This is not to deny that there is some poverty among farmworkers, but the poor workers are a small minority, not the starving masses Chavez has depicted. It is particularly interesting to note that Chavez has not sought to unionize these poor workers, most of whom are in the South, but the well-paid $8000 to $12,000 a year workers in California instead.

The villain in the eyes of most Chavez supporters is the grower, but the growers have also been victims of Chavez's misrepresentations. On the Johnny Carson show, Chavez supporter Gloria Steinem told a national audience, "This (California's San Joaquin Valley) is the heart of the agri-business, which is an enormous industry. This is not just farmers or anything. This is land owned by the railroads and rich banks and corporations, land that is the size of many European countries."

But the truth is that rich corporations and conglomerates are only a very small part of the agricultural industry. The Department of Agriculture reported in 1970 that corporations owned less than 1 per cent of all farms and 7 per cent of all farm acreage, and many of these were family or single-person corporations.

A look at the facts also reveals that the growers certainly haven't been keeping anything from the workers. The return on agricultural investments in recent years has been a meager 2 to 3 per cent. In some years, many small growers have earned less than half the annual pay of their farmworkers.

Chavez's most vicious misrepresentation, however, has been his claim of worker support. In 1965, Chavez called his first strike in Delano, California. Delano is the center of the nation's table grape industry, and in the surrounding fields close to 7000 workers make a living. They work 11 months a year growing, pruning and harvesting grapes.

Ninety per cent of these workers owned or rented their own homes and most drove their own cars. They earned from $7000 to $9000 a year.

Press releases from UFW headquarters in Delano announced that the strike was the largest in agricultural history, with 5000 workers walking off the job. But later, under oath, the director of the California Department of Employment, Albert Tieburg, reported that only 55 workers had gone on strike.

But Chavez maintained the appearance of a strike by gathering outside volunteers to man the picket lines. Most of these were college students belonging to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society. The farmworkers, however, continued working.

"In the picket lines there is none of us workers, none of us people," Dolores Mendoza, Delano grape picker, told nationally syndicated columnist Ralph DeToledano. "They got the hippies from San Francisco, they got people from Mexico who never worked here before, but not us."

Another grape picker, Shirley Fetalvero, testified before a California Senate fact-finding committee. "The union's massive propaganda machine has led the public to believe that there are thousands of desperate, ragged, starving farmworkers on strike here. This is not true. The picket lines are being manned by outside organizations such as the SDS. We resent the invention of an ignorant, downtrodden class of farmworkers where none exists."

The truth is that Chavez's strike was a complete hoax. There was no strike and there was no more than a handful of workers in his United Farmworkers Union.

Some Chavez supporters have attempted to explain the strike's failure by saying the workers feared the growers would replace them with migrants. But both California and Arizona, where Chavez has called his strikes, have laws granting the workers unionizing privileges. As soon as the workers strike the state moves in to arbitrate negotiations and the growers must recognize the union. The California Conciliation Service offered to do just this when Chavez first called his strikes, but Chavez declined the offer because the agency would require substantiation of his support among workers.

There is other evidence that the workers do not support Chavez. In the spring of 1970, 8000 Coachella Valley farmworkers paid for a full-page signed ad in the Riverside paper asking growers not to sign with the UFW.

In Washington, 1200 farmworkers have petitioned the governor and the legislature for protection that would keep Chavez out of the state.

The 2000-member Agricultural Workers for Democratic Action in Delano has petitioned the Teamsters Union for a pledge that they would not return farmworkers to the jurisdiction of the UFW.