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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2013
It has become an embarrassment. The American Conservative crows, “Cesar Chávez, Minuteman,” and the accompanying article delivers the news that the United Farm Workers was not only anti-immigrant but that it set up its own border patrol between Arizona and Mexico. The magazine does not stand alone. Leaders of current right-wing vigilante groups claim Chávez's retroactive endorsement for their occasional attempts to close small sections of the border. In response, Chávez's defenders contend that the UFW opposed the undocumented only when they broke strikes; and besides, that was long ago, and now the union is a strong defender of immigrant rights. Thus, UFW policy toward the undocumented—controversial in its own time—once again has become a subject of public debate, threatening to tarnish the name given to so many California streets, parks, schools, community centers, and even university departments.
1. Steve Sailer, “Cesar Chávez, Minuteman,” The American Conservative, February 27, 2006.
2. Roger Gitlin, “Cesar Chávez,” Minuteman Project, www.minutemanproject.com.
3. I use the word “illegals” a lot in this essay. I understand that it is very strange to call a person “illegal,” as it suggests that a person's very existence is against the law. The words “undocumented” and “undocumented worker” are much preferable. But the term “undocumented” was hardly used by anyone until the mid-1970s and didn't become generally used until the 1980s. Before that, many people, including all variety of progressives, used the terms “illegals” and “illegal aliens” without meaning to disparage the people they were talking about. That includes the UFW, whose press releases, newspaper, and conversations among themselves referred to the undocumented as illegals, illegal aliens, and even, on occasion, wetbacks. When someone reads that with twenty-first century eyes, they are misled by what it signified in the 1970s. Nevertheless, when I write here about the UFW's 1974 “Campaign Against Illegals,” I do not change its name to the “Campaign Against the Undocumented” nor do I elsewhere clean up the UFW's language to make it suitable to our tastes. But the reader should be warned that the word “illegal” carried different freight in 1974 than it does in 2013.
4. Calavita, Kitty, Inside the State: Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York, 1992), 218Google Scholar; Calavita, 152–4.
5. “Immigration Bureaucracy is Overwhelmed by Its Work,” New York Times, January 17, 1980.
6. “Illegal Aliens: A Growing Labor Force, Fresno Bee, September 9, 1973.
7. California Assembly Committee on Agriculture, The California Farm Workforce: A Profile (California, 1969)Google Scholar.
8. Jerald B. Brown, “The United Farm Workers Grape Strike and Boycott, 1965–1970” (PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1972), 264.
9. “Illegals Campaign,” August 17, 1974, I&R, Box 38, Folder “Illegals” Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mi.
10. “Illegals Campaign—Important,” July 6, 1974, I&R, Box 38, Folder “Illegals” 1974 (2); “Fresno County Illegal Alien Documentation, n.d., UFWOP part 2, Box 17, Folder 19, “Illegal Alien Farm Labor,” both at Wayne State.
11. For the full account, see Chapter 24, “The Wet Line” in my book, Trampling Out the Vintage (Verso, 2011)Google Scholar.
12. “To Chávez from Liza” and “To Liza from Chávez,” I&R, Box 41, Folder “Illegals,” Wayne State.
13. California Employment Development Department, California Rural Manpower Report, 1974 (Sacramento, 1976), 16Google Scholar.
14. “Minutes of NEB Meeting,” June 13, 1974, UFWOP, part 2, Box 37, Folder 18, Reuther Library, Wayne State.
