This is part 1 in a series looking at the history of the Texas Farm Workers Union. Check out the other installments in the series here.
Most histories of the United Farm Workers’ founding will mention, of course, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. Occasionally you’ll see Gilberto Padilla’s name. Or sometimes you’ll just see “César Chávez and others.”
But if you look long enough, you might start catching glimpses of the man some have called “the César Chávez of Texas.”
His name was Antonio Orendain.
Known for his handlebar mustache and wide-brimmed black hat – a foil, the story goes, to the white hats worn by the Texas Rangers – Orendain was for years Chávez’s man in Texas, overseeing operations of the UFW’s branch in the Rio Grande Valley.
He garnered the position following years of dedication to the movement, notably as a founding member of the National Farm Workers Association – the union Chávez, Huerta, Orendain, Padilla, “and others” started that later became the UFW after merging with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in 1966.
Orendain served as secretary-treasurer for the union, his signature even appearing right next to Chávez’s on membership cards.
But at some point a fracture formed, and Orendain split from Chávez and the UFW, focusing instead on organizing farm workers in Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley.
In 1975, Orendain and those who followed him from the UFW formed a new group: the Texas Farm Workers Union.
It’s a split that had long been simmering, but perhaps the main turning point can be traced to a strike in Texas’ Starr County.
The seeds of the split
To date, the most prominent academic overview of the Texas Farm Workers Union history is a master’s thesis from Timothy Bowman, a professor of history at West Texas A&M University – that is, until Bowman completes a forthcoming book he’s writing about the union.
Bowman notes the fissures between Orendain and Chávez had always been apparent.
“I think there were always personality differences and ego clashes that could potentially develop between the two,” Bowman said.
For one, Orendain had entered the U.S. and settled in California as an undocumented immigrant when he was younger. This later informed part of his strategy in the Texas union, which sought to organize workers on both sides of the border, regardless of status.
On the other hand, some of the UFW’s policies against undocumented workers have earned renewed focus, and sometimes criticism, when assessing the legacy of Chávez.
Chávez also cultivated a very spiritual persona, embracing Catholic imagery and famously engaging in fasts as part of his strategy of nonviolence. Orendain, on the other hand, was a secularist who often voiced his opposition to Chávez’s fasts – even at one point showing his back to the UFW leader as a form of protest.
“He very much has this kind of revolutionary sort of aesthetic about him that I think resonated with a lot of people in the Valley who were really poor,” Bowman said.
But perhaps the main sticking point centered around the lack of progress Orendain felt the NFWA/UFW had made in organizing workers in Texas.
In 1966, the NFWA/UFW had become embroiled in a wildcat strike among melon harvesters in Starr County. Bowman says Chávez didn’t really want to be part of the struggle but was compelled to due to the role his Texas grape boycott director, Eugene Nelson, had taken in organizing the strike.
Nelson had initially formed his own independent union, the Independent Workers Association, in May of 1966 in anticipation of the looming strike. His group soon voted to affiliate with Chávez’s union, becoming NFWA Local No. 2.
But Nelson and the new local faced stiff opposition from the Valley’s growers, and the outlook seemed bleak.
“Chávez starts to worry that if this movement in the Valley or this sort of branch of the farmworkers movement doesn’t go well, that that then will lead to problems for him out in California and in the mainstream portion of the movement,” Bowman said.
So in September of 1966, Chávez sent Antonio Orendain to the Rio Grande Valley to take charge of the strike.
Orendain quickly made a name for himself in Texas. He staged sit-ins on the international bridge in Roma, organized boycotts, and even found himself and the farm workers accused of sabotage in an incident that led to tense encounters with the Texas Rangers.
It was amid this struggle that Orendain grew to feel at home among the Texas farm workers.
“Over the process of being in Starr County and in the Rio Grande Valley, he developed this real compassion for the people, I think,” Bowman said. “It’s almost like it becomes his own separate kind of dedicated area where he feels this sort of calling or a sense of purpose to do something.”
After the strike, Chávez recalled Orendain back to California, but Orendain soon felt the pull of organizing in Texas. He opted to move his family to the Rio Grande Valley and continued to organize workers there under the UFW banner.
He oversaw the construction of an office in San Juan that would become the headquarters for the farmworkers movement in Texas – a building they named El Cuhamil. Orendain also started a popular cross-border radio show called “La Voz del Campesino,” which became an invaluable tool for organizing workers in the Valley.
Bowman says Orendain saw his efforts in Texas as laying the foundation for Chávez to bring the movement there. But while Chávez had said the UFW would eventually turn its focus to Texas, Orendain began growing impatient.
By the 1970s, the lettuce strike in California held the focus of the UFW. But over in Texas, farmworkers became embroiled in a new melon strike in the spring of 1975.
It was during this strike that a breaking point came, when a grower opened fire on picketing farmworkers near Hidalgo, injuring close to a dozen.
Bowman says the news of the shooting infuriated Chávez.
“He calls Orendain up and says ‘How can you do this? This is terrible for us. I can’t have this in the union,’” Bowman said. “And then by August of that year, Orendain splits off and forms the Texas Farm Workers Union, and then the rift becomes official.”
A history pushed to the side?
At first glance, with his own stern gaze and prominent handlebar mustache – slicked into a sharp curl – Joseph Orendain clearly evokes his father.
But the assistant district attorney for Hidalgo County, and youngest son of Antonio Orendain, tells me that it isn’t just his look that gives away his family lineage.
“I was always prosecuting cases, whatever kind of case it was. And I’ve gotten good verdicts – fair,” he said. “And so I would always go into the jury room and talk to the jurors and ask them, ‘hey, what did I do wrong? What did I do right?’ And every now and then, I’d get somebody that would say, ‘excuse me, ¿que eres tú de Antonio Orendain?
‘I’m his son.’
And they’re like, ‘yo sabia, porque hablas igual que él.’
And I always took that as a really good compliment, that I spoke just like my dad.”
Joseph Orendain remembers his family’s early days in California. When he speaks, his direct attorney’s mannerism gives way to a grinning recollection – memories of his 6-year-old self surely playing before his eyes as he talks of days spent in daycare at the UFW’s Filipino Hall while his parents were walking the picket line with César, or of hanging out with Chávez’s kids in Delano.
“The union kids would hang out with each other,” he recalls.
But for Joseph Orendain, that history remains restricted to memories of his own to retell. That’s because, he says, his father’s early contributions to the UFW have been largely written out of the union’s officially sanctioned narrative.
“Anything authorized by the UFW, you could not mention my dad,” he said.
I did reach out to the UFW in the hopes of interviewing someone about Orendain’s early days in the union’s founding, as well as how that history is assessed within the union today, but was unable to find anyone willing to speak on the record about it.
Currently, the only mention of Orendain on the official UFW website appears to be one reference in a PDF for an education program to celebrate César Chávez Day from 2007. He does not appear in the site’s history section.
Joseph says his father was even slated to be portrayed in a 2014 César Chávez biopic, but the part was eventually cut. Still, if you search, you can find recordings of actor Gino Montesinos’ audition for the role on YouTube. The footage provides a glimpse into the way Orendain was to be portrayed as a foil to Chávez’s famous principles of nonviolence.
In the completed film, that role is instead fulfilled in brief scenes by a character named Eli, who nonetheless dons a black, wide-brimmed hat and mustache that seems likely inspired by Orendain when coupled with the fact that the character reads the lines Montesinos read in his audition.
“If you watch that movie, you’ll see, and they’re accusing him of being the radical, violent one,” Joseph said.
Joseph says a popular dichotomy between Chávez and his father – of an image of nonviolent vs. violent, of Chávez’s pious nature vs. his father’s rugged machismo – doesn’t tell the full story. He cites incidents of violence in the movement in California and the documented purges of UFW leadership and members in the years following the union’s move from Delano to La Paz, as chronicled in Miriam Pawel’s “The Union of Their Dreams,” as examples of issues within Chávez’s own movement.
But mainly for Joseph, and for others I spoke to who were part of the TFWU in its heyday, the issue isn’t so much that the UFW is celebrated; most highlighted Chávez as truly blazing a trail when it came to organizing farmworkers and standing up for Latino civil rights.
Their concern is that examples like Antonio Orendain and the TFWU have been relegated to the side, they feel, lest it blemish Chávez’s legacy.
For them, it’s about sharing the credit – if not on a national scale, then at least here in Texas.
“I mean, obviously César is the beginning and deserves all the accolades he gets, right?,” Joseph said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. And in fact, that’s who encouraged my dad and contributed to helping him do it over here in Texas, and continue doing it.
“We’ve never really had anything against the UFW other than them leaving my dad out of the history books … he was and deserved acknowledgement for what he did for the United Farm Workers in Texas and for what he did as the Texas Farm Workers Union here in Texas.”
Traces of the TFWU
While there is no clear evidence that the UFW actually sought to scrub mention of Orendain from its history, the curious may discover that, beyond Bowman’s thesis, finding information about Orendain and the Texas Farm Workers Union does require a bit more digging – at least when compared to the trove of resources, markers, murals and memorabilia for César Chávez and the United Farm Workers.
A search for “Orendain” in the Texas Historical Commission Historic Sites Atlas garners no results. Likewise, there is no mention of the “Man in the Black Hat” for the marker that does exist on the Starr County Strike, despite Orendain’s role in it.
And it’s these public fixtures that some who want to see the TFWU’s history told more widely seek.
Some I spoke to would like to see a school named after Antonio Orendain. Others hope that a formal history of the TFWU is incorporated into Texas’ public school curricula.
But, for them, it all starts with getting the story out there – and that story will next take us to a monumental moment in the TFWU’s history.
If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.