Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution Read Free

he or she was doing was important.
It didn’t matter if you were an attorney representing
the union in court or someone cooking in the strike kitchen.
He made people believe in themselves—those whom almost
no one considered very important. He gave them faith that
they could challenge and overcome one of California’s richest
industries.
    Maybe that’s why Cesar succeeded where others with
much better educations and a lot more money tried and failed
for a hundred years before him. It is a measure of his greatness
that he inspired hope and confidence in people who
never had them.
     
    Cesar could be incredibly generous in helping people grow
and investing them with the authority to do their work. Jerry
Cohen, the UFW’s longtime lead attorney, is still mystified by
critics who claim that Cesar refused to delegate authority.
“Cesar gave me too much authority” in hammering out union
contracts with growers and jurisdictional pacts with the Teamsters
Union or waging crucial legal fights, he says.
    “Once he had a sense of confidence in a person, Cesar had
no problem delegating authority,” Jerry recalls. “He gave me
carte blanche to do whatever the hell I wanted. He’d say to
just engage in the fight and use whatever tools I needed. ‘I’ll
support you whether you win or lose in court,’ Cesar would
say. And he would. Of course, I kept him informed of whatever
I was doing all the time.”
    That confidence helped enact California’s pioneering Agricultural
Labor Relations Act, considered one of Cesar’s crowning
achievements. To get this collective bargaining bill passed,
Cesar and Jerry discussed “the key principles of what we
wanted to see in the legislation, and then Cesar said, ‘Keep
negotiating. Don’t give up on what we think is essential, but
get whatever you can.’”
    At one point when the recently elected thirty-six-year-old
governor Jerry Brown was resisting their efforts, Jerry Cohen
and Cesar devised a good-cop, bad-cop routine: Cesar spoke
around the state, saying, “Jerry Brown doesn’t know the difference
between a tomato and a potato,” while Jerry Cohen
bargained with the governor in Sacramento.
    Cesar also granted great autonomy to the UFW boycott
operations across the continent. He encouraged boycotters to
come up with whatever strategies and tactics worked for them
in their cities. As a result, people generated innovative ideas
that succeeded because Cesar gave them the support they
needed.
    When he knew that people were honestly reporting results
and trying their best, Cesar left them alone. If he worried that
a city wasn’t accurately reporting, he’d jump in, demand an
accounting, and fix the problems.
    I experienced the same thing as his spokesman. When major
public campaigns were under way, I met with Cesar and others
to help fashion the union’s message or position. After that, I
didn’t need to check with Cesar again when reporters called,
unless they raised new issues or an inquiry took a different
twist. He just trusted me to do my job.
    What it came down to was that Cesar delegated a lot of
authority to people he had confidence in; he didn’t delegate
much to people he didn’t.
    That doesn’t mean he wasn’t constantly harping on everyone
in the union “about petty things like phone bills,” Jerry
Cohen remembers. “He was a pain in the ass over that. But
not on the major stuff.”
    Cesar could be tough and demanding. You had to keep up
with his pace, his hours, his schedule, and the demands he
placed on himself. After the passage of California’s Agricultural
Labor Relations Act, he set out on a thousand-mile
march to inform farm workers of their newly won rights and
then spent frenetic months driving up and down the state
during the first union elections. I didn’t have time to read a
book for five months. He didn’t take a day off, and I didn’t
either. He loved the work and never tired of it.
    One former UFW volunteer remarked, “Cesar had us work
harder