Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 11
Оглавление’27 to ’39
The tenant sat in his doorway, and the driver thundered his engine and started off, tracks falling and curving, harrows combing, and the phalli of the seeder slipping into the ground. Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, footbeaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so that it fell sideways, crushed like a bug. And the driver was goggled and a rubber mask covered his nose and mouth. The tractor cut a straight line, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder. The tenant man stared after it, his rifle in his hand. His wife was beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.
—The destruction of the Joads’ house, John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath
I remember the tractor heading for the corral. I shudder now to think of it. It was there that Richard and I had fun together riding the horses and the young calves bareback . . . Now the tractor was at the corral, and the old sturdy fence posts gave way as easily as stalks of corn. It was a monstrous thing. Richard and I were watching on higher ground. We kept cussing the driver, but he didn’t hear us, our words were lost in the sound of tearing timbers and growling motor. We didn’t blame the grower, we blamed the poor tractor driver. We just thought he was mean. I wanted to go stop him but I couldn’t. I felt helpless.
—Cesar Chavez remembering the destruction of the family
homestead in Arizona, Jacques Levy, Cesar Chavez,
Autobiography of La Causa
Cesar Chavez was twelve years old in 1939 when he and his brother Richard watched the tractor destroy their childhood. It was the same year The Grapes of Wrath was published; a year later, moviegoers in theaters across America watched as a tractor smashed the Joad homestead on celluloid, and Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda) told enthralled audiences that wherever people were fighting against injustice that is where you would find him. By that time the Chavez family was on the migrant trail, sleeping in a leaky tent in Oxnard, trying to squeeze a living out of the California fields. Cesar and his younger brother, Richard, got jobs sweeping out an Oxnard movie theater every day after school. They earned a nickel each, which they gave to their mother, and a free movie pass. The young migrants soon became movie fans: Cesar told his main biographer, Jacques Levy, that he went to the movies so often that he saw almost every Lone Ranger serial.1 But he never said anything about seeing the popular movie version of his own family’s tragedy, even as he told Levy about an incident in his life that seemed to come right off the screen. Maybe he missed the movie. What he didn’t miss, what he knew in his soul, was the shocking difference between his Arizona homestead and the California fields: a family surrounded by a community of friends and relatives, working on their own plot of land; that same family uprooted, traveling among hostile strangers, working on large corporate-owned farms for other people’s profits.
The Chavez family’s doomed corral was part of their hundred-acre ranch outside Yuma, in Quechan Indian country. It had been homesteaded by the boys’ grandfather Cesario, a muleskinner from Chihuahua. Cesario laid claim to the land thirty years before the family lost it, and he was lucky not to live long enough to witness the disaster. Cesario’s son, Librado, had been unable to pay all the taxes on the farm. An Anglo absentee landowner who held title to the adjoining property had paid the taxes and wrenched the family homestead away from the Chavez family.
Losing his father’s land was just the latest in Librado’s long series of losses. When the Depression first hit, another Anglo, a lawyer, had swindled him out of the title to his own forty-acre ranch. As the bad times got worse, Librado lost the grocery store, pool hall, and garage that he had bought in the prosperous twenties. Broke, he moved the family back to his father’s original homestead, where he tried to make a go of it growing corn, squash, chilies, and watermelon. But the Gila River, which irrigated the farm, was unreliable. Twenty years of overgrazing had destroyed the native grasses along its banks. Often it was dry, but in wet years it flooded.2 Librado’s first harvests were hampered by drought. Then, in the midst of his troubles, the rampaging river broke through the irrigation ditches his father had built. Librado couldn’t sell the crops he managed to salvage. By the time the boys saw the tractor crush the corral, the family had spent one last year on the homestead after a wasted season working in the California fields in hopes of raising money to pay the taxes. Now they would have to go back to California.
Until the family hit the road, Librado Chavez’s problems had barely registered on his oldest son, Cesar. It had been mostly good times in the North Gila Valley: playing in the grocery store that had doubled as the family’s first home; learning about horses from his father and charity from his mother; catching gophers, feeding them to the cats, and selling their tails for a penny a piece to the local irrigation district; playing pool with Richard on the table that sometimes doubled as their bed; gathering chicken eggs and bartering them for bread or flour with neighbors and relatives; listening to the old people’s stories at summer barbecues at night; playfully teasing his nearly blind grandmother, who was almost one hundred and who taught him prayers in Latin and instructed him in the lives of the saints.
For the young Cesar Chavez, the California fields were a disaster. He saw his father, a master horseman, tricked and humiliated. He went hungry for the first time and joined the family to search for wild mustard greens to have something to eat. Alongside his father, he walked out of the fields in informal strikes, losing every time. His world of play, interrupted only by chores on the family farm, was replaced by a world of unrelieved work on other people’s land. “Unlike the ranch, the work was drudgery,” he told Levy. It was hard, unbearably hard. He remembered working with the short-handled hoe as a kind of crucifixion. He had lost the corral, the horses, the dogs and cats; the pool table had been left behind. He had lost the community of the North Gila Valley, peopled by relatives, friends, other Mexicans. Now home, or what passed for it, was the family’s 1927 Studebaker. He slept in a series of tents, shacks, hovels. He traveled among strangers in unknown places, victim of a new set of rules. When he went to the store, he was cheated. He was beaten by older boys. When he left his toys outside, they were stolen.
This is a familiar story: a family hits the road to California when the old homestead is lost to unpaid taxes, lawyers, and the Depression. But it is more familiar as an Okie story, and the Chavez family—Librado, his wife, Juana, the children, Rita, Cesar, Richard, Vicky, and Lenny—were clearly not Okies. They called themselves Mexicans; sociologists today probably would classify them as Mexican Americans. Cesar and his siblings had all been born in Arizona. Librado had been brought across the border when he was only two; Juana, when she was six months old. Cesario had voted in Texas elections before the turn of the century and had carved the homestead out of the Colorado desert three years before Arizona became a state. But despite the three generations in the United States, the family did not “hyphenate” itself. People didn’t start doing that until after World War II. Speaking Spanish, living in close contact with new immigrants who had firsthand news from home, settling in a territory they knew had been taken from Mexico in a war of conquest, they remained Mexicans and were proud of it.
Only in school did Cesar feel that there was anything suspect about being Mexican; teachers in the North Gila Valley punished him for speaking Spanish, but what had been occasional in the valley was normal in California.* There, Cesar first saw a sign stating “White Trade Only.” There, he was denied service at a restaurant, was stopped by the migra, and for the first time felt somehow diminished because his skin was dark and he was Mexican.
The California fields robbed the young Cesar of almost everything that was good in his life except the love and comfort of his family. “I was like a wild duck with its wings clipped,” he said.3 Farmwork for wages was an affliction. It took his youth. It hurt his back. It humbled his proud father. Everything about it was wrong. He could know it was wrong because he had lived right: “Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on the land, and I knew a different life.”4
The Chavez family hit the migrant circuit in what arguably were the hardest times in California agricultural history. It wasn’t just that wages were low. What made matters worse was that the sweeping farm worker upsurge of the early 1930s had passed. As the Studebaker carried the sometimes-hungry Chavez family from job to job, the strikes that had raised both wages and spirits in the fields in 1933 were long gone, replaced by losing battles directed by disheartened union organizers who would soon leave the fields to focus their attention on cannery workers rather than farm workers.
No sophisticated economic analysis is required to understand the melancholy that dominated the California fields at the exact moment that the young Cesar Chavez picked up a short-handled hoe. Too many workers were chasing too few jobs. In cotton, where most farm workers were employed, acreage had climbed steadily, from 130,000 acres in 1924 to 670,000 in 1937. In the next two years, though, under the provisions of Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, California cotton acreage was cut nearly in half, to 340,000 acres, just as displaced people from Oklahoma, southern Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas were pouring into the state.5 Some 400,000 of these Okies came to California between 1935 and 1939, and many of them headed directly for the fields, where they competed for disappearing jobs with the 200,000 mostly Mexican farm workers who were already there. It was a competition that only the large growers won.
For those entering the fields in 1939 it would have been easy to regard the natural condition of farm workers exactly as it was depicted in the documentary art and literature of the period. In that one remarkable year, three books of photographs of farm workers and dispossessed small farmers evoked a wave of sympathy among large swaths of the American public: You Have Seen Their Faces, with photographs by Margaret Bourke and text by Erskine Caldwell; An American Exodus, with the photos of Dorothea Lange and a text written by her husband, Paul Taylor; and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans. These books were stared at, studied, worried over, looked at again and again by millions of people, most of them far from the California fields. Steinbeck’s magnificent Grapes of Wrath became an immediate best-seller that year. Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field also was published in 1939, and became popular at the same time that hundreds of witnesses in a sensational few weeks of testimony were telling the U.S. Senate Labor Committee and its chair, Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr., about the systematic, well-organized, usually brutal, and often legal repression of California farm workers.
This was more than a coincidence or an inexplicable agreement among diverse artists and journalists about what was important and how to present it. It was a campaign with an agenda. As Arthur Rothstein, the first photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and Lange’s colleague, put it: “It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them.”6 McWilliams’s book was a straightforward call for farm workers to be covered by the protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and to be granted the same rights as factory workers. Steinbeck, whose purpose and art were more complicated than the others’, nonetheless fully affirmed the overall agenda, and made it clear directly in his pamphlets and indirectly in his novel, that the migrants deserved government help because they were true American whites. La Follette, the professional politician, could be most direct. His introduction to the transcript of the hearings called for farm workers to receive the full range of federal protections and benefits.
The campaign failed to achieve its immediate aim, as concern for farm workers was pushed aside by the approaching world war, and as the white migrants who were featured in the photos and the prose moved out of the fields and into California’s expanding war and food-processing industries. But those early images of suffering, kept alive by reprints and museum revivals and by the continuing popularity of Steinbeck’s masterpiece, remained seared in the national psyche. They came to stand for the entire farm worker experience and engendered a latent nationwide sympathy for farm workers that Cesar Chavez would later use as a powerful lever with which he moved the world. He could do it so convincingly because the images of 1939 documented his own childhood tragedy and thereby enabled him, in good faith, to draw on the deposits of empathy that Steinbeck, Lange, and the others had made a generation before.
But the collective portrait created by Popular Front artists and their colleagues was incomplete: at best it related only to a particular time and place; at worst, it was an insult to farm workers’ genuine tradition and history. Workers acting on their own behalf never win in these representations. They can’t, because winning, or even fighting effectively, would muddy the moral waters. This cultural agenda was so fixed that in Steinbeck’s morality tale of an apple strike, In Dubious Battle, farm workers suffer a grand defeat, although farm workers won in the actual 1933 peach strike on which his story was based.7 In Lange’s photographs, noble migrants suffer and endure. Rarely in the photos do we see images of farm workers throwing back tear gas canisters, or angrily confronting scabs, or giving a rousing speech at a mass meeting. All of that happened on a regular basis in the early 1930s, and even amid the general defeat of the late 1930s. The farm workers’ combative tradition and their recurring power during harvest seasons and in times of labor scarcity have been trumped by the images of 1939, where, as the cultural historian William Stott put it, farm workers come to us “only in images meant to break our hearts.”*
A more complete portrait of California farm workers requires quite different images. In the early Depression, farm workers were united in a movement that had blown hot and cold since 1928 and became a mighty storm by 1933. Of the several winds that have blustered through the California fields, that was the biggest. Never before had so many farm workers gone on strike. At the height of their struggle in 1933, led by the Communist-sponsored Cannery and Agriculture Workers Union (C&A), ten thousand people were striking in the peaches, four thousand in the grapes, and fifteen thousand in the cotton—three of the most important harvests in the state at the time. Five days into the cotton strike the battle’s first chroniclers, Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr, called it an earthquake and the New York Times called it a war; the San Francisco Chronicle compared it to a volcano. No cataclysmic metaphor was too excessive. For the almost exclusively Mexican strikers the first days were a determined, joyful demonstration of their unity and strength. Trucks and cars overflowing with strikers went from field to field, the caravans getting larger as other pickers joined them. The growers and police were overwhelmed. Twenty-five strikers stopped a rancher’s car and broke all the windows before allowing the two frightened growers to escape. In the midst of a small confrontation, a woman striker took a cop’s gun and car keys. Some strikers ran into the fields to chase off scabs. Others set fires. Thousands of pounds of picked cotton went up in smoke. Everywhere the deepest mark of the workers’ power was on display: deserted fields helplessly guarded by frustrated farmers who had no one to pick their crops. When three strikers were shot and killed, their compañeros held mass funerals, which even former strikebreakers attended. In a large caravan after the murders, strikers openly displayed their guns, and the Mexican consul reported that workers had told him they “were prepared to die fighting for their rights.”8
Official government sources reported that nearly 50,000 people struck in the California fields in 1933, about 25 percent of farm workers then in the state. By way of comparison, in 1937, at the apex of strike activity among industrial workers, only 8 percent of the workforce went on strike. The big industrial strikes were more successful than the farm workers’, for industrial workers not only won higher wages but also secured union contracts in major industries, while most—but not all—of the farm worker strikes were settled without workers winning recognition of their unions. But farm workers did not strike in vain. More than 80 percent of the twenty-five strikes officially recorded in 1933, including the peach and cotton wars, won the strikers higher wages, increasing farm worker pay by about 40 percent.9
The great upheaval of the early Depression was not a unique event. Periodically throughout their history, California farm workers have fought vigorously, sometimes in small, local battles unknown to anyone but the immediate participants, and at other times in large campaigns—directed by radical or even openly revolutionary leaders—that have lasted for several seasons. The nature of these fights is rooted in the special character of agricultural production and in the real opportunities that farm workers have encountered in the fields for nearly a hundred years.
Commercial farmers of whatever size have two special vulnerabilities. Although they must work the land much of the year—preparing the soil, planting, thinning, weeding, irrigating, fertilizing—only during the harvest do they produce a commodity. If the harvest is delayed or interrupted by a strike, they cannot warehouse their fields or shut down production temporarily and then work people overtime once the strike is over. If the strike is effective, growers can lose their entire investment in a few weeks or even less, as some fruits and vegetables must be harvested within days of becoming harvest-ready. Also, because the growers’ demand for labor varies greatly during the year, there is not enough work in any particular area to sustain an extensive settlement of agricultural workers. That is why farm towns are small, and growers depend on migrants. But migratory trails are not always reliable, and occasionally enough farm workers don’t arrive in time to work the precious, short-lived harvest.
Time is often on the workers’ side, and they have not hesitated to seize it. Brief harvest walkouts, sit-downs, slow-downs, and stay-at-homes are part of farm worker tradition, weapons used much more regularly by agricultural workers than by industrial workers. When conditions have been favorable, these short strikes and quasi-strikes have been transformed into large, extensive campaigns, like the coordinated shutdowns of the early thirties, or the later battles out of which the UFW emerged.
The pattern of militant farm worker action, significant wage gains, and an ultimate failure to build a lasting union was set nearly a generation before the Depression-era upheaval. Between 1914 and 1917, in a period of overall labor scarcity, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), at times working in tandem with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led a series of walkouts in the California fields, orchards, and vineyards that pushed up wages, forced labor-camp managers to provide better food, and prompted the state of California to build an extensive series of new labor camps, which improved the lives of many migrants. A harvest-time strike in the hops in 1914 doubled piece-rate wages, and by 1917, the average wage of California farm workers had risen to nearly 90 percent of the average wage of California’s city workers.10
Although the major strikes received the most publicity, the Wobblies, or Wobs, as IWW members were called, applied much of the pressure on the growers through smaller on-the-job actions. Using tactics as old as agricultural slave labor, they skipped over fruits and vegetables ready to harvest, worked sloppily enough to ruin some of what they picked, and often labored at so slow a pace that they enraged their overseers and foremen. In 1915, the Wobblies proposed a regular slow-down of fifteen minutes per hour, during which farm workers would neglect their jobs and turn their “full attention” to the cases of two IWW leaders, Richard (Blackie) Ford and Herman Suhr, who had been framed for murder, and for whom the union was demanding pardons. The Wobs also threatened to sabotage the entire 1915 harvest if Ford and Suhr were not freed. In March 1915, E. Clemens Horst, a major California hop grower, and W. H. Carlin, one of the prosecutors who had helped frame Ford and Suhr, both testified in support of a pardon for the two hated agitators—a clear indicator of Wobbly power.
The Wobblies openly advocated acts of sabotage such as burning barns, sheds, and haystacks. Nineteen fifteen and 1916 were bad years for fires in rural California, but none of the blazes was ever pinned on a Wob. One act of sabotage easily traced to the IWW was the popular poster affixed to thousands of California fruit trees with copper nails; the poster warned people not to drive copper nails into fruit trees because it would damage them.
According to the Wobblies, their actions in the fields cost the growers about $10 million a year in lost crops between 1914 and 1917. The U.S. Justice Department, which had its own reasons for exaggerating IWW power, figured the growers’ total loss at a smaller but still significant $15 million to $20 million for the entire period.
As powerful as the movement was, it did not establish a stable union that might have consolidated farm worker victories. That was partly a result of ideological disposition. The Wobblies were anarchists, trying to build an anticapitalist culture among workers rather than a formal union, and even at the conclusion of successful strikes they refused to sign contracts, as they opposed any agreements with the boss class. But the failure to build a regular union was not only a product of IWW ideology. Just as conditions in the fields made growers vulnerable, they also made building a regular union extremely difficult—so much so that it wasn’t even an important goal of most striking workers. Moving from one part of the state to another, working for several employers in any given year, farm workers did not build up a commitment to any particular place or job. Why fight for a contract with an individual boss when you might work for that boss for only a few days, weeks, or months? Workers were willing to fight for an immediate upgrade in wages or working conditions but were less willing to engage in an extended battle for union contracts. For their part growers might grant short-term raises to get the harvest in, but they did not want their periodic vulnerability to be converted into long-term gains for the workers. So the workers fought hard and often, sometimes winning and sometimes not, but they were unable to make their victories stick.
Federal and State power abruptly ended IWW farm worker organizing in 1917, as the United States entered the Great War. The attack on the Wobblies was only partly prompted by the Wobbly opposition to the war; in California it was mostly motivated by IWW’s strength in the fields, where they had about five thousand card-carrying members and many thousands of sympathizers. Raids began at the IWW’s two most powerful farm worker locals, in Stockton and Fresno. They continued until about half the California IWW membership was in jail, with more than a hundred doing hard time in San Quentin.11
Among contemporary farm workers the IWW is forgotten, but what the Wobblies called sabotage—quick harvest strikes, slow-downs, purposely damaging the crop while picking it, burning barns and sheds—reoccurs regularly whenever farm workers do battle. The tactics are linked to the character of agricultural production, and each generation of farm workers is fully capable of figuring out where its leverage lies. Nevertheless, the tactics do have a lineage, and among militant Mexican workers they have long been associated with the name Ricardo Flores Magón.
Flores Magón was the leader of the PLM, a sort of half-sister to the IWW in California. His interest was not primarily California farm workers. Flores Magón was an early opponent of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, and published a weekly newspaper, Regeneración, for which he wrote political and social commentary. He and a small band of comrades fled Mexico in 1904. They resumed publishing their newspaper in the United States and smuggled it back into Mexico, often hidden between the pages of Sears, Roebuck catalogues. As the crisis in Mexico intensified, Regeneración became the main tribunal of the Mexican Revolution, distributed clandestinely throughout the country, and, famously, read out loud by campfire light to the troops of Emilaiano Zapata.
Flores Magón, who is celebrated in Mexican secondary school textbooks as a “precursor” of the revolution, remained in exile in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life. Although Ricardo Flores Magón, his brother Enrique, and a substantial number of displaced Mexican revolutionaries focused primarily on political developments in Mexico, they also set up a series of PLM clubs in the Southwest and California. Those clubs attracted Mexican migrant workers, some of whom began to call themselves Magonistas. The clubs were linked through Regeneración and several other local, less regular PLM newspapers. Club leaders read the newspapers out loud to assembled groups of workers, who then discussed the situation in Mexico and their own troubles in the United States.
The hub of PLM power was Los Angeles, which was still an agricultural town in 1907 when the Flores Magón brothers settled there, and already was the center of the Mexican community in the United States. The PLM’s LA clubhouse became a center of multilingual, multiethnic activity where socialists and Wobblies famous and obscure mixed with Magonistas. Regeneración, its back page printed in English, built up an LA circulation of 10,000, making it both the first bilingual paper in California and the largest Spanish-language newspaper in town. The PLM club, which was also considered a Spanish-speaking IWW local, had 400 active members, most of whom were farm workers.12
Elsewhere in California, Spanish-speaking IWW locals were filled with people who were also Magonistas. San Diego had a joint IWW-PLM local, and the highly active Fresno Wobbly local had a large number of Mexican workers. Given the loose attitude of the two anarchist groups toward questions of formal membership, among the rank-and-file the primary differences between Wobblies and Magonistas were language and nationality rather than ideology or practice.13
The PLM clubs and IWW locals were not just debating societies and places to hang out. In San Diego in 1910, a joint IWW-PLM local organized a strike at the local gas and electric company that won equal pay for equal work. That same year a fight for free speech that ultimately did so much to popularize the IWW among California farm workers, began in Fresno in the midst of a battle to organize Mexican workers who were being contracted to build a dam on the outskirts of town. In hop fields, vineyards, sugar refineries, and citrus orchards, many farm worker walkouts were joint Wobbly-Magonista efforts.
The PLM and the IWW went down together. In 1918, Ricardo Flores Magón, along with other PLM and IWW leaders, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 1918 for “obstructing the war effort.” At Leavenworth Penitentiary, in Kansas, he had a cell next to Ralph Chaplin, a prominent Wobbly poet, cartoonist, and songwriter. They did their time translating the poetry of a slain Magonista soldier, Práxedis Guerrero. For Ricardo, it was the last time of his life. The new Mexican government offered its help, but he declined because he deplored the government’s conduct following the revolution. He died in jail, in 1922.14
The IWW and PLM, along with most other anarchist groups, did not survive as effective organizations after World War I. The Bolshevik victory in Russia seemed to confirm that Communist parties, not anarchist ones, were the best vehicle for fighting capitalism. But Magonismo never totally disappeared from the California fields. Remaining underground in unfavorable times such as 1939, Magonismo has reappeared whenever farm workers have had an opportunity to fight. It is there when they slow down on the job, sabotage the crops, or strike at the beginning of a harvest. Magonistas played a part in Imperial Valley melon and lettuce strikes in the late 1920s. They worked together with other militants when California farm workers shook the state in the early 1930s. A generation later a few Magonistas would play a small role as the movement that produced the UFW was getting under way. And in 1979, the ghost of Ricardo Flores Magón would make a cameo appearance at one of the most dramatic moments in UFW history.
For the young Cesar Chavez, in 1939, that was not only an unknown future, it was an unknown past. The Chavez family was unconnected to any political tendency. More than that, families like the Chavezes were, in a sense, at an angle to history. Displaced Mexican homesteaders were only a tiny part of the great migration made famous by Steinbeck. In fact, across the 1930s, Mexicans who hit the road with all their worldly possessions were overwhelmingly headed not west, but south, to Mexico, driven by a combination of necessity, nativist attacks, and Mexican government inducements. Unacquainted with established farm worker traditions and communal networks in California, the Chavez family might easily have regarded isolation and loss as the steady state of people who work for wages in the fields.
More typical of the Mexican experience in California is the story of one of the other founders of the UFW, Gilbert Padilla.* Padilla was born the same year as Chavez, 1927, but unlike the latter he was “born into the migrant stream,” in the Hamburg labor camp in Los Banos, Merced County, located in central California, where his family was picking cotton. Gilbert’s parents, his paternal grandmother, and three uncles had come to the United States from Mexico in 1917, traveling on a troop train carrying revolutionary soldiers to Juárez. After crossing the border at El Paso, the Padilla clan went to Needles, California, worked on the railroad, and lived in railroad camps. In 1920 the family moved to Azusa, a town in East Los Angeles County. Gilbert’s father built a house, and most of the family worked in the nearby fields and orchards. They started migrating north to Los Banos in the Central Valley in 1926, leaving in June and returning in December or January.15
Padilla cannot recall when he first started working in the fields, as it was always so. Often he worked with his dad and his eight brothers and sisters on the same crew. Padilla remembers his first miniature cotton sack tied around his waist. It wasn’t cute; he hated it. Unlike Chavez, he didn’t associate the work with the loss of home or childhood. Working in the California fields was his childhood. Later that would seem an injustice, but at the time it was just hard work.
Padilla says he learned about work from his dad and about justice from his mom. Juana Cabrera Padilla had little children to care for and food to prepare, and Gilbert listened to her stories at home in the kitchen. She and the rest of the Padillas had paid two centavos each to cross the border, where U.S. agents had sprayed her and the others with DDT, a synthetic pesticide. She called it the most degrading moment of her life. She talked about how hard life had been back in Mexico and about the early hopes for the revolution. She had strong opinions and delivered a running commentary on contemporary politics: on Herbert Hoover (she hated him), FDR (she liked him), and war (it was the most hateful of all). She had learned English listening to the radio but refused to speak it. She was the first person Gilbert Padilla heard talk about equality.
The Padillas had been part of the migration of more than a million Mexicans who came to the United States between the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the beginning of the Depression in 1930. Pushed out by economic disaster in the Mexican countryside and the violence of the revolution and attracted by the growing demand for labor and the relatively high wages in the U.S., most of the migrants settled in the Southwest and California. Many worked in the fields, and as early as 1920 California farm journals were running stories about the “Mexican Harvest.” In the decade that followed, the Mexican population of California more than doubled, and by 1930 Mexicans were the vast majority, perhaps 80 percent, of the state’s 200,000 farm workers. When the Depression hit, most of them had been doing farmwork for a good many years and were familiar with the California scene. Like the Padillas, they traveled a regular migratory route; they knew the crops, the contractors, the small towns of the Central Valley, the labor camps, the limits and opportunities of any potential fight.16
This community of people, connected to one another through networks of extended families and self-help organizations called mutualistas, was badly battered by the Depression. Blamed for the unemployment of white “American” workers, among the first to be fired as the economy spiraled downward, kicked off public and private welfare rolls, shoved back to Mexico in a series of highly publicized Border Patrol raids, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans left the U.S. and returned to Mexico.17 It was so bad that by 1933, one-third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles, including many U.S.-born children, had gone.18
The Padillas were among those who stayed and fought, not as militants but as rank-and-file participants in the great upheaval in the fields in the early 1930s. Gilbert Padilla’s father, Longino, and his oldest brother, Cesario, walked out of the cotton fields along with thousands of others in 1933. They returned home to Los Banos after walking the picket line for several days. They talked excitedly about the collective dashes into the fields to confront the scabs and heard reports about the strikers who were shot down in response. Family friends told them of the enormous funeral marches and of the encampments that became living quarters for the embattled strikers. They got news of the 3,000-strong Corcoran camp, with tents in long rows along dusty paths named for Mexican towns and heroes of the revolution. They learned how the authorities tried to starve the workers into submission and then bribe them with food; how, at Corcoran, with everyone hungry and at least two children dead of starvation, the strike committee called a general meeting, and people debated, took a vote, and decided not to accept the food as long as it was conditioned on their return to work; how at another meeting workers shouted, “We are all leaders”; and how after all that, the strikers won higher wages but failed again to win recognition for their union.
Gilbert Padilla was only six years old during the great cotton strike of 1933, but he heard the stories as the years passed, and he absorbed the essential lesson: his father, his brother, the ordinary laborers who peopled his world, were hard workers and proud fighters. When he was a boy, it was not work in the California fields that struck him as wrong and degrading, but inequality, segregation, and discrimination. On the Hamburg ranch in Los Banos, the Mexicans lived in one camp and the whites in another, though they often picked cotton together in the same crews. School was worse. Azusa had one elementary school for Mexicans and two for whites. At Lee Intermediate School, Mexicans stayed on one side of the school and whites on the other. They had separate recesses, and at lunchtime whites ate in the cafeteria while Mexicans ate outside. That and the segregated movie theaters in town had a deep impact on Gilbert. But his most lacerating memory was of the Azusa public swimming pool. The white kids could swim all week; the Mexicans and African Americans, only on Fridays. Friday nights the water was drained and the pool was filled again so that the whites wouldn’t have to swim in the supposedly contaminated water.
Work in the California fields didn’t feel wrong until Padilla came back from the U.S. Army, in 1947. He had been a squad leader in basic training and had been sent to Japan, where he worked as a crane operator. The Army “opened my eyes,” he says. He became a noncommissioned officer. He made friends with whites. He operated complicated equipment. When he and two of his brothers were discharged and returned to chop cotton at the Hamburg ranch, they were making less than the braceros. Once when he and his brothers stopped at the end of a row to have a cigarette, the foreman came by and bawled them out. The three brothers walked out of the field together, and then walked six miles home.
“My brother had been a prisoner of war, another brother was wounded and a hero, and David had just come back from the Philippines. There were six of us in the Army, and to come back and be treated that way! So we left. We weren’t going to chop cotton anymore.”
Gilbert went to work for a dry cleaner, but he didn’t like it much. Then it was back to the fields. He listened to the old-timers talk about earlier strikes. He saw some melon workers sit down on the job until they got the wages they wanted. He remembered his mother’s stories. He got interested in politics. When more braceros came during the Korean War and drove wages down further, he went back to the job at the dry cleaner, but he still didn’t like it. He joined an old mutualista and tried to revive its burial insurance plan. He was looking for a fight, looking to learn how to do it, listening to everybody with a plan. In 1955 he met Cesar Chavez. Chavez had a plan.
* Victor Villaseñor, born in 1940 in Carlsbad, California, about fifty miles from the Mexican border, writes in Rain of Gold (New York: Delta, 1991) that not until he first went to school did he learn that he didn’t live in Mexico.
* They are allowed but a single emotional register. Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother,’ holding a swaddled babe in her lap and framed by two distracted young children, leans forward with a hand to her face, looking past the photographer with an inexplicable combination of worry and grace. “She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too,” Lange’s boss at the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker, said. The actual woman, Florence Thompson, was a full-blooded Cherokee, but she comes into history as an Okie, an honorary white. Lange took seven shots of Thompson. The ones that showed the two young children smiling for the camera and her teenage daughter with a dreamy, flirtatious look were never published until after Lange died. See Levine, “Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s” in Fleischhauer and Brannan, 1988, p. 16; and Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” Metro [Santa Cruz], January 19–25, 1995.
* When Padilla’s parents went to Merced to register his birth, a county clerk listed his name as Gilbert rather than Gilberto (another clerk had listed his brother Carlos’s name as Charles). His family always called him Gil or Flaco—meaning Skinny. When he went to school, people started calling him Gilbert. Monolingual Mexicans know him as Padilla. Among the UFW staff he was usually called Gilbert.
