CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Old Passions Surround New Library : Proposal to name building on San Diego State campus in Calexico after Cesar Chavez brings back memories and antagonisms of bloody 1979 strike. Growers say he was a ‘scoundrel’; students say it’s a matter of pride.

It seemed like a fine idea for the future. But that was before anyone factored in the fury of the past.

With the Imperial Valley branch of San Diego State University expanding rapidly, students were asked to vote on whose names should adorn the new buildings. What better way to foster school spirit and give the campus a local flavor?

Three of the recommendations by students quickly gained community support: that the art gallery be named for crusading newspaper editor John Steppling, the student plaza for former Calexico Mayor Rollie Carrillo, and the maintenance building for longtime custodian Art Leon.

But the fourth recommendation by the students--that the new library be named in honor of Cesar Chavez--has inflamed passions as hot and harried as the blistering Imperial Valley summer.

The emotions are traceable to the 1979 strike in the valley’s lettuce and vegetable fields. It was one of the bloodiest, most protracted and significant strikes in California history.

A number of growers and landowners, who stayed silent while a street on the rundown side of Calexico was named for Chavez after his death in 1993, are strongly opposed to having the union leader’s name on a gleaming new university library.

“We think Cesar Chavez was basically a scoundrel and we’re not appreciative of naming anything after him,” said Wes Bisgaard, manager of the Imperial Valley Farm Bureau.

“Putting his name on the library would be a slap in the face to growers,” said Steve Sharp, manager of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Assn. “There are still deep wounds left in the valley from that time and having his name on the library would force us to relive all that pain.”

The strike pitted Chavez and his United Farm Workers against the valley’s agribusiness Establishment. For weeks, thousands of strikers and replacement workers engaged in daily confrontations in the fields.

Crosses were burned in the fields to terrify strikers. A grower used a helicopter to make menacing low-level passes over strikers. Strikers threw chunks of concrete at strikebreakers, burned their cars and tried to flood the fields by sabotaging the irrigation canals. Police used tear gas to drive strikers from the fields. The growers hired 200 security guards with attack dogs.

When one of the guards working for the valley’s most powerful growers shot and killed a 28-year-old striker, he became a martyr to the UFW. The farm workers’ sense of injustice was magnified when Imperial County authorities ruled that there was insufficient evidence for prosecution.

Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., a close ally of Chavez, marched in the funeral procession for the striker, Rufino Contreras. Three years later, when George Deukmejian ran for governor on a promise to reverse the pro-UFW policies of the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board, his campaign was assisted by hefty donations from Imperial Valley growers.

For 16 years, an annual memorial Mass for Contreras has been held in Calexico at the UFW headquarters, where Contreras’ likeness is included in a wall-sized mural with other UFW heroes: Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Some years, the Mass attracts more than 750 people.

In the Imperial Valley, where the soil yields two crops a year, memories and antagonisms persist with a stubborn tenacity. None has persisted so ferociously as the battles of 1979.

“It’s like the strike happened yesterday,” said Hildy Carrillo-Rivera, managing editor of the Calexico Chronicle. “The wounds have never healed.”

Nobody knows that better than John Renison, a native of Calexico who, as development officer for the Imperial Valley campus, is in the middle of the library name controversy. “Both sides felt they were right back then and still do,” he said.

An advisory committee to the university, hoping to avoid rancor, has asked that no building be named for any political figure, including Chavez. One committee member says that naming the library for Chavez could strangle the tiny campus’s chances to expand.

“If the campus wants to grow, it needs land and that probably means somebody will have to donate raw, agricultural land,” said El Centro lawyer Brooks Anderholt, a former Imperial County deputy sheriff who patrolled the fields during the 1979 strike. “With a name like Cesar Chavez Library, that’s not going to happen.”

Anderholt, a member of a pioneer farming family, added: “We do not need things that will continue to divide this community. We need to concentrate on things that will bring us together so we can offer education both to the children of farm workers and the children of farmers.”

Students and Latino political activists vow to take their demand to the board of trustees of California State University, which has the final word on naming buildings. If the trustees rebuff the students, there is talk of a strike at the 650-student campus, where two-thirds of the students are Latino and a large number are the sons and daughters of farm workers.

“What is happening here is that the growers still refuse to accept our heritage as legitimate and refuse to admit we have a right to be in this country,” said David Zavala, president of the local Mexican-American Political Assn. “That’s what Cesar was fighting for, and that’s what we’re fighting for, too.”

Along with the resistance from growers, Zavala and the others must overcome a board policy that says buildings should be named with an eye toward attracting donations and that no two buildings in the 21-campus system can be named for the same person.

The student union at San Francisco State University, where the political climate is considerably more liberal and labor-friendly than in the Imperial Valley, is already being named for Chavez. Still, the naming policy allows trustees to drop the one-name, one-building rule “in special circumstances.”

The four proposed names for the Calexico buildings have been submitted to administrators at the main campus in San Diego. In turn, administrators will forward their own recommendations to the chancellor’s office in Long Beach before the issue goes to the trustees.

“Cesar Chavez fought for the farm workers and for education,” said student Ruth Diaz-DeLeon. “His name on the library would be a positive role model and a true sign that our culture is finally being respected.”

One person’s role model, however, is another’s economic terrorist.

“Cesar Chavez hurt this valley very badly and chased a lot of farmers into Arizona by being too greedy and trying to push wages too high,” said John Pierre Menvielle, whose family has farmed the valley since 1903. “We’re still hurting from the 1979 strike. If they put his name on a library, they’re going to end up hurting the university in terms of donations and support from agriculture.”

The history of the Imperial Valley is dotted with periodic strife between growers and their workers. Some historians trace the beginning of unionism to the arrival of displaced farm workers from the Dust Bowl.

“They were less tractable than the older class of Imperial Valley migrants,” says a guide to California published in 1939 by the Federal Writers Project. “Before long the labor unrest that was sweeping the country went below sea level [the Imperial Valley is largely below sea level] . . . “

In 1934, 8,000 workers in the fields and packing sheds struck for higher wages and toilet facilities. Growers, hard hit by declining prices during the Great Depression, fought back.

“The resultant melee in which blood was shed made headlines from coast to coast,” says the 1939 guide.

Some of the Dust Bowl refugees from the 1930s had, by the late 1970s, became landowners and their views about the proper relationship between workers and growers had changed.

“You have to remember that a lot of these growers came here during the Dust Bowl and made a success out of this valley with no help from anyone,” said one Calexico businessman who asked that his name not be used. “They viewed Cesar Chavez as an economic threat to their families and everything they had built.”

The 1979 strike came as his UFW was seeking to force the growers to renew the contracts they had signed after strikes in the mid-1970s. At the center of the 1979 strike was the valley’s most powerful grower, Mario Saikhon, who was later convicted of income tax evasion. Contreras was killed in one of Saikhon’s fields.

The UFW soon found that renewing the contracts would be as difficult as winning them in the first place. “The strike was a turning point for us and for the growers,” said Esteban Jaramillo, regional manager for the UFW in Calexico.

The growers decided to resist renewing the contracts, rather than offer incremental improvements in wages and working conditions, the norm for labor-management dealings in those days.

To the UFW and others, the growers’ resistance had an ugly undercurrent of racism: that the growers could not abide by the idea of dealing with a union led by Latinos. “A lot of the animosity is the old brown vs. white issue,” said Carrillo-Rivera.

The strike ended with mixed results. The union could count some victories, the growers could count others.

Within a few years, however, the balance of power had shifted, and today the United Farm Workers has not a single contract with an Imperial Valley grower.

Calexico Police Chief Mike Singh, who as a sheriff’s lieutenant was assigned to keep the two warring sides apart during the 1979 strike, does not expect emotions to subside soon. “Probably not until the generation that lived through it passes away,” Singh said.

Rusty Garcia, whose parents were farm workers and who is now head of the local Hidalgo Society, summed it up simply:

“Some scars never go away.”