Go Where the People Are: A conversation with historian Matthew Garcia
Joe Waters interviews Matthew Garcia on what today’s movements for children, families, justice, and equality can learn from Cesar Chavez and the farm worker movement.
Pea Pickers Line Up on Edge of Field at Weigh Scale, near Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California, 1939. (Dorthea Lange, 1895-1965)
Many in the United States are contemplating how to rebuild after the Covid-19 pandemic and the unrest caused by the sickening killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Activists across policy areas are reimagining their activism as new challenges emerge and frustrations with a lack of progress reach a boiling point.
Covid-19 has especially devastated the child care industry and has focused the attention of advocates on building new movements for dignity and economic opportunity for those who care for our youngest citizens.
Matthew J. Garcia is professor of history and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth College. Throughout his career, Matt has been inspired to ask why we, as a nation, have frequently demonstrated little regard for the people who pick, pack, prepare, and serve the food we eat. He came to know the struggle of food workers personally through his work as a meat cutter and store clerk in his father’s carnicería (Mexican meat market) and through the lives and experience of his paternal grandparents, who toiled in the fields of California and prepared and served meals to college students. In his scholarship, he focuses on the origins of inequality in our food labor system. He is the author of A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 and From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker, which won the Philip Taft Labor History Award.
The following conversation on the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez, and the characteristics of successful social movements has been edited for length and clarity.
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Joe Waters: I’d like to start with both the cultural context in which successful social movements arise and the features of those movements. What lessons can be learned from influential social movements of the past, and the recent past in particular, that could potentially be applied to a movement to build more opportunity and dignity for our children and those who care for them?
Matthew Garcia: Often there is a wide recognition of a problem in society, along with the recognition that government and public policy have failed to resolve it. These movements arise out of a new generation's interpretation of what is causing the problem, and also a willingness to try new solutions. That was the impetus for the farm worker movement that I studied and wrote about. The problem in the late '50s, early '60s, was the continued use of temporary contract workers under the bracero program that brought people here from Mexico to harvest crops, mostly in California.
This suppressed wages for everybody. It also made workers tractable because they could be sent back to their country of origin if they raised questions about the conditions of their labor. The first problem Cesar Chavez saw as necessary to address was the structural problem of the importation of guest workers. But as I said, this wasn’t a newly recognized problem. Ernesto Galarza, who preceded Chavez, wrote extensively about it. He tried to organize braceros and ultimately just felt like he was tilting at windmills and that the United States and Mexico were incapable of resolving the problem. He actually told Cesar Chavez, "You're not going to succeed." Galarza dampened his expectations for change. But because Chavez was young and in the process of discovering a new way of changing his reality, and the realities of his generation, he persevered. That was the beginning of the modern farm worker movement.
“I think sometimes it’s important to recognize that government facilitates or creates the problems that we’re living with. In the case of the pandemic, it wasn’t that the government could have stopped the pandemic, could have changed the way the coronavirus acted upon human bodies in the United States. But it could have been much more prepared for dealing with the virus.”
I am curious about the possibilities for success in future movements when government is chronically unresponsive. Not just unresponsive, but dysfunctional in discharging its most basic duties, like protecting the public health in the midst of a pandemic.
I think sometimes it's important to recognize that government facilitates or creates the problems that we're living with. In the case of the pandemic, it wasn't that the government could have stopped the pandemic, could have changed the way the coronavirus acted upon human bodies in the United States. But it could have been much more prepared for dealing with the virus. We know this from the fact that with other viruses, previous presidents, specifically President Obama, initiated some preparation. The current president really decommissioned the preparations of the responsible agencies.
Japan and South Korea, had a capacity to deal with the spread of the virus and to reduce the number of deaths. Even China, although it failed miserably in the first month or so, developed this capacity. We are looking at a systemic failure in which the government facilitated deaths by its lack of preparedness. We cannot take our eye off that, even though it is the tendency of government, especially political parties, to try to stay in power and to put the onus on a foreign power, which is happening with the Trump administration.
Can you help me understand a little bit more about who and what enables social movements? Who stood behind and supported an influential movement leader like Chavez?
It is often nongovernmental organizations. In the case of the United Farm Workers, going further back to its origins, it was the Industrial Areas Foundation that was founded in Chicago by Saul Alinsky. Alinsky sent out a young man named Fred Ross to interpret the problems of racial injustice in California. Ross expected to find out what Jim Crow looked like for African Americans in California. He discovered that yes, there was racism, yes, there was the Klan, but the more nagging problem, the more widespread problem, was disenfranchisement and exploitation of Mexican and Filipino workers. He was just taken aback by that.
So, it was Saul Alinsky who was funding this, and finding that, in fact, the federal government was facilitating that exploitation by inviting guest workers in the bracero program into the state to harvest crops and suppressing wages. And the state government had failed to resolve the problems of child labor, of poor housing, of inadequate running water, of poor sanitation. All these issues plagued the farm worker communities.
Fred Ross decided that it was not a new Industrial Areas Foundation that needed to be funded out West. A new organization was needed, and that was the Community Service Organization. He often said: "We need to go where the people are, not where we want them to be." What that meant was that he would go to their homes, he would listen to them, and respond to the needs of the community. They started organizing around those issues and then eventually got to the bigger issues: How do you end the bracero program? How do you bring justice to the fields of California?
Cesar Chavez speaking at the Delano UFW−United Farm Workers rally in Delano, California, June 1972.
The movement really began, though, with the meat and potatoes issues of sanitation in homes and a roof over people’s heads. It was done essentially house by house, organizing people and telling them, "You can achieve change by believing it is possible." Cesar Chavez was Ross’s best recruit. He instilled in Chavez the ability to go into a community, go into a home, and transform people’s thinking to see themselves as active agents of change.
Please tell us more about that balance between the role of the federal government in facilitating solutions and its potential to exacerbate the challenge we're trying to solve.
I think there are two issues. First, sometimes the problem is not seen by policy makers, by the federal government, even by state governments. With the bracero program there was the need to educate policy makers and say, "Look, you're causing the plight that exists within the fields. You're suppressing the wages that are really causing this problem."
The second issue is to counter the influences that are creating those policies. With the bracero program, that meant offsetting the influence of the strong farm lobby and saying, "Look, our voices matter too. In fact, there are more of us than them, and we care, and we will do something and protest about something if you don't resolve it." It is an awareness issue, but it's also about overcoming a political opponent who's stronger than you. That's what the United Farm Workers did. They became an entity that the government had to listen to and learn from, and that the growers and the most powerful moneyed interests also had to respect and essentially bow down to.
In a movement like the United Farm Workers, where does the shift happen, from raising awareness of the issue to proposing solutions? And when you are proposing and advocating for solutions, at what point do you enter the traditional public policy process in a more direct or concrete way?
If you think back to Ernesto Galarza, he was someone who tried to talk to policy makers. He took it to Congress. You can go even further back to Luisa Moreno in the 1930s and '40s, who addressed Congress and tried to change the destiny of farm workers by direct contact with policy makers. They were not listened to. The voices of the moneyed interests from the farm lobby were stronger. There would have to be a grassroots movement.
Grassroots movements can take many forms and go in many directions. This is where tactics and ideology are so important. What was critical in the farm worker movement was the long tradition of labor organizing with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, AWOC. The Teamsters were also there, in packing houses, and had set an example of what labor unions could do, but because the braceros were replaceable, were deportable, the Teamsters and most other unions basically left them alone and said, "It's just impossible to organize field workers."
But there was one group, a massive group, that proved this was not true: the many Filipinos who worked in California, led by Larry Itliong. They were aligned with AWOC. They had radical underpinnings; some of them were communist. They were open to organizing and calling strikes. They moved Chavez from the house meeting approach to a labor movement. And that became a tension for the farm worker movement well into the 1970s. Was it a civil rights movement, was it a community-based movement, or was it a labor movement? It was all of those things, but it was important that they all functioned together during the 10 years of the heyday of the farm worker movement.
What was the role of race and racism in laying the conditions for the exploitation of workers, particularly during the New Deal?
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, sponsored by the reformer Robert F. Wagner, excluded farm workers from collective bargaining rights. Partially, that was rooted in the idea that farm workers are made up of transient people, of transnational people, people beyond the reach of unions who did not care about their conditions of labor. Some of them were tenant farmers, of course, from the deep South, African Americans. Some of them were Mexican migrants and some of them were Filipino immigrants. There was a built-in prejudice within the labor movement, and there's built-in prejudice in our public policies that otherwise are positive moments in policy history, like the Wagner Act.
Race is critical here, but it isn't always just seen through a kind of black and white lens. I think that is really important in California, where African Americans were incredibly important farm workers. If you look at Dorothea Lange’s early photos of the early farm worker movements in the '20s and '30s, she captures African Americans working alongside Latinos, mostly Mexican and white workers. The manifestations of racism are particular to the racial composition of the place where you are organizing. In California, that discrimination was towards Mexicans. That has everything to do with the fact that California had been part of Mexico, and there was always a fear of some in the white, English-speaking, Protestant majority that the Southwest could be inundated by Mexican immigrants and that it could be reclaimed by Mexicans.
There is a fantastic book about Texas and the deepness of that anti-Mexican racism, The Injustice Never Leaves You by Monica Martinez. What she covers in Texas in the '20s extended throughout the American West and particularly to California. There was a real fear that that border between the United States and Mexico could be breached, and that even culturally, it could fall back into a kind of Mexican province that the owners of industry, particularly in farming, would never tolerate.
When I think of Cesar Chavez, I picture the images of him receiving Communion with Robert Kennedy by his side at the end of one of his hunger strikes. Please help us understand the role of his religious views and how to understand those as we think about the effort to build movements across different types of people with different beliefs.
I think what is special about Cesar Chavez is the way he utilized faith in the service of farm worker justice. He did not just utilize Catholicism, though that was what he drew on the most. The farm worker movement was an interfaith movement. In fact, the people that were most forceful in driving the movement forward and driving the National Farm Workers Association (Chavez’s predecessor organization that merged with the AWOC to form the United Farm Workers) into a strike and out on the boycott were Protestants. So Chavez worked very closely with Protestant ministers. Ministers, like Chris Hartmire and Jim Drake, were critical to the advancement of the movement.
It was interfaith always, but part of the reason why Catholicism was important and why symbols like the Virgin de Guadalupe were so prominent, is that most of the farm workers were Catholic. So he was smart about that. Breaking bread with Robert Kennedy to end the fast was symbolic but also strategic.
This flexibility, though, ultimately came back to bite him a bit, because he began to devise a kind of religious movement around himself and around the tight circle of his followers, which metastasized into a new religion. Towards the middle of the 1970s, he began to try to emulate organizations like Synanon, which were new religions that revolved around one man, Charles Dederich. He really wanted to be that kind of spiritual leader. Religion can be empowering, but it can also distract and derail a movement. That happened to the United Farm Workers by 1977.
Chavez’s fasts were inspired by a Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi and then, of course, by a Baptist, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. His fasts were important for many reasons, but primarily used to distract the violent tendencies of his followers so that they would remain nonviolent. It was an incredibly ingenious way of using the fast. It's as if he was saying to his followers, "Let me absorb all the hatred and the violent tendencies you feel towards the growers and maybe even towards the state. As long as you have those feelings, I'm going to do violence to my body until you stop having those tendencies." That's the way he used the fast. It's pretty amazing what he did.
From your perspective as a historian, what should we be focused on in our public life today that we are probably not nearly as focused on as we should be?
“One of the most basic divisions in our society, which allows us to do unspeakable violence to children and families, is the division between people who are documented and undocumented. Citizens and noncitizens. You see this manifest in the treatment of immigrants in our society and the separation of children from their parents at the border.”
One of the most basic divisions in our society, which allows us to do unspeakable violence to children and families, is the division between people who are documented and undocumented. Citizens and noncitizens. You see this manifest in the treatment of immigrants in our society and the separation of children from their parents at the border. I think that when we look back on this unspeakable violence 20, 30, 50 years from now, we will say, "Oh my God, I can't believe our society condoned caging children and families for prolonged periods of time."
I think we need to get our heads around why we exclude people and why we deny people their human rights based on their immigrant status. We just haven't come to terms with immigrants as essential and critical members of our society. We tell ourselves all the time that we're a nation of immigrants. I really think that’s a myth. It's a terrible, terrible myth. I think that myth has been totally exposed in the last four years. Look back to the previous administration, but particularly the Trump administration, and its treatment of immigrants. It is contemptible and unspeakable what we have done to immigrants in this country.
When you say it is a myth, you are saying that the myth is that we're a nation of immigrants?
Yes. We tell ourselves that because we want to see ourselves as inclusive. We want to see ourselves upholding this notion of the American Dream, that anybody can come here and succeed. This goes back to what we were talking about: how the state can be an impediment to those ideals that we say are essential to who we are. In this case, we have always restricted access to people on the basis of their race, their language, their religion. That is happening right now, as we speak, mostly to Latinos, and specifically Central Americans. These people are essential to our existence as a nation and our productivity as an economy. Many of the people who are working in essential services today, such as slaughterhouses and harvesting fruits and vegetables, are immigrants. We do them such a dishonor by condoning actions and perpetuating policies that treat them as expendable and unworthy of dignity.
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This interview was edited by Nancy Vorsanger.