Tragedy in the Fields: The Self-destruction of the United Farm Workers

Abstract

Frank Barcdacke’s history of the United Farm Workers therefore shifts much of our attention from the fasts, marches, and boycotts that made Cesar Chavez and the farm workers so iconic in the late 1960s. Instead, he refocuses the narrative onto the next decade, when Chavez became an increasingly self-destructive leader even as an enormously hopeful wave of farm worker militancy exploded across the state, not in the Delano-area vineyards, where the UFW never actually won the allegiance of most farm workers, but among the vastly larger work-force that labored in the Oxnard lemon orchards; the Salinas lettuce fields; and in the garlic-, tomato-, and melon-producing areas of the state.Chavez embodied the pitfalls of charismatic leadership, but the entire UFW experience also demonstrates that social movement unionism, even when most triumphant and inspiring, requires participatory mechanisms that can give effective voice to all those who join such a sprawling and multifaceted insurgency. Victory cannot be truly consolidated unless it is rooted in a set of democratic institutions.