2025/05/01 by Matt Garcia · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609885
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
When I sat down to interview veteran educator and community organizer Raul Loya at his home on January 19, 2005, I anticipated recording stories of collaboration with Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement. After all, Loya had known Chavez and organized with fellow Chicano activists to address systemic discrimination and labor exploitation in the Coachella Valley, one of the most important agricultural regions in California. To my surprise, Loya offered a different take on Chavez: “He was jealous of almost everybody that I knew” (Raul Loya, interviewed by Matt Garcia, January 19, 2005, Matt Garcia Papers, Claremont Honnold Library, box 14, folder 48, Oral History Transcripts, Raul Loya, 2005, Claremont, CA). Loya laid out a critique of Chavez for his vilification of undocumented immigrants, his distrust of local leaders, and his encouraging of young Mexican Americans to forgo an education to work for the union. Ultimately, Loya’s candid interview inspired me to become part of a trio of authors—Miriam Pawel, Frank Bardacke, and myself—whose scholarship has revised what we know about the union and its leader.A nuanced perspective on the United Farm Workers long resided in archives and among movement veterans for anyone who cared to look and listen. Yet as Christian Paiz’s new book, The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement shows, good history requires more than just looking and listening. Writing history, after all, is an act of interpretation that requires an honest reckoning with the evidence and the scholarship that proceeds it.Paiz fails on both counts. Many of the most egregious flaws stem from his narrow definition of who counts as a subject and his analysis of the UFW’s ultimate decline. Regarding the former, Paiz would like us to believe that previous historians did not talk to activists or farmworkers, when in fact most of his predecessors, including myself, interviewed numerous veterans (including many on Paiz’s list). Nevertheless, he uses this false premise as a foundation to argue that previous scholars willfully obscured “rank-and-file” members in favor of leaders and “white liberals” (4). Although Paiz never fully defines what he means by “rank-and-file,” he uses the term throughout as an instrument of exclusion and division for a movement that, for much of its existence, distinguished itself as inclusive and diverse, including in Coachella. Many of the people he derides as “white liberals” were critical to the early success of the movement; later, as lawyers and organizers, they played an essential role in the implementation of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA). Given that several of these individuals were Jewish, Paiz’s dismissal of their contributions harks back to the antisemitism of the early 1980s, when some in UFW sought scapegoats for the union’s decline.Paiz’s juxtaposition of “leaders” versus “rank and file” is equally inconsistent and ill explained. He asserts the canard that a true history of “everyday people” in the movement can only be told when the historian “transcends its leaders” (5). Such an argument takes the “bottom-up” approach too literally, especially in the case of the United Farm Workers, which functioned as an autocracy under Chavez despite having a National Executive Board and maintaining ranch committees at companies where the union had contracts. In its best moments, The Strikers of Coachella shows how the ranch committees empowered many members, but these stories are not a stand-in for the history of the union, as Paiz asserts. The story of “everyday people” must be seen in a wider context of forces and decisions that either subverted or confirmed their will. As most of Paiz’s predecessors show, Chavez occasionally trampled their dreams rather than affirming and respecting them. In fact, many of the strongest worker leaders, including some from Coachella, ended up purged—by Chavez.Finally, although Paiz admits that ordinary members were “shadowed by failures,” he rarely attributes these shortcomings to anyone but the union’s enemies or the state (5). Despite ample evidence of missteps by the union under Chavez’s leadership, now widely acknowledged by those who worked within the movement, Paiz says he “is not convinced” that more discipline or forethought would have made a difference (172). He even adopts this “no-fault” interpretation of Chavez’s well-established anti-immigrant stance, contending that recruiting new immigrants would have cost too much (170). Time and time again, Paiz contorts narratives, defies logic, and ignores evidence to exonerate Chavez on any number of issues—from the alienation of Filipino workers, to his divestment from ALRA, to his multiple purgings of loyal volunteers, a subject Paiz avoids almost entirely (162, 171, 209).The Strikers of Coachella reads more as a misinformed repudiation of Paiz’s predecessors rather than the “people’s history” he intends. To absolve Chavez of all responsibility for the dramatic decline of UFW, Paiz dismisses recent scholarship and disputes well-documented accounts in archives he chose not to engage. Fortunately, the firsthand experiences of contemporary observers like Raul Loya are available to the public, and many articles and books are still to be written. Such work will offer necessary analysis of past successes and failures to contemporary farmworker advocates deeply committed to the fight for justice.