Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Marc Grossman on Helen and Cesar Chavez

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

In this month’s bonus episode, Liza is joined by Marc Grossman who was speechwriter, press secretary, and personal aide to Cesar Chavez for 24 years. Marc shares his unique insight into the marriage of Cesar and Helen Chavez, and how Helen was a powerful force in her own right and became the mother of the United Farm Workers’ movement. We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and today we're having a very special conversation about a woman who is integral to the United Farm Workers movement, but whose work is often subsumed by her more visible partner. These are Chavez's press secretary, speechwriter, and personal aide for 24 years, and who's conducted many hours of interviews with Mr. Chavez's wife, Helen, which he has generously agreed to tell us about. Mark Grossman, thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's my pleasure. and her impact, what I like to do when I tell these stories is give a little bit of context of why the more visible piece of the partnership is important to us all culturally. So could you orient us just a little bit with Cesar Chavez and why it is that we care about him? Well, Cesar was perhaps the most significant Latino civil rights leader of the 20th century. You know, the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument is the first of 400 now plus units of the National Park Service

named to recognize a contemporary Latino leader. And he, with his colleagues, began building and sustaining the first enduring farmworkers union in American history. After 100 years of people with a lot more resources and better educations tried and failed to organize farmworkers. He was a social entrepreneur. He was an environmental champion. Douglas Brinkley's new book, Silent Spring Revolution, chronicling the birth of the American environmental movement, has Caesar sprinkled all through it because he considers himself one of those few people in the 60s

that took on the degradation of the environment. And Brinkley is now working on a full comprehensive biography of Caesar. Oh, fantastic. It's set to come out on the centennial of his birth in 2027. Great. And he not only became a farmworker leader, but a Latino leader and really a moral force and a leader for an inspiration for millions of Americans who trace their social political activism to this small brown man. I'm one of them. Hmm. And what is your connection to the Chavez family?

Well, I had met Cesar already going up on car caravans to Delano in the late 1960s or in the Delano Grape Strike, bringing donated food and clothing to the strikers and was active. You know, if you were on or near campus in the 60s, 70s, you were boycotting grapes or something else. And so I did that a lot. So I'd met Caesar already. I really got to know him through his eldest son, Fernando. I still call him Polly, his nickname around family. We've been very close friends since we were 19, 20-year-old college students.

And so I met Caesar and Helen. I got to know Caesar and Helen through him. Kind of grew up around their older kids. Helen, in addition to know Caesar and Helen through him, kind of grew up around their older kids. Helen, in addition to raising her own family, was really a surrogate mother to many in the farm worker movement, and I was one of them. And then I knew Caesar the last 24 years of his life. And much of that time, I was his press secretary, speechwriter, and personal leader. Oh, wow. So I traveled with him. He

took me with him almost everywhere in California, often out of state. So you have a front row seat to their extraordinary life and career. And I do also want to thank Eduardo, who is our sound engineer, for suggesting this subject. He's the person who said that Helen would be a great person to cover, and I'm glad that he mentioned it because this already sounds like a great story. So you're going to help shine a little bit of light on this person who was central to Cesar Chavez's life and work, who has been much less visible historically. And that's his wife, Helen, as you've mentioned. So can you tell us, kind of go back to the beginning of their relationship

and tell us how they met? Well, first, Helen shared much of the same hardships that came with migrant and seasonal farm work. Although she was born in the Imperial Valley, town of Brawley in 1928, she was really raised in a converted horse barn in a little town called McFarland, just south of Delano. Her father was one of Pancho Villa's colonels during the Mexican Revolution. Wow. And she met Caesar in the mid-1940s at a malt shop,

11th and Glenwood in Delano, that was paved over by the 99 freeway in later years. They began courting. When Caesar went away to the Navy in 1946 for two years, they became very serious about each other. And when he was discharged in 1948, they decided to get married. And he went to work out in the fields for months and months to raise money for their life and also so they could go on a honeymoon. They wanted to take a little honeymoon. They went and visited the missions up and down California. And they settled initially in Delano,

living in the granny unit in the back of a house off what is now the 99 Freeway. And how old were they at this time? See, in 1948, Caesar was 21. So they were pretty young. She was a teenager. She was maybe 20. Right. Yeah. Caesar and Helen both told the story about when they got married, you know, her mother was a single mother and they had, Helen had two sisters and two brothers. So Helen quit high school.

She was a good student at Delano High School, but quit in her sophomore year to support the family. And so Helen's mother would not allow her to do housework and cooking because she was the breadwinner. And so when Caesar and Helen were going to get married, Helen's mother told Caesar, well, you know, she can't cook.

Caesar said, well, she'll learn. He married her anyway. Married her anyway. He overlooked her defects, as all good husbands do. Okay, so they're pretty young, but probably, you know, not unusual for the time to be getting married at that age. She has a history of supporting her family. Does she keep working outside the home, or does he become the more traditional breadwinner?

No, she's pregnant with their first child, Fernando. And Helen tells a story in the tape recorder interviews I did with her that are transcribed, that in those early months of their marriage, Helen says the pay was so damn cheap. He'd leave for work when it was dark and he wouldn't come back until after sunset. And it started him thinking, Helen is saying to me, that something's got to change. Somebody has got to do something about it. And Caesar would say, my dream, I want to do something for these people, for those workers. I know how hard it is because I've been through it. And Helen would say, you know, she said there was a saying in Spanish, solamente el que carga el saco sabe lo que tria adentro,

that only the one who carries a sack knows what's inside it. Caesar knew about farm labor because he was a farm worker. And he would say, someday, somebody's got to do something to help farm workers. Now, he had no idea that somebody would be him. So, when does that inspiration enter his mind, their mind, their life? When does that take hold? Well, in 1952, Caesar was recruited into the community service organization, Latino Civil Rights Group. And it was how he really, he had already gotten out of farm labor, but it was the first decent job he had. He was there for 10 years. He worked for Saul Alinsky in Chicago, Industrial Areas Foundation. It sponsored CSO.

And Caesar eventually became its national staff director. He was very talented. He organized new CSO chapters up and down the state. But he never forgot, he never let go of this dream of wanting to organize farm workers. And in 1962, when he could not convince his beloved CSO to let him do it, he quit. He gave up this middle-class lifestyle that he had achieved and carefully built. He even had a Brooks Brothers credit card. Drove a Volvo. How many Chicanos drove a Volvo in the early 1960s? And they moved from a nice house in Boyle Heights in East LA to this dusty little farm town called Delano. And Helen has some wonderful insights about that. And, you know, that when he made the decision, he wanted, it was really a joint decision, you know, with Helen.

How old were their children at the time when this was percolating? They were between the ages of three and 13. Okay, so she's been married 20 years to him at this point. Well, he's married at that point about 12 years, 13 years. Okay, great. And she's supported her husband while he has sort of achieved a middle-class American dream in quotes.

And they're somewhat affluent, it sounds like. They've got a home, right? They had credit cards. They no longer have to scrimp and save to buy food and pay the rent. Yeah, and he's not laboring the fields from before the sun gets up to after it goes down. And it's still nagging at him, right? That there's still something he needs to contribute. He could not live with himself without at least

trying to organize farm workers. He knew the history. Many people with better educations and much more money had tried and failed for 100 years before him, but he just couldn't live with himself unless he tried. He and Helen talked and he explained that there'll be no paycheck and it was going to be a big sacrifice and that Helen would have to go back and work in the fields to support the family again. She had left, escaped farm labor when they got married. Helen said, he asked, would I give my consent? Would I help him? And she answered, yes, I'll do whatever I need to do. And Caesar said,

the kids are going to have a hard time. They're going to have to do without a lot of things. And Helen would too. So when they first moved to Delano in 1962, most of his time he was on the road. He was traveling, driving from one impoverished farm worker town to another trying to organize people into this young new union and it was tough for every 100 people he talked to 98 wouldn't speak with him because they knew the history that's the brutality the strikes that were broken people were blacklisted. People were killed during fall strikes. And so sometimes Caesar would come home from days on the road, not having recruited anybody, and he would be demoralized. And Helen would buck him up. And she'd say, Caesar, have faith.

You know you can do it. If anyone can do it, it's going to be you. And it's going to take you a lot shorter time than you think it will. Helen said that she, you know, I always supported him. I always gave him courage when he would come home, sometimes depressed or, or tired. And she would say, I know it's going to be hard for you for, you know, that there's no paycheck, you know, but, you know, you're doing the right thing, she would say. And she also said that Helen knew that he was going to get the support of the people, she said, because, you know, Helen said people were ready to fight. They were ready to get a better wage. You know, they'd been with a foot on their neck for so long that I think it

was time that somebody, they needed a little push. And I think Caesar was that little push. And so in his journal, Caesar would record feeling down, talk to Helen, went out on the road again. Oh, that is so poignant. That's amazing. Did she ever give you the sense, and I don't know how much you probed for this or not, but did she ever give the sense that she was at all conflicted about going along with this massive change in their lifestyle, in their family prospects, that she was committing to this incredible act of sacrifice, really. And I'm wondering if there was a little bit more of a sense, like, was it just out of love or was it duty or was she, you know, just following her husband because she's supposed to? Or was it that she was swept along in the meaning of the work from the start? from the start? Well, you know, when she passed away in 2016, some well-meaning people were saying about, you know, there's that expression that behind it, every great man is a great woman. And her children took exception with that. And they said, Helen Chavez was never behind

Cesar Chavez. She was at his side and sometimes she was in front of him. And it's funny you should ask that, the question, because shortly after they began the work in 1962, Caesar got an offer from the Kennedy administration to head up a part of the newly formed Peace Corps in a portion of Latin America. And Helen and Caesar, they called the kids together. They had a family meeting. Caesar, Helen, and the eight kids. They're ages three to 13.

And Caesar told them, I have this offer of a job and it would mean going to South America and your mom would not have to work in the fields anymore and you'll have maids and a big house and nice schools and all the advantages. So the kids are all looking at each other, and they're smiling. You know, oh, that sounds pretty good. But then Caesar explained they would no longer be able to do anything for these farm workers that they had started to organize. And Helen, and she's telling me this in the 2000s, and she said, I knew what Caesar's mind was set on.

He'd left a job that he loved at the CSO. He wanted to do what he believed was right, what he had always wanted to do. And so who was I to change his mind and say, no, I want to go to a different country and live like a queen, even though I lived in poverty myself and worked in the fields all my life. So that dream to organize farm workers whose lives both Caesar and Helen had shared was a joint dream. It was something that they both felt. Wow. And it's so rare to have the kind of access that you have been able to offer It was something that they both felt. relying on the, you know, the sort of gaze of the historian, and they're not always asking these kinds of questions. So I'm, again, just very grateful that we have you here with us to give

us the direct line. Okay, so they are, so 1962 is, I think, where we've kind of come up to, and he is, the kids are between three and 13. There are eight of them, you said? Yes. Wow. She's working in the fields all day. He's going out and trying to rally support. It's dangerous work.

It's exhausting work. It's sometimes probably hopeless feeling. So what is the next big moment in their journey? Probably the next, the event that many people are familiar with comes three years later in 1965. This is when in September of that year, Filipino farm workers in the Delano area walked out on strike against wine and table grape growers. And everyone, Cesar and the Filipino union leaders, they all knew the history. Growers would pit the races against each other. They'd use the Latinos to break the Filipino

strike and vice versa. And so the Filipino union leaders, Larry Leon, Peter Velasco, and the others came to Cesar Chavez and asked his mostly Latino union to join their picket lines. Now, Cesar and Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and their other early organizers, they had a long-term plan that they would organize for maybe years using the community organizing model they had learned in the 50s before they were going to be ready for a major field strike. learned in the 50s before they were going to be ready for a major field strike. But Caesar also knew the history and that there really wasn't a choice. And there was a debate among the Caesars, mostly Latino unions, should or should they not join the Filipinos' walkouts? And Helen is

listening to this debate and she asks, well, are we a union or not? And that settled the questions. Fantastic. And then joined the strike. And then her life, which was already pretty difficult, became even more burdensome. How so? Well, when the strike began, Oh, well, when the strike began, there was a farmworker credit union that Caesar ran. He couldn't do that anymore because of the strike. He turned it over to Helen, taught her how to do it, accounting and bookkeeping. And by the way, over 25 years, it loaned out $20 million to farm workers. She would get up well before dawn and she would do the wash and she would do the clothes and she would make the breakfast and the lunches for the kids. And

then before dawn, she would be on vineyard picket lines and then go into the office all day and run the credit union and then come home and more cooking and cleaning and making sure the kids were doing their homework. And Caesar wasn't around. I mean, he had to make the decision that the work was so important that it was more important than even spending time with his own children. Helen told me, you know, some fathers are just distant. They don't want to spend time with their kids. But Helen told me Caesar wasn't like that. When the older kids were young, he loved being with them. But once the union work and the strike began, I asked Helen once at the end of my interviews with her, would Caesar have done the work, taken on this mission,

if he didn't know that Helen would be there to care for his children? In other words, would Caesar have jeopardized the welfare of his kids? And Helen said, she contemplated it, and she said, no, I don't think he would have, if it hadn't been, if he didn't know that she would be there to take care of his family. Okay, so they band together with the Filipino farm worker strike at 1965. And then what's the next milestone? Well, there's a five-year strike and international grape boycott that rallies millions of people all over North America and even into Western Europe to the farm workers caused by boycotting grapes. That's how I first got involved in the late 60s. And

then there was just decades of strikes and marches and boycotts and demonstrations and political campaigns. Helen was with Caesar in 1968 during Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign in California. When RFK was shot, Helen was with him. She was there. Wow. When they received news of it, they went on their knees and said the rosary, praying to survive. And there were tough times. I mean, today, when people are safely in their graves, they become safe. But people forget Cesar Chavez was a very controversial figure when he was alive.

Sure. I was with him twice in the 70s when federal agents notified the union of assassination plots, the ATF, Alcohol and Tobacco Firearms Bureau, and then later the FBI. And in 71, when the ATF agents notified the union, they even gave us photographs of the hitman who'd been hired. And the California Highway Patrol arrested the guy. His name was Buddy Gene Prochnow. Outside Salinas, only a few miles from where Caesar had been the day before.

He was stalking him. Arrested him for another murder for hire. He actually did commit. Wow. So she was living with this kind of stress. Mortal fear, yeah. did commit. So she was living with this kind of stress. And finally, Caesar, he was on the road, maybe two, three weeks, never sleeping in the same place twice. And he finally told Helen, I'm not a coward. I haven't done anything wrong except fighting for workers' lives. I'm going to go home and go back to work,

and if they kill me, you know, then so be it, if that's God's will. But he wasn't going to be intimidated, and she stuck with him. She was there, not behind him, but by his side, and sometimes out in front, you know, in the late 60s, Caesar, who had a transformational vision of trade unionism, saw a union as a community of people. It couldn't just be solely an economic institution only worried about wages, hours, and working conditions. including all the crippling dilemmas farm workers faced outside the workplace when they went home to their communities where they suffered discrimination and miserable housing and lack of educational opportunities and real discrimination because of ethnicity or language. And so, you know, Caesar in the late 60s, because he had this vision of a union as being more than about just getting more money for people. He opposed the Vietnam War in the late 60s. In the 70s, Caesar unequivocally embraced LGBTQ rights, what they called gay rights back then. I met Harvey Milk accompanying Cesar as his aide to events in San Francisco. And Helen had

something to do with that too. Her childhood friend going back to the 30s and 40s in Delano was a young woman named Mocha was her nickname. Taurus was a family name. And she was lesbian. Wow. And Helen and Cesar had her baptize their two oldest children, Fernando and Sylvia, in 1949 and 50, respectively. And they were a Catholic family, I'm assuming. Probably Catholic. So this is incredibly, I don't know if we want to call it open-minded or just human, humane. What is it they say that when you know or are close to someone from the LGBTQ community, it changes your attitudes? Sure, right.

And so they knew her. And so in the 70s, I mean, Caesar would strongly support gay rights. In 1984, when the Democrat National Convention was in San Francisco and labor had a huge march down Market Street, Caesar brought a couple hundred farm workers. And then when it was concluded, he brought the farm workers together and said,

I'm going to go march in the gay parade in the Castro district. And you're invited to come with me. You don't have to come, but you're invited to come with me. You don't have to come, but you're invited. And many of them did. So, you know, Helen was part of that process as well. And, you know, Caesar would say, how could you battle discrimination against your own people when you tolerate discrimination against anyone else because of who they are. And in the 1970s, that was not.

It was long before it became popular, even among many of Caesar's constituencies. Sure. Okay, so we may be sort of nearing the final chapter, I'm assuming. Okay, so why don't we dive into that final chapter of their time together? Well, I'm thinking of images. In 2012, when President Obama came to our headquarter southeast of Bakersfield in the D'Hassan Mountains where Caesar and Helen lived and labored their last 22 years and dedicated the Caesar E. Chavez National Monument, the first unit of the National Park Service ever to recognize a contemporary Latino figure. And that's where Caesar was buried. And the president with Helen on his arm knelt at the grave site and laid a single rose on the grave

site. And as they were walking away, this very humble, modest person who never spoke out in public, never granted an interview to a reporter. She buttonholes the president of the United States and she says, Mr. President, will you promise me that you're going to do something about immigration reform? And the president said, yes, Mrs. Chavez, I promise I will. So Helen was a humble and modest person, genuinely, but she was also fiercely determined and very courageous. And she would speak up when she needed to.

Does she have a monument yet? She's buried next to her husband. Okay. In a beautifully landscaped memorial garden, the stones throw from where Caesar lived. Caesar lived and worked. But, you know, if there was a founder of the farm worker movement, and there was more than one,

one of them would have to be Helen Chavez. How do you feel their legacy is holding up now? Well, the movement that Caesar and Helen and others built had an influence far beyond the fields. And I saw this traveling with Cesar around the country. People would come up to him, especially Latinos, but people from all walks of life. And they would say, you inspired me to be the first in my family to go to college or to become an attorney or a doctor or a business person or to run for public office. That's great.

Cesar came to understand that his work had far transcended the fields. And there are literally millions of Americans today who trace their social political activism, their sense of giving themselves to others in a nonviolent cause to be part of something that's bigger than you are. And I think a great deal of that credit isn't just with Caesar. It's also with Helen Chavez and countless others. Caesar always was very reluctant, felt very awkward being

recognized in public because he knew there were so many Cesar Chavez's, so many women and men who made great sacrifices and achieved tremendous things, but whose names are largely lost to history. Helen Chavez was one of them. Well, hopefully not for good. Hopefully people will pay her a little bit more mind. Can you, just so that we have a little bit of a sense of closure, can you tell us how each of them did come to pass? Caesar died at the age of 66, 31 years leading the UFW never having taken a vacation real vacation working I don't know

12, 14, 15 hours a day Helen would outlive him she died in 2016 Wow natural causes and you know surrounded by you know seven surviving children and 31 grandchildren. Oh, my goodness.

There's a legacy. More great-grandchildren. I don't even know what those numbers are. And she was just, as her children said, she never stood behind her. She stood by his side, and sometimes she was out in front. She certainly is remarkable. Is there anything that I have failed to ask about that you'd really love to impart to us? You know, when in 2016 also, the U.S., you know, Caesar served in the U.S. Navy for two years, honorably discharged.

He said it was the toughest two years of his life. Oh, my goodness. Before President Truman integrated the armed services. I see. There was a lot of discrimination and segregation even then. But for Helen, the Navy years were very meaningful because it was when they became serious about each other. And the Navy launched its latest Lewis and Clark class dry cargo ship, the USNS, United States Navy ship, Cesar Chavez. It was Stern's first launch into San Diego Bay in front of 7,000 people.

into San Diego Bay in front of 7,000 people. And Helen was very moved and insisted on going. And she hit the champagne bottle against the ship. She christened the ship. And it was because of her memories of those Navy years. Oh, that's great. When they first became close. Mark, what are your plans with all of this massive amount

of research that you're sitting on? Are you intending to do anything in particular with any of it? Are you just sort of a resource for whoever decides to come calling? Well, you know, I'm fortunate. This is my 53rd year with the movement.

And I work still both for the United Foreign Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation. So I get to do a lot of the legacy work. I do some writing. I'm helping out Doug Brinkley with the new biographies writing. All of my stuff is at the Labor Archives at Wayne State University in Detroit. My stuff is at the Labor Archives at Wayne State University in Detroit. So, you know, I think it's really important that, you know, the lessons that I learned from Cesar Chavez and from Helen Chavez and from the movement, you know, they have real life, present day relevance. Sure. Yeah. And, you know, I think that people like that couple who really sacrificed far beyond what any of us would have chosen to do, I think that that kind of moral and physical courage, you know, is as relevant today as was back in their day. Indeed. Well, Mark, this has been great. Thank you so much for sharing this incredibly valuable perspective.

My pleasure. Thank you for having us. We'll be releasing bonus episodes right up until season two comes out. So be sure to hit the subscribe button. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes.

You can email us at significantpod at gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening.