From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement

by Matthew García

From the Jaws of The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement is the most comprehensive history ever written on the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of the United Farm Workers, the most successful farm labor union in United States history. Based on little-known sources and one-of-a-kind oral histories with many veterans of the farm worker movement, this book revises much of what we know about the UFW. Matt Garcia’s gripping account of the expansion of the union’s grape boycott reveals how the boycott, which UFW leader Cesar Chavez initially resisted, became the defining feature of the movement and drove the growers to sign labor contracts in 1970. Garcia vividly relates how, as the union expanded and the boycott spread across the United States, Canada, and Europe, Chavez found it more difficult to organize workers and fend off rival unions. Ultimately, the union was a victim of its own success and Chavez’s growing instability.From the Jaws of Victory delves deeply into Chavez’s attitudes and beliefs, and how they changed over time. Garcia also presents in-depth studies of other leaders in the UFW, including Gilbert Padilla, Marshall Ganz, Dolores Huerta, and Jerry Cohen. He introduces figures such as the co-coordinator of the boycott, Jerry Brown; the undisputed leader of the international boycott, Elaine Elinson; and Harry Kubo, the Japanese American farmer who led a successful campaign against the UFW in the mid-1970s.  

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Labor, Ethnic Studies

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[David Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the tradition of Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby, and Chana Kai Lee, Matt Garcia chronicles the history of the United Farm Workers (UFW) from an organizing perspective. Quoting Jerry Brown, Garcia highlights the importance, the principles, and the requisite grind the includes organizing: Fred “Ross never lectured about organizing. He believed that one could only learn to organize by doing. He would point out there was nothing romantic organizing, and this it required mainly common sense, meticulous planning, hard work, and a great deal of self discipline” (63). Whereas much of the public memory of Chavez and the UFW has focused on marches, hunger strikes, and confrontations, Garcia brings to life a history of “slow and respectful work.”

From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement highlights the use of three principal tactics within the UFW: the strike, the march, and the boycott. While each served a distinct purpose, exerting different levels of pressure on the agricultural industry, Garcia pushes readers to see the significance of the boycott not only within the United States but also across the globe. In many ways, From the Jaws of Victory is a story of the grape boycott.

Although documenting the efforts to organize the farm workers themselves, Garcia spends many pages of From the Jaws of Victory highlighting the many ways that UFW organized the consumer boycott. As a child I still recall, the “don’t buy grapes campaign,” which in many ways impacted by own politicization, identity, and understanding of justice.

To work alongside of those withholding their labor, the UFW organized consumers to withhold their dollars, to punish grape growers for their failure to provide adequate compensation and working conditions. While Chavez was “reluctant to embrace the boycott … given the difficulty of maintaining such a campaign well beyond the primary site of struggle” (46), the boycott proved important in generating public participation. Despite apprehension, the UFW, with the assistance college students and other nonpaid volunteers, tried to cut off the demand for grapes. Educating consumers, pressuring markets, and disrupting supply chains, the UFW took the boycott to Los Angeles and New York, to Toronto and London.

Garcia chronicles the depth of this organizing and the extensive networks required to disrupt the supply chain at a global level. They created boycott houses; they lobbied other unions to refuse to transport grapes; and they shamed any who aided and abetted the global sale of grapes. Here the book emphasizes how the UFW utilized the media, and deploys particular frames to galvanize support, offering a dynamic and engaging look at the UFW as a social movement, as a space of organizing.

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[Raul Alonzo Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sobering, but necessary and essential history.

[Jonah Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Garcia takes readers behind the scenes of the UFW’s most pivotal moments, from the brilliant collaborative planning of the grape boycott in the mid-60s to the internal disagreements amongst UFW board members that eventually came to a boiling point following the defeat of CA Proposition 14 in 1976. This book provides a great comprehensive overview of UFW’s various different spheres of activism, distinguishing clearly its success as a social movement from its struggles as a labor union to compete with the financial and legal power of the growers, the Teamsters, & ALRA. Although it definitely stung to read about all the horrible ways that Chavez, Huerta, & others in leadership roles abused their power in the later years of the movement, especially at the cost of the low-income workers that were depending on their support, I think it provides an important learning lesson for future labor rights movements. To really respect the UFW’s leaders is to see them for all their positive & negative traits, not only for the accomplishments that have been preserved in the glamorized history of the movement. Overall an extremely interesting & well-researched piece of nonfiction. I highly recommend.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The early chapters are the best thing I've read on the nuts-and-bolts of the UMW boycotts—arguably the most successful national boycotts in American history. The later two-thirds of the book covers the cannibalization and disintegration of the UFW (in no small part due to outside forces). It is an ugly picture of Cesar Chavez, and taught me that the Chavez-as-MLK hagiography is based on selective history. That's not to say that Chavez wasn't a phenomenal and important leader for much of his life, but there's a big part of his legacy that still needs to be wrestled with.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dense read, but a good one, that reminds us not to make heroes out of people. Chavez was a powerful leader, but ultimately ate his own children due to ego and paranoia.

[Emily Hanamann]

(Different thesis)

[Dan Pasquini · Rating 2 out of 5]

A corrective to the myth of Saint Cesar Chavez -- but it only works if you're well versed in the history of Chavez and the UFW.

Oddly, this book is all fall, no rise. We get essentially nothing about Chavez, his charisma or the powers of persuasion that enlisted a huge cadre of volunteers to follow his movement for farm workers' rights. Garcia also does an astonishingly poor job of laying out what actually happened in the fields: we go from a set of grievances at one grape ranch to a full-blown industry boycott without any explanation of how we got there or what was at stake.

The fall is a queasy but engrossing blow-by-blow account of Chavez's attempt to build a cult of personality, shifting the work of the union to creating a new religion closely based on the Synanon cult. The evidence reveals the shocking racism, homophobia, paranoia and megalomania in Chavez -- and, for that matter, Dolores Huerta -- which set the union adrift and led to its implosion.

Garcia was aiming for our sympathy that the effective work of hundreds of volunteers and workers would be squandered by a petty dictator. But they believed in him for a long time. Without showing us Chavez at his best, it's a hollow defeat.

[Mills College Library]

331.8813 G2166 2012