No One Was a Nobody in UFW Movement

To many outsiders, Cesar Chavez was the United Farm Workers union. Not only was he one of its founders, Chavez was its chief strategist, spokesman and symbol.

Of course, there were many others who were the union. At its zenith, more than 25,000 were UFW members.

There was Julio Hernandez, the first president of the UFW’s credit union. There was Doug Adair, one of its first organizers whose sketchy command of Arabic made him the spokesman for several thousand Yemeni farmhands around Delano. There was Irene Ramos Chandler, who as a young mother seemed to spend as much time in jail for union activities as she did raising her young daughters. There were others, so many others.

When they came together for three days over the weekend at Cal State Northridge, that’s the thing they kept saying: They never knew there were so many people involved in the formation and the early struggles of the UFW.

”. . . Que monton de gente ,” the elderly Hernandez was heard to say. “What a lot of people.”

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That was all they talked about. The early meetings. All the backbreaking work in the fields. All the strikes. All the people, most of them little known, who made up the UFW.

About 20 of those “little people”

--organizers, orators and just plain members--were at the campus to make a permanent record of their involvement in a labor union that later came to symbolize a social movement. Under the direction of Dr. Jorge Garcia, the dean of humanities at CSUN and himself a UFW organizer, these union pioneers were interviewed about their role in the struggle for campesinos .

Their oral histories will become part of a depository dedicated to the UFW at CSUN. It will include memorabilia and other documents from the union’s past.

When the old-timers got in front of the video cameras and tape recorders, they often talked fondly about the workers who cussed out foremen and patrones .

“There were so many people I can’t even remember their names,” Hernandez said at one point. “They were all over the (San Joaquin) Valley. There were Mexicanos , Arabs, Filipinos, whites. We had everybody in the union.”

Adair talked about the macho young men who tried to, but couldn’t, cut grape vines properly during harvest time. He talked about workers without cars who were forced to pay their bosses $5 just for a ride into the nearest town. He remembered how health officials from the United Nations discovered that many of the farm workers from Yemen were afflicted with a particular intestinal illness linked to the Middle East.

He, too, couldn’t remember all the names of the people he said were the backbone of the union. “Some of the happiest years of my life were spent working in the grape fields,” he said. “All those people . . . all those memories.”

By chance, I encountered one of those people at the Friday night reception honoring the reunion of the UFW troopers. He wouldn’t give me his name because, he said, he was a worker--nothing more, nothing less. He wasn’t scheduled to have his UFW years recorded.

But his weather-beaten face spoke volumes of the years in the lettuce fields.

“Some like Mr. Chavez are born to lead,” the onetime farmhand said in Spanish. “But most of us worked. That’s all . . . that’s what we did every day. We worked hard. It’s an honorable thing to pick the food we eat. But we needed dignity and the union gave us that. Ernesto from Delano, Juan and his brothers from Bakersfield, Johnny what’s-his-name from Stockton . . . all of them helped the union make things better for all of us. If that means I, too, played a small part, then that’s good. But I’m just a worker.”

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During the three rain-drenched days at Northridge, the message from the UFW old-timers seemed clear.

Sure, times are tough because of Proposition 187, but a movement needs hundreds, even thousands, of supporters who can picket, march, cajole and even vote. They are just as important as quotable leaders.

“There’ll be other struggles, other fights for dignity,” said a onetime lettuce picker who was also reluctant to give his name. “We need to be ready--get the people to support the leaders. With (Chavez), we didn’t feel alone. With us, he wasn’t alone.”

With that, he left the reception at CSUN’s Oviatt Library. “I’m a nobody and I have to go to work,” he said.

Hardly.