There is a largely untold story about the United Farm Workers (UFW) that the union hopes people will ignore as the sexual abuse drama around Cesar Chavez continues to play out across the country. It has a historical record that is conveniently glossed over to protect the future of a labor movement hard at work trying to reinvent itself to remain relevant today.
Before the border vigilantes that lined the Arizona border with México starting in 2005 to keep migrants from crossing the border, there was another group of vigilantes made up of mostly Mexican Americans that lined the border before the Minuteman did to keep Mexicans out.
The Minuteman, launched in late 2004, collapsed in 2016 because of infighting. But the tactics the controversial vigilantes used on the border were not new. In fact, it was a Mexican American union that created the concept of using civilians to line the border and repel Mexicans trying to cross it physically and sometimes violently. The union was the United Farm Workers (UFW) co-founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Between 1962 and 1975, the UFW worked diligently to keep undocumented workers out of Arizona’s and California’s fields. Between 1975 and 1993, the UFW would call the Border Patrol to report undocumented workers working fields they were striking while accepting and encouraging undocumented workers to fill their ranks. Basically, they used the Border Patrol to remove those that didn’t pay dues to the union. It wasn’t until after the death of Cesar Chavez that the union began advocating for migrants as the result of California’s Proposition 187 in 1994.
Proposition 187 was a California measure that restricted access to education, healthcare and social services to undocumented migrants. The courts halted the measure and by 2014, the measure was repealed after the courts ruled it unconstitutional.
But before the embrace of migrants by the UFW, for a period of about a year they manned the border as unofficial border patrol agents, dubbing themselves that UFW Border Patrol.
This is the story of the United Farm Workers Border Patrol.
The UFW Border Patrol
On August 27, 1974, the UFW launched a strike in Yuma, Arizona against citrus farms. Shortly after, the union launched its first UFW Border Patrol unit in mid-September 1974. The task of the UFW Border Patrol was to keep Mexican migrants out of Arizona physically by lining the border.
It was Cesar Chavez’s cousin, Manuel Chavez, head of the union’s field operations that oversaw the unofficial border patrol. News reports of the time erroneously called Manuel Chavez the brother of Cesar Chavez because Manuel was considered by Cesar and brother Richard as their brother. It was Richard Chavez that designed the UFW’s logo.
According to Oscar Mondagron, the UFW’s spokesperson, to bolster the capabilities of the UFW Border Patrol, the union had decided to build tent cities along the border.
On October 8, 1974, Mondragon, announced that the union had started to build a tent city along the border in Arizona to keep Mexican workers out. He added that a plane would also patrol 125 miles of the border looking for people attempting to cross it.
In addition to the tents, and the airplane used to surveille the border from the air, the union deployed roving patrols using cars, pickups and station wagons. Border Patrol agents, who also patrolled the area, largely ignored the UFW patrols as just “another annoyance.”
At its zenith, the UFW Border Patrol manned tent cities along 24 miles of the U.S.-México border. It was dubbed the “wet line.” The union was using army surplus tents set at 200-yard intervals along the border, only 50 yards from the international boundary. Each of the tents was adorned with the red and black UFW flag. Each of the tents were manned by union members who were paid $10 each day to be there. Twice as much as other union activities. As many as 300 UFW Border Patrol union members patrolled the border for the makeshift border patrol. The UFW Border Patrol was shuttered in 1975, but the union’s antagonism against the undocumented workers remained, largely for the non-dues paying migrants because the union allowed undocumented among its ranks.
Although the union argued that they would attempt to “persuade” the migrants not to cross, violence was regularly reported by the migrants. By December 1974, two union members had been convicted by a jury of aggravated assault and third man remained at large in an incident where three undocumented migrants had complained about violence, adding that they were robbed as well. In another case, a UFW “patrolman” was found guilty in a misdemeanor case of battery.
For the UFW, the undocumented migrants were both the scapegoat they needed as well the members that filled their ranks. When the UFW was challenged about its anti-immigration stance by W. Michael Smith, a Yuma County Attorney about undocumented UFW members, Mondragon insisted that the union had a policy of not accepting undocumented workers but that “we don’t ask a lot of questions like the Border Patrol,” he told the Arizona Daily Star.
After the union shuttered its border patrol operation the antagonism against undocumented migrants remained well into the 1990’s with the union regularly providing lists of where the undocumented could be found to the Border Patrol. Smith told the newspaper that he considered it “ironic” that a Mexican-American-dominated union “would be using their union members to keep out” undocumented Mexicans.
