What Cesar Chavez Missed

The new film doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement

The new movie Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, directed by Diego Luna, tells the story of the Delano Grape Strike that began in 1965. This epic five-year labor battle led to the founding of the United Farm Workers (UFW), and made Cesar Chavez a social movement hero. The movie has provoked controversy over its depiction of his role, and the accuracy of the history it recounts of those events. In this roundtable, In These Times explores these themes with Eliseo Medina, who was a farmworker when the strike started and became a noted labor organizer, first in the UFW and later in the Service Employees International Union; Doug Adair, an activist in the 1965 strike who has continued working on farms in the Coachella Valley; Dawn Mabalon, a professor of history at San Francisco State University who studies the history of Filipinos in California; and Rosalinda Guillen, who comes from a farmworker family in Washington State, worked as a UFW organizer, and today organizes farm labor in the Skagit and Whatcom Counties, north of Seattle, with Community2Community. (The interviewer, labor journalist David Bacon, is also a former organizer for the UFW.)

The UFW was a multinational union, including Filipinos, African-Americans, Arab-Americans and EuropeanAmericans, as well as Chícanos. Does that come through in the film?

ELISEO: When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds-the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world. It wasn't until the union began that we finally began to work together, to know each other and to begin to fight together. I do wish that that had been more explicit. Certainly the contribution that was made by the Filipino workers to the strike was an incredible part of the success of the union.

The movie's portrayal of Filipino workers has been criticized. How do you feel about that?

DAWN: Filipinos had been organizing, not just that year, but for decades. The growers had always divided Mexicans and Filipinos. What was so powerful about that moment in Delano, California, was that those two groups defied this. But the way they came together was downplayed. The filmmakers didn't understand what made the strike so powerful.

DOUG: The original spark in Delano was when Filipino workers began sitting in at the camps. It wasn't a strike with picket lines, but a sit-in and refusing to go to work.

The movie stops when the industrywide grape contract gets signed. Did the contract change life for farmworkers in the long term?

DOUG: When I worked under that first contract, [most pickers'] wages and benefits were over double the minimum wage. We had a health plan that was the envy of many other unions. We could sit down with the growers and negotiate over grievances. We wouldn't always win, but we could negotiate our working conditions. The movie did show that workers can join together in spite of appalling conditions and improve their wages and working conditions and change history.

ELISEO: Clearly the union was able to begin lifting workers out of poverty. They had paid holidays, vacations and health insurance. Unfortunately, at the time when we were poised to completely change these workers' lives we lost focus. As a result, workers today are back where they were before the union. Most are working at minimum wage again. Employers are back to just trying to get the work done in the cheapest way possible, regardless of the impact on workers.

DOUG: Today, wages are nowhere near even the miserable minimum wage. There are a few advances in pesticide regulations, toilets in the fields, shade and drinking water-minimal things that didn't exist in 1965. But the presence of the union in the Coachella Valley is a shadow of its former self. Just a few pensioners like me.

ROSALINDA: Today farmworkers can organize because of the example of the farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s in California. This is one of the legacies of Cesar Chavez, this coming together of different workers with different religions and different political views. Unfortunately, today we have a splintered movement and divided communities. We see the same old attacks, like this guestworker program, to stop farmworkers from organizing for better wages and better treatment.

DAWN: My father died working the asparagus nine years ago. I wish the film had been much stronger in saying these conditions still exist today and we still have to fight for farmworkers. I was hoping at the end of the film you would have this feeling of inspiration and a call to action, but you get the sense that now we won and it's over.

What did the movie do well?

DOUG: It showed the viciousness of the growers and their local power structure; district attorneys and the cops and thugs on the side of the growers. The whole local structure was against the union and the farmworkers.

In one scene the sheriff and the growers accuse the unions of being Communist, and Cesar says that's silly, we're Catholic. But the Filipinos, in their prior organizing, had been very leftwing. Is this underplayed?

DAWN: There was always tension between the Filipino leftists/Marxists/ Communists and anti-communism within the UFW. By erasing Filipinos, you also downplay those radical roots. Even nonviolence was a tension for Filipinos, who were used to using violence against scabs who crossed the picket lines, and were uncomfortable with hunger strikes, marches and religious pageantry.

DOUG: The movie stressed Cesar saying, "Were Catholic, so we couldn't possibly be Communists," but in fact, a strong element in the union was anticlerical. The church in Mexico was always on the side of the growers and the wealthy and always against the peasants and the poor. Typically the Protestants among farmworkers had rebelled against the Catholic church and were rebels at heart and were especially receptive to the union.

At one point the growers say they are going to bring in "illegals " [the movie uses this word] by the truckload. Do you think this experience shaped how Cesar saw the question of immigration?

ELISEO: The growers knew very well that divide-and-conquer was an important strategy. And they certainly felt that having a captive work force would make it easier for them. Cesar was well aware, as were all of us, that the union and the strike was a movement of documented and undocumented people. Some of the strongest and most active people were undocumented. For the undocumented, being for the union was a lot more serious because it potentially meant arrest and deportation, leaving their families behind. The union was very conscious about this and made it their policy to defend those workers.

DOUG: Whether they had papers or not, if they were strikebreakers we wanted them out of there. At different points in the unions history, its taken a very hard line against people without papers. The unions base was the permanent families who lived in Delano.

ROSALINDA: In my time in the union, I did not see any behavior that was in any way anti-immigrant. Today when were opposing guestworkers, were not against Mexican workers who are being brought in. Were against this program that legalizes wage theft, because they're displacing the workers who are already here. The issue of blocking the guest-worker program was central to the union's political work, because the agricultural industry uses this program to slow down farmworker organizing.

Most people's experience of the union was not in the fields, but as supporters in the boycotts. What do you think about the picture that the movie painted of the grape boycott?

DOUG: By late November 1965, it was clear that the strike had been brokenwe weren't going to win the strike in the fields. The boycott was one of Cesar's many ideas to finesse the local power structure and get the American public involved. Cesar's genius was not in being the one handing out leaflets but in putting together a team and sending people out to cities all across the country, and in fact, all across the world.

Any last words?

DOUG: I cry in movies, and I cried in this one.

DAWN: As disappointed as some of us may be, I think the movie has given us this amazing opportunity to dialogue, and to continue to be involved in farmworker justice. It's made young Filipinos go, "Why aren't we in it?" and "I want to know more." I think that's amazing.

DAVID BACON is a writer, photographer and former union organizer. He is the author of The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (2013).