From the Jaws of Victory by Garcia Matthew;

Author:Garcia, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 14. The “No on 14” poster, featuring Harry Kubo, 1976. UCLA Political Collection.

In the past, the union had approached setbacks as an opportunity to learn from its mistakes and improve its strategy. This time, however, Chavez chose not to convene his usual meeting of the executive board to make recommendations on how to move forward. Instead, he left the postmortem to youthful volunteers, whom he summoned to La Paz. A crestfallen seventeen-year-old, Sharon Delugash, recalled how she and her fellow volunteers “look[ed] forward to that series of meetings so that we could commiserate and lick our wounds together.” When they arrived at the North Unit for the meetings, volunteers were told by La Paz staff that Chavez would not attend in order to give them their privacy to be completely honest. Delugash and her fellow attendees, however, resented his absence and saw it as Chavez “not want[ing] to hear any criticism about what had gone wrong.” Or so the group thought. As the meeting began, volunteers shared their opinions, including criticism of the leadership. Delugash recounted what happened next: “Suddenly Cesar climbed in through the window and was yelling, ‘Bullshit!’ We were stunned at how angry he was, and defensive. Maybe we who were not in leadership were terribly naïve, but this seemed completely in contradiction with how the union ran. We were used to singing every morning and talking about highlights and lowlights, not blaming ourselves for things, many of which were completely out of our control.”102 Chavez’s actions and abusive words in this moment manifest alterations in his personality familiar to Gilbert and Esther Padilla, Marshall Ganz, and the few people who had witnessed his collapse in the days following the loss of Proposition 14. Tom Dalzell, a member of the legal team who helped pull the ALRB out of the fire, offered his interpretation of Chavez’s state of mind at the end of 1976: “Prop 14 was not our first defeat (the summer of 1973 comes to mind), but it was a public and political defeat, which could not be turned to good. Cesar’s faith in his ability to take his case to the voters was shaken, adding to his growing lack of confidence in a new world.”103 Although that new world still included a functioning ALRB, negotiations with the Teamsters, an effective legal team, and an army of experienced labor organizers ready to reach out to eager farm workers in Imperial Valley, Ventura, and Salinas, Chavez, for the first time, turned inward and dark, focusing on how he had lost control and obsessing about how to get it back.

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