Free The Crusades of Cesar Chavez by Miriam Pawel

he asked, prodding the boycotters to identify one big, fat target. “One specific place, if we’re going to make Giumarra call up tonight on the phone and say he’ll settle? . . . Which one person in the entire United States is the most key?”
    Because farmworkers were not covered by the National Labor Relations Act, Chavez explained, the union could boycott not only Giumarra grapes but anyone who sold them. A few boycotters got excited about throwing up picket lines outside stores. But Chavez rejected that idea and focused again on the distributors or agents, to stop grapes before they reached the stores. “This is not a consumer boycott,” he told them. “Supermarkets—that’s just a tiny tiny drop in the bucket. Because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of those stores.”
    They inched closer to the idea Chavez clearly endorsed—sending everyone to New York, the biggest market for Giumarra grapes. He asked what would happen if they concentrated all their efforts on Victor Joseph, the Giumarra broker in New York. Marcos Muñoz replied that either the agent would tell them to go to hell or they would succeed. Chavez’s tone changed suddenly.
    “If you were to concentrate all your time, every bit of your time, blindly, like Dolores does, she just puts on shutters like this and she goes directly in a straight line, you could get anyone . . . you generate power,” he said sharply. “No one’s going to tell you to go to hell if you have that power . . . So how do we generate the power? . . . We can’t move till we understand power.”
    His answer was simple: work single-mindedly, day and night, searching for the most vulnerable place to attack. Do not even entertain the idea of failure. “You find out which is the most sensitive part and you go after it. You’ll get it. I’m sure you’ll get it. If you put it on the basis of, ‘If I don’t get it then I’m a failure, if I can’t get this done, I’m a failure,’ then you’ll do it. Your mind’s made up that nothing’s more important.”
    He imbued them with a sense of their own power, and they left with renewed commitment—to the cause, and to Cesar. He told them they were fanatics, just like him, and the notion filled them with pride. They did not want to let him down. “Cesar is the main reason 4 we are alive today,” Eliseo Medina told an interviewer. “We have not been wiped out like other unions that have tried to organize the farm workers.” Farmworkers who only a few years earlier had not seen a future outside the fields now met with congressmen and mayors, flew cross-country, and debated growers on radio shows.
    As soon as the New Year’s holiday passed, the boycotters set off for New York. Father Mark Day blessed a school bus that had no heat, and fifty boycotters traveled cross-country to work under Fred Ross’s direction, with the mission to get Victor Joseph, the Giumarra broker. They generated publicity and persuaded New York City mayor John V. Lindsay to support the boycott. But Giumarra continued to sell grapes with little difficulty.
    After several months, the union figured out that Giumarra was borrowing labels from other growers and easily shipping grapes under dozens of other names. Since there was no way to distinguish where grapes in the supermarket originated, Ross and Huerta urged Chavez to extend the boycott to all California grapes, whether or not they were harvested from a vineyard where the union had ever set foot, much less certified a strike.
    The union redeployed boycotters to more than a dozen cities, the largest markets for grapes. In early May, just as the first grapes from the Coachella vineyards reached the market, Chavez went on the Today television show and announced a boycott of all California grapes. This far more ambitious goal enabled the union to spread a simple message: don’t buy grapes, so that farmworkers in California can win better wages and working conditions.
    Given that mandate,