The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement (review)

This is the story of eight people, mostly from the fields and classrooms, who joined César Chávez's farm worker crusade as organizers and activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Their story highlights Chávez's incredible accomplishments as well as their own, but unlike most books about the farm workers' movement, it also chronicles Chávez's ultimately woeful shortcomings as a leader and administrator.

The grape agribusinesses had no intention of ever recognizing a union, even one that had the overwhelming support of the impoverished field hands. After two years of failed strikes, Chávez switched tactics to launch a nationwide boycott of grapes in 1967. At the height of the boycott in 1970 seventeen million Americans stopped eating grapes so that farm workers in California could achieve better wages and working conditions.

The selected eight people were among a host of volunteers who initially worked for free and slept on floors, inspired by Chávez's oratory, his commitment to non-violence, his vision of poor people taking command of their lives, and his sacrifices—e.g., Gandhi-like fasting—to propel the movement forward. The well-known union victories are noted, but the author focuses on the problems that abounded. The eight leaders had to cope with chaotic union hiring halls, wildcat strikes, innumerable and complicated lawsuits, and staying in touch with widely dispersed workers from the remote headquarters at La Paz. The author describes the long ordeal of the UFW crumbling from within, and places the blame squarely on Chávez's inept micromanagement and growing intolerance of dissent. Chief lawyer and frequent negotiator Jerry Cohen, for instance, believed he was close to having the historic grape contracts renewed in 1973, when Chávez suddenly excoriated the growers for allowing prostitutes and gambling in the company camps. The negotiations failed. With the Coachella grape strike faltering in 1974, Chávez denounced illegal immigrants in the fields and urged the federal government to step up deportations. But the union's staunch church supporters never embraced the demand.

One divisive issue revolved around the modest salaries that the lawyers and some other staffers received unbeknownst to volunteer staffers. This startling revelation in 1977 was accompanied by Chávez's demand that the union staff abandon salaries and traditional unionism and adopt communal living, modeled after California's Synanon drug rehabilitation cult. Marked by shaved heads and overalls, Synanon members were deeply involved in the "Game," an encounter group exercise in which players hurled insults at one another for alleged bad behavior in a therapeutic effort to enhance communication. The "Game," soon required of all staffers, seemed to promote Chávez's increasing fears that the union was infiltrated with enemies. In the late 1970s and in the 1980s Chávez turned against most of his veteran staffers, some of whom turned on each other, and the grape and vegetable contracts began disappearing. Chávez died in 1993, by which time only one percent of the state's farm hands (5,000) were still under contract.

The author, an accomplished reporter, utilizes interviews and archival sources, albeit some of them private. She disrupts individual storylines by switching from one activist to another, but stitches it all together coherently in a well-researched, sorrowful tale of the demise of a potentially transformational union for farm hands. Future UFW researchers will have to deal with this unsettling book, and will find the main body of it very difficult to question.

I should disclose that I was marginally involved in la causa and met two of the leaders mentioned several times in the book (but none of the eight principals). Also, I remember that the movement in the Rio Grande Valley was plagued by some of the same internal problems that occurred in California, but the Texas story—including the...