Before Cesar Chavez, there was Ernesto Galarza to lead the seemingly endless struggle to bring economic and social justice to America's farmworkers. But even many who have followed that struggle may have forgotten Galarza, dead for 20 years now.

I recall him clearly. His shining black hair and fierce, penetrating gaze. His angry, intense words and slashing speeches against those who resisted demands for reform. His scholarly writing, novels, poetry, his teaching.

Galarza's was one of the loudest and, surely, most unusual of the voices that have been raised in behalf of the farmworker. He had a Ph.D, wrote a half-dozen books and numerous pamphlets and articles, and taught at all levels, from elementary school to university. Yet he also was an active union organizer, a key leader in laying the groundwork for the emergence in California of the farm labor movement led by Chavez.

Galarza came to California's fields in 1948, as an officer of the American Federation of Labor's National Farm Labor Union. He had grown up in California, after his family fled from the chaos of the Mexican revolution of 1910, and had worked on farms as a teenager. But Galarza had left that behind long before to head off to college on a scholarship and, eventually, to Columbia University for a doctorate in Latin American affairs.

After that, he worked 11 years for the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C.- until, characteristically, he became outraged over what he felt was the organization's acquiescence in the exploitation of Latin American workers by U.S. interests and resigned to take the AFL job.

Although primarily an intellectual, Galarza initially played an activist's role as the leader of several strikes. But he was completely thwarted by the federal government's bracero program, which enabled growers to import penniless, undemanding Mexicans to replace U.S. workers who struck or otherwise sought better treatment.

In 1950, for instance, Galarza led a strike of several thousand tomato pickers in the San Joaquin Valley who sought an increase in their poverty-level pay, only to have them replaced by some 2,000 braceros who were escorted across the picket lines by deputy sheriffs and State highway Patrolmen.

Within a few years, Galarza shifted his efforts entirely to trying to abolish the bracero program, abandoning the weapon of direct economic action for the intellectual's weapon of words.

"There was no choice," Galarza reasoned. "Without a frontal attack on the bracero program, nothing was possible. Farmworkers couldn't be organized, they couldn't have a union, they couldn't have any rights, as long as the program existed."

The battle raged for more than a dozen years, an exhausting and often frustrating and lonely battle for Galarza. He spoke out endlessly, before legislative committees and elsewhere. He issued hundreds of reports thoroughly documenting the abuses of U.S. and Mexican workers alike under the bracero program, making as many enemies as friends with his angry intractability and harsh charges against growers, politicians, government officials and others.

He spared no one, not even AFL leaders, who gave him only slight backing and frequently counseled caution and compromise."Labor fakirs back east," Galarza called them.

By 1960, his union was gone - "no money, no organizers, no support," Galarza noted candidly. Incredibly frustrated and near exhaustion, he turned to writing, teaching, scholarly research and work for civil rights organizations.

Galarza and his wife Mae, a longtime teacher in San Jose, where the couple lived most of their lives, developed a pioneering bilingual program for the city's schools that served as a national model -- one reason there's now an Ernesto Galarza Elementary School in San Jose and a statue of him, "Man on Fire," downtown.

Galarza's long fight against the bracero program was not in vain, however. The public pressure he had played a key role in generating finally led Congress to kill the program in 1964. It's no coincidence that 1964 was the year in which Chavez began his organizing drive. For Galarza was correct: The existence of the bracero program had made organizing impossible.

By the time of Galarza's death at age 78 in 1984, the Chavez-led United Farm Workers had become an effective, nationally-supported union. It's true enough that the farm labor system still relies heavily on unorganized, desperate and poverty-stricken immigrants, as in the days of the bracero program. But thanks to the UFW, many workers nevertheless have had a chance to seek - and many have won - the "decent economic conditions and social stability" that Ernesto Galarza spent so much of his life demanding for them.

Copyright © 2004 Dick Meister