UFW Sets Off on Trek Back Into the Fields : Labor: With membership and influence flagging, the union says its 330-mile pilgrimage symbolizes a renewed commitment to the dreams of founder Cesar Chavez.

The United Farm Workers, hoping to reclaim the magic that once made it such a force in these fields, began a 330-mile march up the spine of the Central Valley on Thursday--a trek that signals the union’s return to the work of organizing farm laborers.

The pilgrimage, or peregrinacion, opened with a 90-minute Mass on the 67th anniversary of Cesar Chavez’s birth. About 750 people led by Arturo Rodriguez, Chavez’s son-in-law and successor, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the union, marched from the UFW’s Forty Acres compound to the first overnight stop, the town of Richgrove, about eight miles northeast.

The union hopes to enlist 10,000 new members by the time the march is over. It will end with a rally in Sacramento in three weeks, on the first anniversary of the union founder’s death.

“The pilgrimage is about recommitment and penance,” Rodriguez said at the outset of the march, “recommitment to building a national union for farm workers, penance, because all of us let Cesar carry the responsibility for organizing the union on his soldiers. Now the burden for fulfilling Cesar’s dreams and our own rests squarely on each of us.”

Even as the pilgrimage was announced, municipalities elsewhere in the state were underscoring how far the union has come. In Los Angeles, the Eastside’s landmark Brooklyn Avenue was renamed Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Meanwhile, the city of San Fernando--the first in the state to declare Chavez’s birthday a holiday--held a march in the labor leader’s honor.

But the march also signals an important departure from the strategies of Chavez. No longer will the grape boycott be the centerpiece of the UFW’s activities, as it has for the past decade. The union’s leadership has decided to return to the fields to enlist new members, confront growers and push for new contracts.

The shift in strategy is a concession that the boycott alone has not been enough to improve the lot of farm workers, whose wages have leveled off or dropped in the past decade.

The return to organizing is seen as a gamble for a union that has suffered years of defeat and infighting and the death last April of Chavez. Today, the UFW does not have a single contract with grape growers; in 1973, it had contracts with 80% of them. It has fewer than 15,000 members now, compared to 100,000 at its height.

Critics called the march a desperate public relations ploy to revive a dying union.

“This march is a publicity stunt,” said Richard Baiz of the Grape Workers and Farmers Coalition, an advocate group representing the grape industry that opposes the UFW. “The grape boycott was a huge failure and now they want to organize in the fields.

“Well, they’re going to find it tough out there. The farm workers are happy just to have a job, and working conditions have improved a great deal since the 1970s. For the UFW, this is Custer’s last stand.”

The shift in strategy is welcomed by longtime supporters and former top UFW organizers. The pilgrimage retraces the path Chavez took 28 years ago this spring, a march that transformed the relatively unknown labor leader and this farm town into national symbols.

For the past decade, some of them have decried the union’s retreat from the fields and its singular dependence on the grape boycott and the issue of toxic pesticides as a means of pressuring growers to improve the lot of farm workers. They asked how can a union be a union without organizing workers.

Times staff writer Miguel Bustillo contributed to this story.