not given a whole lot of credit that they're due for," said Randy Shaw, author of "Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century."

"No one had any idea how religious Chavez was and how religious the movement was," Shaw said in a Nov. 24 telephone interview with Catholic News Service from San Francisco.

Shaw also took note of the role the late Robert F. Kennedy played in marshaling popular support for the UFW. "The fact that Kennedy said it's a bishop's duty to stand with the farmworkers, I think, in terms of Kennedy's legacy, was extremely important," he said.

What impressed UFW leaders is that Kennedy gave his support without asking anything in return.

Kennedy first lent his support in 1966, well before grape boycotts swept the nation in order to bring grape growers to the bargaining table. He also sat with Chavez at the end of his first "spiritual fast" in 1968, shortly before announcing his bid to capture the Democratic presidential nomination -- a bid that ended with his assassination that June.

Shaw also noted how the UFW served as a bridge-builder between Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles and the labor movement with the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. Cardinal Mahony had been a staunch supporter of the UFW in particular, and unions in general, during his time as bishop of Stockton, Calif., and early in his tenure in Los Angeles. But the cardinal's relationship with labor was strained when labor leaders blamed Cardinal Mahony for a failed attempt to organize workers at the archdiocese's cemeteries in the early 1990s.

The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride thawed relations that had been cool for a decade, Shaw said, giving the credit to Eliseo Medina, who got his start as an organizer with the UFW and later became a vice president in what is now the nation's largest labor union, the Service Employees International Union.

"It was kind of the UFW tradition, recognizing the importance of the immigrant community," Shaw said. "That turned out to be a very important overture."

In a further show of solidarity with immigrants, Cardinal Mahony in 2006 said he would ask priests of his archdiocese to break the law rather than comply with provisions in a bill the House had passed that would criminalize the act of offering aid to illegal immigrants. "When you have a cardinal saying we're not going to comply with this, it's pretty serious, I think," Shaw said.

Thanks to grass-roots boycotts on the national and international level, community organizing and political savvy, the UFW achieved a string of victories between 1966 and 1976. It lost badly when a California ballot measure it supported dealing with the agricultural relations board failed in 1976, but the UFW rebounded in 1979 with a lettuce strike that won it still more contracts.

"You could say that with everything that happened up to 1979, they could be as strong as ever," Shaw told CNS. "But then Cesar had to manipulate the (UFW) convention and not let the workers have a say. That decimated the union. Cesar undermined the organization he had built."

Even though the UFW is itself not as strong as it once was, its methods have inspired countless campaigns over the past generation. They include those seeking pickle contracts between Vlasic and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Ohio and Michigan, pursuing tomato contracts between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida and some of the nation's largest fast-food restaurant chains, and community organizing projects in cities and towns across the country.

Shaw also noted how the UFW's signature chant, "Si, se puede," or "Yes, it can be done," was modified into "Yes, we can" for the campaign of Barack Obama, a onetime community organizer who is now president-elect.

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