The PBS Interview On January 15, 1997, the PBS January 1997 Press Tour interviewed Richard Chávez, brother of César Chávez, and Rick Tejada-Flores and Ray Telles, Producers/Directors of "The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers' Struggle", at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, California. Below is a transcript of this press conference. All PBS Press Tour transcripts are prepared immediately following press conferences. They are provided for your convenience and are not intended as a substitute for attendance at press conferences. Due to the speed with which these transcripts are prepared, complete accuracy cannot be guaranteed. JOHN WILSON (PBS): Hello, today we will preview "The Fight in the Fields." It's a labor of love from two Emmy-winning producers who together have nearly a half-century of production experience in both commercial and public television: Rick Tejada-Flores and Ray Telles. Now I have just a brief change here to note to your programs -- Arturo Rodriguez is unable to join us, as is Paul Chávez. Fast-breaking union business and this unusual weather has conspired against us. However, Richard Chávez is here, and he is César's brother and UFW colleague. And bio information has been circulated and I believe is on the tables in front of you. Now, let me introduce -- here to moderate this session for "Fight in the Fields" is ITVS manager of marketing promotion, Nancy Robinson. Nancy? NANCY ROBINSON: Okay, not to waste any time, let's go right to it. To my left are Ray Telles, Richard Chávez, and Rick Tejada-Flores. And any questions you have, please direct them to them. QUESTION: Richard, could you start by telling us a little bit about your mother, because it seems like she had a lot to do with putting some of these principles into César's mind, and so forth. Tell us a little about her. RICHARD CHAVEZ: My mother was -- she was actually born in Mexico. She was six months old when she came to this country. And she was illiterate. She never went to school, but she was' a very, very, very -- very smart woman. She had the belief of non-violence. She was one that would say, "Turn the other cheek" -- that was her -- she didn't believe in striking back or hurting anybody. And she was a very -- very unique woman, even though she was uneducated. QUESTION: In your estimation, does César Chávez now need, or should he now take his place alongside Walter Reuthers -- the Walter Reuthers of the world, the other great union organizers of the 20th Century? RICK TEJADA-FLORES: Is this for me? QUESTION: For anybody who cares to tackle it. For all of you! And why should he? I mean, I think we know the answer, but I'm asking-- RAY TELLES: Well, let me jump in. César Chávez was a labor organizer, but calling him a "labor organizer" really doesn't give you a sense of who he was, or his significance. He was someone that reached out and made connections between labor unions, between community organizations, between poor minority groups, and the rest of American society. And those connections had been destroyed. They existed in the 1930s, but by the time César started organizing in the 1960s, people really lived in different worlds. And I think part of César's greatness was that he broke down those walls between the different worlds, and brought affluent middle-class Americans face-to-face with poor people who had been left out of the American Dream. CHAVEZ: Yeah, he was primarily a labor -- labor man, but he didn't stop there. He went to anybody that needed help, any other group throughout the country, and throughout the world, for that matter. And he would try to lend a hand wherever he could. He just couldn't see injustices -- he just couldn't stand for it. Held do whatever he could to right the wrongs that he saw before him. So, he was a very unique person in that respect. TEJADA-FLORES: Can I answer your question? Yes, and he was the first person who was ever able to organize farmworkers in this country. Nobody had done it before. And you've got to realize, here's a group of workers who had nothing going up against one of the major industries in this country. And, you know, it's quite a feat to do what they did. TELLES: who had nothing, and who had none of the protections that other American workers have -- that's a very important point. Farmworkers were left out of the National Labor Relations Act, specifically to get the Southern votes to pass the bill. So, when any other group organized, they could get an election and a contract, the farmworkers never had that until in California the Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed in 1977. QUESTION:I'm wondering if you all have seen the film, "Chicano!"that ran on PBS last year, what you thought of the part of itthat was on the farmworkers movement, and whether you have any fears about whether people think they already seen this? And what kind of differences are there between your approach and what they did? TEJADA-FLORES: "Chicano!" was a four-part series, four hours -- one hour, not quite one hour of it was on the farmworkers, and it ended in 1971, '72. So, the trajectory of our film covers, you know, turn-of-the- century up until now. It's broader, and more in-depth. It's a two-hour, you know, feature-length documentary. And also, the way we tell the story is, people who are family members, participants, critics all tell the story. There's minimum narration. QUESTION: Follow-up on that question -- were you concerned at all about duplication? Did you begin the process of doing this documentary after Jose Luis began his, or what? TELLES: Our project started in 1989. We were unable to get funding for it until César Chávez died, unfortunately. But we have -- this is the seventh year we've been involved with this project. It goes back a long way. We were aware of the other project. our feeling is that when you have an important story and an important national figure, that those are worthwhile of many different looks. And we had a point of view,and we had a -- we were going to take an exhaustive, in-depth look, and we felt that there's room for other films, and each one of them adds something to the subject. I don't think the American public knows all they want to know about César and about the farmworkers movement. And we hope this film will help answer those questions. TEJADA-FLORES: The other -- excuse me -- I might add that the approach we also took is to show, to tie César Chávez and the movement into, you know, the broader scope of American politics. I mean, César was connected to Democratic Party politics, to the Kennedys and all that. We make those connections and show just how involved and how co-dependent they were on each other. QUESTION: I think there's a widespread opinion these days that the unions have been losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the younger generation. How does it look from your perspective? Is it a really bad time for union-organizing, and why has this happened? TELLES-: Oh, I think it's a pretty good time for union- organizing, and I think unions are coming back. There's been a real resurgence in the last couple of years. John Sweeney is the head of the national AFL-CIO. The farmworkers are really active for the first time -- and I think Richard can speak a little to that. CHAVEZ: Yes.As far as we're concerned, we're doing very well. We had a little lull there for a while, but we're re-gaining our membership back. We've been able to re-negotiate -- many of the old contracts have been re-negotiated. We have won some big contracts in the roses, in the mushrooms, in wine companies. So now we have that big strawberry fight before us, and we're doing very well. I think that the union is really on the upswing. QUESTION:Why do you think it took you so long to get the funding? And why did you have to wait until after César Chávez died? TEJADA-FLORES: Well, first of all, I think generally when you hear, quote, "Latino projects," there hasn't been a great interest, quite frankly. We went to the National Endowment for the Human ities three times over the years, and it wasn't until ITVS kicked in the money, and that got things going. I mean, they kicked in about 40% of our budget in November or December a couple of years ago. And then on the third round, the National Endowment for the Humanities kicked in. So, part of it is, you're not history until you're dead. And, unfortunately, that was the case with this documentary on Cesar. QUESTION: Do you think any of it was politically motivated, or anything like that? TELLES: I tell you, we squeezed in under Newt Gingrich. I mean, right when the battle was going on with Newt -- Gingrich was coming down on the endowments, we got word that we were most of the way in, and had one panel left to go -- one screening left to go. We thought, this battle of Newt Gingrich is raging against the NEH and the NEA; we weren't going to make it. And somehow we did. I don't think that the following year, '96, we would ever gotten funding. So, there were politics involved. TEJADA-FLORES: But also, the politics of America -- César was a pretty controversial figure during his lifetime. And people who fund projects have trouble with controversy in some senses. I think, you know, I don't see that he's any less controversial now that he's dead, but now he's safe. And historically, now, that important chapter of the farm- workers' story is over, so it was an appropriate time to look back. QUESTION:I'm just wondering, to follow up on that, Mr. Chávez. How do you find him regarded now, by the young people in the Latin American community here, and in the migrant farmworkers and so forth? CHAVEZ: I see a lot of interest. And you see, the workforce never stays -- it's not the same workforce forever. It keeps on changing, you know. And the older workers get out of the industry, and then some new workers come in. So you're always working with new people. And we see a lot of interest in the younger, the young generations of workers. And also, not only in farm workers, but I do a lot of, I go to a lot of dedications, like when they dedicate a street or a library or a school, or some -- I do a little speaking, I speak for the farm workers, and I've been fortunate enough to meet a lot of young people who are in school now, these days, and I see -- really, really an interest in getting involved in politics, and getting involved in making change. I see that a lot. QUESTION: Well, they know who he is. I mean, has he become the kind of a hero that Martin Luther King has become, that same type hero to the young people? Or-- CHAVEZ: Yes, he is, very much. Very much. He's definitely a hero, especially to Latinos. He definitely is. QUESTION: Richard, you talk those dedications. Tell us why those dedications are important. Because, with a lot of our communities have had the big battles over renaming the streets "Martin Luther King Boulevard," "César Chávez Avenue" and so forth. And some people said it's not important, some people, it is. Why is it important to dedicate these things and name these things? CHAVEZ: I think that we have a custom in this country of honoring our heroes, and certainly, César was a hero for a lot of people. And so, they want to name things after him so they could, for generations to come, for a few generations to come, to know who this man was. I see a lot of schools named after other people, and sometimes, when I was young I would ask, "Why is this school named that?" and they would tell me. That's what's going to happen with the name "César Chávez" when young generations, future generations start asking questions about that name, somebody will tell them who that man was, and what he did. So, it's part of history, very much. QUESTION: What's the relationship between -- right here, again -- between the documentary and the book that we have in front of us? I mean, did one come first, is this a spinoff of the documentary? What's the relationship? TEJADA-FLORES:The documentary was done first; it's a companion book. It was done by some journalists, two journalists, who have covered farm labor for 20 years. It was based largely, but not exclusively on the research in the interviews of the book. It has a lot of new additional material. It also has the flexibility of going to things in greater depth than we could, even in a two-hour film. TELLES: If you look at a script of a two-hour film, our script is 65-70 pages, double-spaced, you know, two-thirds of a page, how much can you really do? So, we also talked to -- we had a panel of advisors, a dozen advisors from the NEH, and they said, "You've got to do something with the material." Teachers came up and said, "We need more. We need more." So, we have a 300-page book. We can deal with a lot more of the material. We had the Freedom of Information files, FBI files on César and on the Union. 3000 pages. You couldn't include it in the film, but some of that made its way into the book, which is important, important stuff. QUESTION: Richard, could you tell us first impressions of the fight when César first started to talk [inaudible] because you said that the workers had everything against them and they didn't have the power force to start with. Did it strike you as it would be possible to win it, or did it strike you as a maybe impossible cause? CHAVEZ: Well, organizing farm workers had been tried before in the past, and every time they had been -- they were defeated. They couldn't do it. So, naturally, we knew it was going to be an almost impossible fight, but we also knew that if we did the type of organizing that César did, that we would do four or five years of organizing before ever mentioning strikes or wages or anything like that. We had to build a base. And that's what he did. He started building that base in 1962 in Delano, not talking about -- it was just the National Farm Workers Association. it was a service center. He was helping people with their problems and that sort of thing. And in 1965 we felt that we still had one more year of organizing to really have a solid base throughout the valley and throughout the central coast. But in those days, the Filipinos went on strike in 1965 -- they were the first ones that went on strike. It was a separate organization. And so we had to -- not wanting to -- we had to honor the strike; we couldn't go and break the strike, because they were striking. And so, we were kind of forced to go out on strike also, but it was a year early. And we had a lot of support from the beginning. Because our story was told from the beginning right away what the conditions were and so forth, and so, people throughout the country started helping. when we first went on strike, there were people from all over the country came to Delano and brought us food, and brought us, they came to our picket lines and brought us clothing and money, and so forth, and we saw that there was a good chance that we were going to be able to be effective. But it took 58 months before we got our first contracts, so it was almost a five-year boycott, but it really did it. QUESTION: I remember when -- way in the back here -- I'm wavin' at you. Over here. I remember when the union was first trying to organize, and the entire -- the opposition was that we would lose cheap food if the unions came in. Proportionally speaking, how much more does food cost today than it would have cost back then? CHAVEZ: That was an argument they used all the time. See, they never said your cars are going to cost more. They cost more, they're going to cost more, and that's all there was to it. And they were organized, and your TVs are going to cost more, but we don't care, we're just going to pay whatever it costs, because the increase was there. But when it came to farmworkers, they said that food was going to go way up-- Let me give you an example. When I was doing boycott in New York, just so you can get an idea of what it was, maybe today, still, I don't know, but, they used to be packaged -- bell peppers -- I'm just saying an example because they're so obvious. Three bell peppers in a package that cost about a -- I don't know, close to a dollar, or something like that. And a single farm worker could pick thousands of those bell peppers by himself a day, you know. I mean, thousands. A cutter -- a worker -- can cut, I don't know how many, thousands of bell peppers a day. You see, it wasn't that we were going to pay the workers more money and they weren't going to make money. It was just something that they were using to intimidate, to get the public not to support us, or to give us the help. But, actually, it's tenths of a percent what the thing goes up when we get a raise. TELLES: The other issue is, we're talking about conditions, I mean, there were no -- no drinking water in the fields, bathrooms, that kind of thing. I mean, real basic stuff that the union was going after. It wasn't just money. It was being able to be represented by a union. CHAVEZ: That's right. It wasn't just wages. It was working conditions and the benefits that come with a union contract and so forth. Like everybody else has in this country. And every other worker that is unionized. QUESTION: I came in late, so if somebody asked this question -- I'm over here. Okay? on your right. No, your left. If somebody asked this, forgive me. On your walk that you're going to do, you know about the health insurance, job security, living wage and such, you say an end to sexual harassment. Now, are there women working in the -- there are women working there, right? CHAVEZ: Yes. QUESTION: So, why do you need the government to tell your men to stop sexually harassing the women? I mean, wouldn't that just be something that you could solve among yourselves? CHAVEZ: If we have a union contract we do. QUESTION: You mean you can't stop harassing women unless you have a contract? QUESTION: Oh, boy. CHAVEZ: See, that's a lot of -- it's very hard to understand -- it's difficult, and I don't expect you to understand it just because I'm telling you. But if you're a woman, and you work in the fields, a lot of times you have to "perform special favors" for the bosses -- not for the big boss, but for the, what we call the contractor, or the "straw bosses" and all of that, you know. And it's really ugly sometimes. And if you don't have a contract and put it down in writing that this is not going to happen, that's when we take care of it. TELLES: I mean, I think something's not clear is, many times in the past, women, in order to keep their jobs, had to have, basically, you know, do sexual favors for the boss. QUESTION: Favors? To extend favors to the boss to get the job? TELLES: Yeah. TEJADA-FLORES:[overlapping] Yeah, to keep the job. QUESTION: To keep the job. TELLES: You know, the basic crux of this, whether it's sexual discrimination or any other thing is that f armworkers have been almost powerless. The only way they could assert their rights is to organize. And this organization and the person who led it was the only successful attempt ever to put those issues back on the table, and to get justice for them. QUESTION: Have men ever had to use the sexual harassment clause? CHAVEZ: I don't know. [nervous laughter] QUESTION: Uh-huh. [no] CHAVEZ: I don't think so. I don't know, really. But it's mostly with women. The reason I know it's mostly with women is because everywhere where we have a presence, we have what we call a service center. That's a place that provides services even to non-union members. That's a way of organizing, also. You dop't have to belong to a union to come to that place to get services. They come in with their complaints, and then we take them up and take them to a proper channels, and get things done about it, you know? And it really happens. Where there's no contract, it happens, like, daily. It's a common thing. And we deal with it through our offices. ROBINSON: We have time for two more questions. QUESTION: Richard, I wonder how you would characterize what some have called "oppressive strategies" and policies by Governor Wilson, regarding what are called "undocumented workers" at the border? How do you feel about that on-going controversy? CHAVEZ: Just today, as I was driving -- yesterday -- I was driving from Fresno to where I live. We've got this program that deals something like that. And there were stories there concerning what you mentioned. There were stories there, horror stories, that's kind of hard to believe, you know. This lady that was on a talk show, like a talk show -- people were calling in to the radio station -- and they were saying that they were doing these dragnets now, and they were telling their stories of how they're going up how the Immigration Department goes and does its dragnets go to the houses and knock down the doors of the cabins in the middle of the night and things that are happening right now. They're saying that they can't understand when they're law- abiding illegals [laughs] -- I guess, what you would call the immigrant -- all they do is they want to work. They come here to work. Sometimes it's below zero, like in Washington State -- this call was from Washington State -- "It's below zero and we have to go up there and do the work, and they come and take us and all we do is want to work." Now they say, "We can understand if we were breaking the law, if we were here doing all kinds of crimes, and all that. We could see getting somebody and throwing them back." But when people are just trying to survive and to work -- and the other thing is they say, "I wonder if they ever stop to think if they say they would get us all together and throw us back to where we belong, who would do that work?" He said, "I am sure that nobody would go out and do that work for what is it, the minimum wage, $4.75 an hour right now "nobody would go and take those jobs in the conditions they have to work. Who is going to do that work?" Well, this is what they were saying. But it's a very touchy thing, you know. We believe -- I believe -- that people have a right to exist, that people have a right to life, and we have a huge program going on about citizenship. We are setting up classes, we are getting people to become citizens. In just this last election, there were thousands and thousands of people that had been here for years, that became citizens and voted, and we could see the difference. And so that's what we're saying. You're going to be in this country, you want to stay here, just become a citizen, do whatever has to be done to become part of this country so you can be here legally, nobody's going to bother you. And that's what we believe in. ROBINSON: One more question. QUESTION: Richard, you know I asked if -- ever since the 80's, it seems like the working man has lost in a lot of fields, pulled back -- what right now are the big issues for you? What kind of things are you fighting for at this point? CHAVEZ: As far as the union is concerned, as far as organizing? QUESTION: Yeah, or anything else affecting the working man that you think is a really crucial problem now. CHAVEZ: Well, we have the big Strawberry Campaign, that's what we're focussing on right now. Because the conditions there, like any other place is deplorable, they are really bad conditions. Even though we have a law that says that a worker must make the minimum wage -- the way they work it out -- people don't make the minimum wage, they work below minimum wage. And these are people that aren't going to say anything because they need a job and they're afraid if they complain, they're going to be f ired. They're going to call the Immigration Department. And so it's like semi-slavery, I would say. That's what we're focussing on right now. We're focussing on the strawberries, because it's a huge, huge industry. There's about 60,000 workers that desperately need to be organized, that desperately need better conditions. That's what we're focussing on. And this includes children, too. You know how a lot of people say there's no more children working the fields? That's not true. You go to the strawberry f ields and see a lot of children, a lot of children which should be in school that are still working out there, picking strawberries. QUESTION: Have you ever been threatened? CHAVEZ: Have I ever been threatened? QUESTION: Yeah, for organizing or anything like that? Have your lives or anything you've ever done been threatened? QUESTION: Oh, yes, many times, yes, yes. I've been shot at many times. I was lucky I wasn't hit, but yes, yes. It was very, very hard doing it at the very beginning. We don't see too much of that anymore. We still encounter violence once in a while, but it's not as bad as it was before -- you know, we had five martyrs and they all died in the line of duty, picketing or doing something like that. And so, yes, we were threatened many, many times. ROBINSON:"The Fight in the Fields" airs on PBS on April 16th. Rick and Ray and Mr. Chávez will be out in the lobby if you have any further questions, and we thank you very much for coming.