Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers

by Frank Bardacke

The first-ever comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers and its infamous leader, Cesar Chavez—"one of the most attractive and charismatic figures U.S. politics has produced” ( The Guardian ).

In its heyday, the United Farm Workers was an embodiment of its slogan “Yes, we can”—in the form “¡Sí, Se Puede!”—winning many labor victories, securing collective bargaining rights for farm workers, and becoming a major voice for the Latino community. Today, it is a mere shadow of its former self.

Trampling Out the Vintage is the authoritative and award-winning account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers and its most famous and controversial leader, Cesar Chavez. Based interviews conducted over many years—with farm workers, organizers, and the opponents and friends of the UFW—the book tells a story of collective action and empowerment rich in evocative detail and stirring human interest. Beginning with the influence of the ideas of Saul Alinsky and Catholic Social Action at the union’s founding, through the UFW’s thrilling triumphs in the California fields, the drama concludes with the debilitating internal struggles that effectively crippled the union.

A vivid rendering of farm work and the world of the farm worker, Trampling Out the Vintage is a dramatic reappraisal of the political trajectory of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and an essential re-evaluation of their most tumultuous years.

Genres: History, Labor, Nonfiction, Politics, Biography, Agriculture, Activism

856 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2011

Reviews

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a labor geek, who has read several prior biographies of Chavez and the UFW. But, this volume covered territory raw and damaging to Chavez' historical image, which is likely the reason that much of it is published here for the first time. I had no idea the degree to which an anti-immigrant focus was the base of the UFW's work for so long. I had heard of Chavez' paranoia and arrogance, but more in the form of rumor, rather than rooted in primary documents, as this book provides. The no-holds-barred spotlight on truth is only part of what makes this book worth the (long) read. I loved the sections outlining the processes and skills required to harvest and pack various produce. And then there was a short section on the Catholic church that answered questions I'd always been interested in, but hadn't researched myself. And, the history of the Bracero program was enlightening. An important addition to labor history.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book was brilliantly chosen - it is of course the phrase from the famous abolitionist song The Battle Hymn of The Republic that immediately precedes the words "the grapes of wrath" - and it connects this superb biography of Cesar Chavez and his union to the famous grape boycott, to the downtrodden California farmworkers in Steinbeck's epochal novel, to the similar struggles of abolitionists in the 19th century, and to the religious faith that propelled Chavez and so many others throughout their quest to organize their fellow farm workers. For many people in America today Chavez has long stopped symbolizing the cause of labor rights and has instead become a sort of demi-saint of Mexican-American culture, the Chicano equivalent of MLK. This is a tragedy, because the deeper you get into the book the more impressive his accomplishments become, and even though he was just as responsible for the decline of the United Farm Workers as he was for its rise, as the man who founded one of the only independent unions to actually survive the brutal combat against bosses and other labor organizations chronicled here he deserves a closer look at his contributions to society. Bardacke is eminently well-qualified to write this story: he's one of the few "Anglos" who has actually done farm work, and his descriptions of the labor in the chapter "The Work Itself" help bring home just how backbreaking something like celery- or lettuce-picking can still be. How Chavez forged his association and then the union out of an odd mix of Mexicans, Filipinos, and Anglos by protesting, striking, and boycotting is fascinating to read even as Bardacke scrupulously records the "mischief" committed by all parties and Chavez's increasingly despotic rule. It's a real challenge to see Chavez as a "good guy", per se - though you continually root for him to keep outwitting the truly horrible agricultural aristocrats and rival unions like the Teamsters (surely one of the worst labor organizations ever in terms of corruption and brutality) to bring benefits to his fellow workers, as he tightens his grip on the United Farm Workers you can see why exactly so many people don't like unions or powerful associations in general. Chavez was a strongly religious person, and there are many points in the book where he comes off like a cult leader - the burdens he placed on his subordinates, the personal loyalty he demanded, the marches/pilgrimages, the fasting, the Versailles-esque isolated retreat where he ran the whole union. It's a truism that centralized power is very good for initiating things when they're small but bad for sustaining things as they get larger, as the decisiveness and speed of the central authority starts making more and more mistakes and slides into sclerosis; Bardacke is brilliant at showing how Chavez's refusal to give any but a small inner circle of devoted associates and relatives any real power in the organization doomed it into its current state of irrelevance. It's very instructive to compare the bunker mentality of Chavez with the inhuman generosity of someone like Eugene Debs, a real-life saint if there ever was one. Check out Ray Ginger's amazing The Bending Cross for more on Debs and how he was able to inspire an enduring labor movement beyond himself rather than focus people's energies on his own projects only like Chavez did. Pretty much the only flaw with the book is that Bardacke briefly lapses into badly-chosen caricature. E.g. he trashes Walter Reuther, one of the greatest labor leaders of all time, for the fact that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party didn't get fully seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention, when in reality Reuther not only funded the MFDP but helped it get more than it would have otherwise. There's similar mis-moralizing when it comes to illegal immigrants, who Chavez had a complicated relationship with, seeing them as potential allies but more as competition, undercutting the wage agreements he kept trying to set. Overall though this was an excellent biography, and you will gain a new understanding of the hidden side of agribusiness, such as its creation of the table grape market, as you learn about this still-relevant guy.

[jac · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can’t help myself with the 800 page organizing histories of who said what in the committee meeting. loved it as much as let the record show. the drama and labour and contradictions of making change!

[Tom Edminster]

I wrote a highly edited review of this book for the CALIFORNIA TEACHER. It is probably the best non fiction book I have read in more than a decade. Of course, I was one of those encouraging the author to work on it for the last decade & an half or so... It really is dispassionate, yet fair to all actors---and it does unearth and give voice to the workers whose interests were served and could have been BETTER SERVED by a democratic union--which the UFW was not.
Frank has been lauded appropriately, yet he defers to all those whose voices he helped integrate into the fabric on an incredible historical piece. At 730 pages, it WAS ably excised and edited by JoAnn Wypejewski..(sp?)
If you wish to take a deep and good look at the UFW, and have to choose just one book, this is it. There are others worth reading, but NONE match the breadth and depth of TRAMPLING OUT THE VINTAGE, now in paperback.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredible. It's some of the best history writing I've ever read. I left it sit on my shelf for nearly a year, intimidated because it’s thick as a brick. Once opened, though, it had me from the first paragraph. The author was a farmworker who begins by interviewing his old carpool on what they thought of the movement gone by... humanizing and diversifying views on what happened from the very beginning. And doing something the UFW tragically came to reject: listening to farm workers.
It quickly becomes clear that only a farmworker could write this history, shaped so much as it is by specific crops and climates, and the work environments they create. Frank Bardacke details the different timing and leverage of lemon pickers, asparagus cutters, and grape pruners. What work could be done by scabs and what couldn’t. What work is so miserable yet skilled that only braceros were desperate enough to learn the trade. Hell, there’s a full 2 pages about the knife used to cut celery…and it’s beautiful.
The story's arc is dramatic. The rise of a righteous cause in all its spirit. Organized migratory laborers who, under the leadership of the genius Cesar Chavez, fuse mutual benefit society (mutualista), Catholicism, civil rights and unionism into an organization that will sway presidential elections and cut off the global flow of boycotted crops. Then we see the vultures circle in on this independent yet needy organization. But the UWF is the protagonist, not victim, and Chavez was extremely skilled at coalition politics.
The heart of the book’s argument is that the UFW had two souls: the boycott and the strike, the base and the leaders. The UFW pulled off what’s probably the biggest boycott win in US history (Grapes, from 1966-1970), but it came at the expense of the strike and worker engagement in the union. At one point in the 1970s the UFW had 544 full-time volunteer organizers, 83% of them working on the boycott and only 6% (33) working on organizing farm workers. As a result, by the time UFW won its first big contracts via the boycott, workers covered by them had no relationship to the UFW at best or actively opposed them at worst.
“Them” initially refers to the militant farmworkers, but later only means the UFW as an organization. Locked into sanitized stories of its own victoriousness, and within a strict chain of command, UFW leadership is unable to learn lessons from defeat. In a slow-motion train wreck spread out over more than a decade, the Chavez leads the union into a more and more idiosyncratic space. Tragic decisions are made: attacks on "wetbacks" (including a UMW border patrol), prepay-to-work dues schemes, prioritizing coalition building over the farmworkers, and withdrawal of leadership into a cloistered mountain compound. Though not without wins along the way, things grow dark and strange from there, as Chavez eventually purges most people around him and morphs in the union into a Synanon-based cult, for a time.
It's heartbreaking, but what keeps it from being demoralizing is... well, this book itself. Top leadership weren't only entrenched in their own ideas but also suffered from a fog-of-war. Constantly noted in the book, major events and campaigns were not debriefed, leaving people blind to all the forces that had been at work. But it's clear that there were plenty more victories to reap (as one Chavez biography puts it, he pulled the union from the jaws of victory). There were solutions available to what silo'd staffers saw as unanswerable questions. This book contains a whole lot of learning.
What makes this masterful writing is that the author is not trying to stake out any personal claims. He lets the players and their actions speak for themselves. So while you're left feeling like Cesar really fucked himself by dismissing strikes as hopeless, you don't get the impression that all the strikes would have won, either.
Ultimately, the author's argument is that Cesar Chavez didn't go crazy and destroy the UFW. That's a conclusion that writes off any other possible outcomes. Rather, the UFW was not built to temper him with other ideas of leadership. Chavez, the great listener and autodidact, did a masterful job and pulled off huge feats, but his sainthood untethered him from the fields. He continued to speak for farmworkers but stopped listening to farmworkers. Elected officials, union locals, and strategic debate beyond his inner circle would have weakened his power but shared the burden of leadership--complicating it but making it much smarter. As one person proposed, maybe it was the UFW that went crazy and destroyed Cesar Chavez.
Fuck the California Teamsters tho.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best labor histories and California histories I've read that charts the inspirational rise and devastating fall of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers organization. It's also a necessary deep dive into the complicated, flawed man behind the myth and farmworker hero, recounting how Chavez's communist paranoia and need to hold tightly to organizational power became more important than the union he had so painstakingly built, and the workers he claimed to represent. Deeply meticulous historical accounts pulled from UFW files, local newspapers and the author's own interviews with major players also recount a history few know-- even those of us who grew up just steps from the central battlegrounds of the fight in the fields. Bardacke's treatment of the villains, heroes, and everyone else in between on either side of the fight in unsparingly straightforward, exposing both the racist and violent tactics of growers long used to treating their employees how they wanted with impunity and the UFW's petty power struggles and internal machinations that doomed the movement they'd worked so hard to build. Even casual readers of history might struggle to reconcile what they know of the supposedly successful fight in the fields with the admittedly still-difficult lives of farmworkers today, making this a must-read.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is I would think the definitive history of the farm worker movement. I learned a lot and feel like it's as thorough and fair as you could hope for. Bardacke paints a vivid picture of the movement and is not afraid to be critical of Chavez and the UFW — and that criticism is well deserved. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in a deep dive on this important struggle.

[Frangelin Pozo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly Recommend! Gives us a non hero view of Cesar Chavez which we don't often see and really goes in depth around the times and conditions.

[Rachael · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF before it was due back to the library.

[Eric Dirnbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bardacke’s “Trampling Out the Vintage” is a monumental history of the United Farm Workers through the 80’s and is a stunning book, one of the best labor books I’ve ever read. He does a great job focusing not just on Chavez and the leadership but many of the rank and file members and boycott volunteers as well, and he really brings alive what farm labor and life was like for the workers in those days. His story follows the familiar UFW arc of union rise (60’s/70's) and fall (70’s/80’s) but he provides amazing detail, much of it from the later years that is critical of Chavez and often astounding to read. He gives what seems like a pretty evenhanded account of the famous two sides of Chavez, the brilliant and dedicated organizer and strategist, and unfortunately, the tyrannical suspicious Chavez who ran witch-hunts and was intolerant of internal democracy. The current UFW leaders probably like the first half of the book and hate the second half. Essential reading on the UFW and perhaps the last word. I would also recommend Marshall Ganz’s “Why David Sometimes Wins”, another great UFW book.

[Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always love reading this kind of nerdy labor history stuff, so no big surprise that I enjoyed this. It was a bit long and I would have edited it down a little. As a former organizer who has worked with people who worked with Chavez or were trained by folks brought up in the UFW, and who is now an attorney working with a few attorneys who also came out of that movement, this book definitely gave me some insight into the way they do things and think about the world. I was trained in very old school style Alinsky methods and have always thought about them as being both the right way and the only way to organize, but this book does point out some of the glaring holes in Alinsky's methods. All in all, this book did little to alleviate my already deepening depression related to my career and life goals, lol. But it's worth reading nonetheless.