Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 15

7 Climbing the Fence

November ’60 to March ’62

The red sky in the east gave way to the full light of early morning, making visible a drama that had begun several hours earlier in total darkness. It was the second day of February, 1961, at the Dannenberg Ranch labor camp in the Imperial Valley. About a thousand men walked a picket line along a fence surrounding the camp in a strike called by the United Packinghouse Workers of America.¹ Hundreds of braceros stood on the other side of the fence, watching the picket line. It was a flimsy wire fence, ten feet high, topped off by another three feet of barbed wire, which jutted out at an angle above the picketing men. The fence was meant to keep the braceros from running away, which they were wont to do, escaping into California to become undocumented but relatively free workers. On this morning, the picketing men also wanted to keep the braceros in the camp, away from the struck lettuce fields. The signs leaning on the demonstrators’ shoulders proclaimed the popular demand of the strike: “uno veinte cinco,” which stood for $1.25 an hour. Some men carried flags, mostly the red and black standards that the official Mexican labor movement had inherited from international anarchism; but there were a few red flags, too, homemade ones, scarlet fabric fastened to tomato stakes.

The demonstrators had arrived by car in the dark, after gathering a few hours after midnight at el hoyo, the hole, where a huge shape-up took place, a few feet this side of the Mexican border. As light arrived, some braceros and picketing men began to talk across the wire, in Spanish. Although the locals were either U.S. citizens or legal residents, they also called themselves Mexicans, and many lived across the border in Mexicali.

The men had a lot to talk about. The strike was in the interest of the braceros, too, the locals argued. Instead of the ninety cents an hour offered by the growers (up from eighty cents an hour the year before) the UPWA was demanding $1.25 for all hourly workers, locals and braceros alike. The strikers even passed union cards through the fence. The men were not unknown to one another, but there were differences to hash out. In the mixed crews they had worked on together for years, the braceros always worked by the hour, while the locals often worked at a piece rate that could earn a good lettuce cutter on a good day as much as $4 an hour, $1.70 more than the average factory worker made in 1961.² The braceros knew that the growers’ unilateral decision to end piece-rate work had made the locals strike, and that while “uno veinte cinco” may have been the slogan of the strike, the restoration of piecework was the demand most important to the locals. Yes, the braceros agreed, they would benefit from the hourly raise, but when could they, too, start earning the piece rate? And did the union want them all sent back to Mexico? And what was the Mexican consul going to do to protect their interests? The strike was six weeks old on that February morning, so there were already a lot of stories to tell, a lot of rumors to consider and evaluate. Soon, most of the demonstrators stopped circling the camp. It was hard to walk around and also talk to the braceros. The picket line ceased to exist in the ordinary sense; it had been transformed into scores of conversations, carried on across the wires of a now mostly pointless fence.

Not until 8 a.m. did Sheriff Slim Lyons drive up, bringing two deputies and a machine gun. The lawmen had been unprepared for the demonstration, thinking the trouble that morning would be across town, where two hundred California ranch foremen and their friends had scheduled their first public rally of the strike. But the union had not wanted to engage in a scripted confrontation. The cops were late getting the news. When Lyons finally arrived at the camp, he tried to enter, but the demonstrators had blocked both gates. “Get more men out here; they won’t let me in the damn gate,” he shouted over his radio as he drove off. More than a hundred deputies, many of them recently deputized local foremen as well as police, Highway Patrolmen, and federal agents answered the call and swarmed to the camp. They carried shotguns, billy clubs, tear-gas canisters, and gas masks.

A man on horseback holding a huge flag emblazoned with the union demand rode back and forth in front of the cops, raising cheers from the strikers. Inside the camp, some foremen herded a couple dozen braceros onto two flatbed trucks and drove them up to the front gate as if to break through the blockade. Over bullhorns, Lyons and another sheriff ordered the demonstrators to clear the way. The demonstrators sat down and began calling out to the braceros to get off the trucks. Soon the flatbeds were nearly empty. As the demonstrators chanted, a bracero began to climb the fence. Ten feet up, he still had three feet of barbed wire to clear. The great mass of men sitting in front of the gates urged him on. He made it over the top, jumped to the ground, and joined the sit-in. Others followed. All along the fence, braceros were climbing up and over. Sitting among the striking workers, John Soria remembered that more than a hundred braceros braved the barbed wire and made it to the other side.³

Sheriff Lyons was in a difficult position. He was under instructions to avoid any incident that would alarm the Mexican government about the braceros’ safety and give it reason to pull them out of the valley. If the eight thousand bracero lettuce harvesters were ordered back to Mexico, the strike would be a sure winner, as the overwhelming majority of the three thousand locals were refusing to work. What could he do? There were too many people to arrest everybody, and besides, it didn’t look as though they would come quietly. Tear gas would cause just the kind of incident that he had to avoid, and the demonstrators knew it. When he took the bullhorn to declare the demonstration an unlawful assembly, the UPWA’s Clive Knowles shouted, “Stay put. Sit down. They’ll probably use tear gas. If they do they will lose every bracero in Imperial County.” The sheriff responded by calling out the names of the strike committee and a few of the paid union staff, asking them to come forward peacefully to be arrested for illegal assembly. Only one person stepped forward, a confused striker who happened to have the same name as one of the union organizers. The sheriff knew whom he was looking for and refused to arrest the man. Finally, some deputies bullied their way into the crowd and pulled out fourteen union leaders. Before he was arrested, John Soria turned to one of the men sitting next to him and gave him his red flag. It was just before noon; the day’s work had been lost.

The Imperial Valley lettuce “deal” (as the growers call the seasonal harvests), which starts in mid-November and ends in early March, expanded rapidly during the 1950s, and grossed nearly $20 million by 1959. But costs also rose. By 1959 only 10 percent of the Imperial Valley farmland was owned by people living in the valley, and fifty years of speculation by absentee landlords had made land rent high. “Making the desert bloom” also had required extraordinary expenditures on chronic drainage problems and periodic pest infestations. The growers with the deepest pockets, and especially those who had become grower-shippers—handling the wholesale distribution of lettuce as well as managing its production—were the winners. The smaller growers, who couldn’t survive one bad season, were the losers. As bracero labor enabled the growers to expand production, the industry became more concentrated: by 1959, eighteen grower-shippers produced half of Imperial Valley’s lettuce, and distributed 80 percent of it. And yet size was no guarantee of profits. The Imperial Valley Lettuce Association complained that since 1956 its members had had only one profitable lettuce season.⁴

In the fall of 1960, months before the Dannenberg Ranch sit-in, there had been no union plan to strike in the Imperial Valley. But when the season started, the growers, in an attempt to end their string of losses, refused to pay the piece rates. Quickly, momentum for a strike started to build among the lettuce piece-rate workers. These lechugueros (from “lechuga,” Spanish for lettuce) were the precursors of the proficient workers who later would feature so prominently in the UFW. But in 1960 they were not yet organized in crews of thirty; rather, they worked and were paid in groups of three, and these “trios” moved independently from job to job, field to field, harvest to harvest.⁵ Although they were highly skilled and invaluable to the growers when fields had to be picked quickly, they were not essential to production because the braceros did the bulk of the work. Mario Bustamante, who started working in the lettuce with his dad in 1963 and was still a lechuguero twenty years later, remembers the difference between the early and later workers:

They were all tough guys back then, or at least most of them. They were very skilled, but they fought among themselves, and there was a lot of drinking and some drug addicts. But they could cut and pack lettuce so they weren’t ordinary winos, and they didn’t live on Skid Row. They were from all over—Arizona, Texas, Mexico—true wanderers. Oh, they could get together and fight the bosses for a few days, but they didn’t have the same staying power we had later.⁶

In late November 1960, a group of lechugueros had gone to the UPWA office seeking help. They were led by Francisco Olivares, known as El Machete, a self-proclaimed Magonista who lived in Mexicali and was a veteran of many earlier farm worker strikes. Some of the men had walked off the job already. Others hadn’t gone to work in the first place after they heard about the wage cut. The rest were working but damn angry about their pay. They knew about the union because the year before, Neil Busby, a local UPWA official, had led several large marches to the El Centro Farm Placement Office protesting the hiring of braceros in place of domestic workers. They figured the union was looking for a fight.⁷

At the office they found Jerry Breshears, whose family had come to California from Arkansas in 1943. As a child, Breshears had followed the crops: tying carrots and picking cotton, peaches, and grapes. When he was fifteen he got a job in a lettuce shed, but when most lettuce packing was moved to the fields, he went to work for the union. His main job was organizing Anglo fruit tramps, but he had learned a pretty good Spanish over the years. Well versed in Clive Knowles’s strategy of encouraging strikes by locals so that the Labor Department would be pressured to remove braceros from the struck fields, he asked the men if they were willing to strike. That’s what they had come there for, they said, so Breshears and the lechugueros wrote up a leaflet asking people to come to a meeting about the pay cuts. Eight hundred lettuce cutters showed up and voted to strike. Breshears had to urge them to wait until Knowles returned from an out-of-town trip.⁸

Knowles was enthusiastic. The thunder in the distance was getting louder. A few months before, in the summer and fall of 1960, Anglo fruit tramps working in the orchards of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys had resumed their infamous practice of stopping work at harvest time to force growers to raise the picking rates. Ninety-two of their strikes had been officially certified by the state of California, but countless others were not.⁹ The pickers had come down off their ladders and walked out of the fields because they knew the AFL-CIO-financed Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was nearby, and the tramps figured that support from the AWOC would magnify the power they had always had during harvests.¹⁰

Knowles also knew that the growing militancy in the fields was matched by increased opposition to the Bracero Program in the rest of the country. The National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor, the first organizational expression of that opposition, had been founded in 1958, co-chaired by A. Philip Randolph, the social democratic vice president of the AFL-CIO, and Frank Graham, a liberal southern Democrat. Public hearings sponsored by the committee in 1959 had convincingly demonstrated the adverse effect of the Bracero Program on farm worker wages. As the deepening African American civil rights movement, in which Randolph was prominent, began to transform American politics, ending the Bracero Program was becoming a regular item on the new liberal agenda, alongside legislative support for the end of segregation, federal aid to depressed areas, increased health care for the elderly, and a higher minimum wage.

Singularly important in mobilizing public opinion in favor of farm worker organizing and against contracted labor was Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame,” which was televised on November 25, 1960, the day after Thanksgiving, soon after the delegation of workers led by Francisco Olivares had had its first conversation with Jerry Breshears. The program, a portent of the power of TV news, featured impoverished farm workers from Florida and California and concluded with the anguished confession of Eisenhower’s secretary of labor, James Mitchell, a liberal Catholic Republican:

I feel sad. I feel sad because I think that it’s a blot on my conscience as well as the conscience of all of us whom society has treated a little more favorably than these people. They have no voice in the legislative halls. They certainly have no voice in Congress, and their employers do have a voice . . . As a citizen, in or out of this office, I propose to continue to raise my voice until the country recognizes that it has an obligation to do something for farm workers.”¹¹

He was true to his word. In more than half of the 1960 farm worker strikes called when braceros were in the fields, Mitchell prevented the continued use of the contracted workers after the strikes were declared.¹²

The November victory of John F. Kennedy made the UPWA organizers even more optimistic, as the 1960 Democratic Party platform had explicitly denounced the Bracero Program. Surely, they thought, Kennedy’s new secretary of labor, AFL-CIO Special Counsel Arthur Goldberg, would be even more willing to intervene on the side of the strikers.¹³ The UPWA called all of its organizers to the Imperial Valley in preparation for a strike throughout the lettuce fields, and successfully petitioned its union rival, the AFL-CIO’s AWOC, active in the the ladder strikes, to co-sponsor it. The lechugueros elected their own ten-member strike committee and prepared for what they believed would be a defining battle.

The strike began on Friday, January 13, 1961, when eighty-three of the ninety-eight lechugueros working in grower-shipper Bruce Church’s lettuce fields walked out and set up a picket line. Company supervisors immediately sent braceros to continue the cutting and packing. UPWA and AWOC representatives brought Labor Department officials to the fields to see the braceros working behind a picket line, and sent telegrams of complaint to Washington. On Monday, James Mitchell’s Labor Department (Kennedy had not yet been inaugurated) rescinded Church’s authorization to use braceros and ordered the removal of six hundred braceros from the company’s camps. The unions sent roving picket lines to other large ranches, and over the next two weeks, they struck all eighteen major grower-shippers.¹⁴

It was now the middle of the harvest season, and the strikers were racing the clock. Would the Labor Department remove braceros from all the struck fields before the season slowed down and ended? And if it did, would the growers negotiate with the unions, something they had sworn they would never do? The sit-down in front of the Dannenberg Ranch labor camp had aimed to bring those questions to a head. It was also intended to force the hand of Kennedy’s new secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg. That hand turned out to hold a big surprise.

Instead of removing braceros from the Dannenberg camp, Goldberg set up a meeting in Los Angeles to “resolve the strike.” At that two-day affair, Under Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz was obliged to travel back and forth between the two parties, because the growers’ representatives refused to meet in the same room with the union men. Clive Knowles, the primary union leader of the strike, was not invited. At the conclusion of the meeting, Goldberg and Wirtz announced that the braceros would be prohibited from working only on fields that were being picketed. Moreover, no braceros would be sent back to Mexico; rather, they could be transferred to other growers, whose fields were free of pickets. It was a disastrous ruling for the strikers. They couldn’t picket all 40,000 acres at once, and so the struck growers could continue to use bracero labor. In addition, some growers had lured local trios back to work by unofficially restoring piece-rate wages. Knowles was furious at Goldberg. The Imperial Valley News reported, bluntly, “Growers are now said to feel that Secretary Goldberg is more sympathetic to their cause than was his predecessor James Mitchell.”¹⁵

The only hope that remained for the strikers was the Mexican government, which had ordered the removal of all braceros from the struck ranches after the Dannenberg sit-in. That order had been ignored in the Goldberg settlement, an insult to Mexican officials. They were further annoyed when a federal judge in San Diego issued an unprecedented order restraining the Labor Department from interfering in any way with the struck growers’ use of braceros.

In response, the unions planned a second, more aggressive, labor camp demonstration, playing to the oft-stated Mexican fears for the safety of braceros during strikes. This time some strikers ran through a labor camp, brandishing broomsticks and attacking the camp manager, a labor contractor, and even a few braceros. Next, the Mexican ambassador in Washington sent an official, public letter to Secretary Goldberg calling the judge’s ruling and the Labor Department’s settlement “an affront and a challenge to the sovereignty of Mexico . . . which has all the undertones of holding Mexican citizens in peonage.”¹⁶ When its complaints went unheeded, the Mexican government announced that no more braceros would be sent to California until the Imperial Valley strike was over and it was safe for them to work. In response, on March 5, Goldberg finally ordered the complete removal of all braceros from all the fields of the eighteen struck ranches.¹⁷

It was much too late. The lettuce harvest was just finishing up. Braceros and a few scab trios had cut enough lettuce to maintain sufficient levels of production. Sheriffs had raided the union office and arrested more than fifty strikers, some of whom were charged with multiple felonies. In court, one judge even ruled that all local picketing was illegal because its intent was to subvert Public Law 78, which authorized the Bracero Program. Even the Mexican government’s threat eventually fizzled. Goldberg reauthorized the use of braceros in time for the upcoming cantaloupe harvest, and plenty of workers arrived from Mexico to do the job.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, Fathers Donald McDonnell and Thomas McCullough, active among farm workers and leaders of the Spanish-language Mission Band ministry since 1950, saw their organizing careers ended because of their support for the strikers. Under pressure from the growers and their allies in the San Diego diocese, their bishop disbanded the Mission Band and transferred McCullough and McDonnell away from farm worker parishes. Back in Chicago, Ralph Helstein, the head of the UPWA, decided to pull his union out of farm worker organizing and focus on the shed workers whom the union already had under contract. Clive Knowles left the union and returned to Oxnard, where he and John Soria formed the Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers, an effort that didn’t last long. In June, George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, disbanded the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.

Knowles blamed Goldberg—and behind him, Kennedy—for the loss of the strike and the dismantling of AWOC: “Later I found out that Kennedy had said to Goldberg, ‘Get rid of that thing, get it out of our hair, we don’t have time for it.’ ” Knowles’s story, though undocumented, is easy to believe.¹⁸ In those early days of the administration, Kennedy would not have had much patience with some Imperial Valley farm worker strike that threatened to foment diplomatic trouble with Mexico. He was considering what he hoped would be his twin policy for Latin America: the stick of the Cuban invasion and the carrot of the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy needed acceptance, if not complete support, for this dual policy from other Latin American countries, especially the diplomatically important ones such as Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The feelings of Mexican officials had rarely been high on the list of priorities of those in the United States who administered the Bracero Program, but this time the U.S. could not ignore Mexican complaints entirely. Although Goldberg’s final order to remove all the braceros from the struck ranches did not affect the strike, it did mollify the Mexicans and was a harbinger of the administration’s subsequent reforms of the program.

Once the strike was over, the best way for Kennedy and Goldberg to ensure that such a difficult situation did not recur was to muscle the AFL-CIO into abandoning its organization of farm workers. Goldberg was Meany’s man in the White House, and Meany would not have been hard to convince. He had not been enthusiastic about setting up AWOC two years earlier and had done so simply to blunt criticism that organized labor was doing nothing about farm labor conditions and to head off efforts in the fields by his rival, Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, who had been funding various small farm worker projects. Meany closed down AWOC because, he said, the group had spent a lot of money and had not recruited any workers, and because of internal bickering among the various unions. No doubt those factors played a role, but neither had been unexpected two years earlier. If Goldberg did indeed ask Meany to shut down AWOC, neither would have said so publicly, and the request would have carried far more weight than Meany’s other explanations.

Goldberg would have been a willing executor of Kennedy’s order. One of the chief architects of the CIO’s expulsion of the Communists in 1947, he was no friend of rank-and-file militancy. In a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers on December 7, 1960, just before he was named secretary of labor, he argued that ensuring that “our military establishment and our industrial way of life remain superior in all respects to that of the Russians requires the wholehearted cooperation of all elements of our society, including, as a first priority, that of management and labor.” A failure to cooperate would be “disastrous,” as it would “lead to an eventual militant class consciousness, the absence of which has been one of the strengths of democratic America.” Goldberg advocated the establishment of a tripartite Advisory Board to the president, modeled on the War Labor Board of World War II, which would bring together high-level labor, management, and government officials to “help settle great disputes by mediation, fact-finding, and recommendations which, though not binding, will help the conflicting parties find satisfactory common solutions to their problems.”¹⁹

Goldberg never got the Advisory Board, but his intervention in the Imperial Valley strike and his subsequent reforms of the Bracero Program are excellent examples of his cold war labor theories in action. The first priority was to get rid of the strike and any agitation that might threaten U.S. foreign policy objectives. Then, through administrative reforms, Goldberg proposed to look out for the interests of the workers whose strike he had helped to break, and whose prospective union he had helped destroy.

In October of 1961, when President Kennedy signed the new extension of Public Law 78, reauthorizing the Bracero Program, he publicly acknowledged that braceros had adversely affected farm worker wages: “Therefore, I sign this bill with the assurance that the Secretary of Labor will, by every means at his disposal, use the authority vested in him under the law to prescribe the standards and to make the determinations essential for the protection of the wages and working conditions of domestic workers.”²⁰ And so Goldberg did. In 1962, he established a federally mandated minimum wage for California braceros of $1 an hour (the national minimum wage was $1.15), placed fifty-seven new Labor Department officials in the fields to monitor the growers, restricted the amount of time that braceros could be used, and, finally, ordered the restoration of piece rates in the Imperial Valley lettuce deal. In other words, the government had officially mandated the wage concession the workers had unofficially won during the strike the year before. Union leaders were properly thankful. Bud Simonson, director of West Coast operations for the UPWA, put it simply: “It looks like we won the Imperial Valley strike of 1961 after all.”²¹

As it happened, neither Arthur Goldberg nor George Meany could shut down the incipient farm worker movement. The AWOC’s chief, Norman Smith, a veteran of the 1930s CIO wars, had held some money in reserve. He had put the union dues that organizers were collecting into a separate trust fund, which he did not turn over to Meany. With that money he maintained some of the old union offices, which were staffed by some AWOC veterans and a new set of volunteers, including students and farm workers. These independent “area councils” carried on their own organizing campaigns, primarily in the Sacramento and upper San Joaquin valleys, but also as far south as Delano, where Larry Itliong, who had a long history in farm worker unions, led efforts among Filipino grape workers.

Many of the area councils began to work with the Mexican American families who lived in the small barrios and colonias. Others focused on the braceros. Smith continued to focus on the mostly white ladder workers. Some councils collected dues; most of them concentrated on educational and agitational activities. They did not encourage strikes, but the strike movement among the workers, once begun, was not so easy to turn off. In 1961 there were forty-seven other state-certified strikes, most of them without any outside support from labor organizers.²² The ladder workers continued to be active, but they were no longer alone. Row crop workers—in the peas, cauliflower, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts—also struck. The majority were in Imperial County, but others hit Salinas, Oxnard, and San Diego County fields. After Meany’s shutdown order, moreover, the ratio of informal walkouts to certified strikes increased.

AWOC’s volunteer period died, or rather was murdered, in its infancy. In 1962 AWOC sent a delegation of workers to the AFL-CIO national convention to ask that body to resume support for its organizing efforts. After hearing an inspiring speech from Maria Moreno, a farm worker, the delegates voted to resume funding. But Meany was determined not to let things get out of hand. His appointee to head up this new version of AWOC, a conservative AFL career official named Al Green, immediately ordered all the area councils to disband and told the farm worker and student volunteers that they were no longer needed. One of the first people he fired was Maria Moreno. “You can’t fire us, we are the union,” one farm worker volunteer objected, to which Green replied, “You may be the union, but I’m the boss.”²³

Green put all of AWOC’s efforts into getting out the 1962 vote for Governor Pat Brown, who by then had become one of the country’s most ardent advocates of the bracero program. Next, Green signed agreements with labor contractors, who simply took union dues out of farm workers’ checks without giving them any benefits. But Green could not corral all farm worker organizing. Itliong continued to organize among Filipino grape workers; nominally part of AWOC, Itliong was collecting his own dues and running his own operation. Many of the dispersed volunteers simply regrouped, in organizations such as Citizens for Farm Labor (headed by the old AWOC’s former publicist, Henry Anderson), the American Friends Service Committee, and Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association. Although the wave of farm worker strikes ebbed in 1963 and 1964, they started up again even more powerfully after the bracero program was formally ended in 1965.

Historians and academics have taken the victory over the bracero program out of the hands of farm workers. The classic argument, summed up by Linda and Theo Majka, sociologists and early chroniclers of the United Farm Workers, attributes the defeat of Public Law 78 to the victorious liberalism of the “civil rights Congress,” the eighty-eighth, which passed the Civil Rights Act and also voted to end the program in 1964. That Congress, so the argument goes, acted in response to several years of educational work by farm worker supporters, especially members of the AFL-CIO and liberal religious groups, who had been thrust into a more powerful position in national politics by the civil rights movement. The scholar David Runsten points out, too, that the introduction of the cotton-harvesting machine undercut grower support of the bracero program nationally. In Texas, where braceros had primarily harvested cotton, the new machines rumbled through the fields, reducing the portion of the crop harvested by hand in 1964 to only 22 percent. Thus, by the time the bracero program was vulnerable, the Texas growers didn’t need it anymore. It was left to California’s politicians to defend the program, and they were not powerful enough alone to defeat their adversaries in one of the most liberal Congresses in U.S. history. Finally, as Kitty Calavita argues in Inside the State, the reforms initiated by Goldberg’s Labor Department in 1962 made braceros less useful to the growers; hence the growers were not so desperate to keep them.²⁴

These arguments have some merit, but they all ignore the role that farm workers—both braceros and domestics—played in putting an end to Public Law 78. Goldberg’s reforms were not just a response to the educational activity of farm worker supporters, nor just a reflection of the strength of AFL-CIO and liberals in Congress and the Kennedy administration. They were also a direct concession to the farm worker movement, especially the wave of strikes in the California fields from 1959 to 1962. Most ominous for the future of Public Law 78 was the role that the braceros themselves were beginning to play in that resurgence. Braceros, it turned out, were not that different from other immigrant groups who had been brought to California to work in the fields. Like the others, the braceros initially were relatively inactive politically. It took some time for them to get acquainted with the territory, to feel comfortable enough to fight. Thus, in the mid-fifties they made only short, ineffective attempts to defend themselves and to unite with striking domestic workers. But by the late 1950s and early ’60s, they had begun to exercise what power they had. In Stockton, a bracero crew refused to get on a bus taking them to the fields when they figured out that they had been shorted on their checks; in Salinas braceros and locals struck together in the strawberry fields. Increasing numbers were running away from the camps and joining the ranks of undocumented workers outside any government control. As braceros began to take part in the emerging fight in the fields, especially in crops like Imperial Valley lettuce where they dominated production, growers started to have second thoughts about the program that had brought them here, and looked for ways to replace them.²⁵

The increased rebelliousness of the braceros was bad enough, but the growing protests that the presence of the contracted workers provoked among the local farm workers was even worse. Ernesto Galarza and Chavez had begun to organize domestic workers around the demand that they be given their legal right to be hired before braceros. Clive Knowles was provoking walkouts on mixed crews in hopes that the strikes would be officially certified and the braceros removed from the fields. Even on the few occasions when braceros were brought in to break AWOC strikes, the use of bracero scabs tended to increase the commotion rather than end it. The locals sitting in front of the Dannenberg Ranch labor camp were just the latest and most impressive example of how braceros had intensified the battles of local workers. The Bracero Program, whose main purpose was to maximize control of the labor force, had now become a major focus of farm worker revolt.

That first unnamed bracero who climbed that fence, wiggled over the barbed wire, and jumped to the ground to join a strike of local farm workers was the beginning of the end of the bracero program. He deserves a place in U.S. history alongside Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotters of 1955, beside the four black college students who kicked off the student civil rights movement by sitting-in at a lunch counter in North Carolina in 1960, and beside the white students who ended the fifties by humiliating HUAC in San Francisco in 1959. The rousing cheers from his new comrades must have been matched by a collective shudder among the cops, the foremen in charge of the braceros, and any growers who happened to be present. Who could ignore this singular act of courage and political will? Braceros would not automatically remain forever the passive instruments of grower interests. If they saw an opportunity to fight, they might snatch it.

One lettuce grower who had been watching the farm worker movement closely and read it correctly was Bud Antle, a maverick in the Salinas and Imperial valleys. Right after the Imperial Valley strike, he concluded that Public Law 78 was doomed and therefore farm worker unionization was inevitable. He figured that a union he could work with was better than the kind of unionism that was sure to come, and when braceros and locals struck at a strawberry company in Salinas soon after the Imperial strike ended, Antle signed a contract with the Teamsters. His prescience earned him the hatred of the rest of the Salinas Valley and Imperial Valley lettuce growers, who were still determined to stop farm worker unionism entirely, independent of what happened to Public Law 78. Antle, who had also been the first to replace his relatively well-paid domestic shed workers with the low-paid braceros in the fields in the early fifties, once again proved to be way ahead of his competitors. They would turn to the Teamsters eight years later, after the UFW had won the first grape contracts, but by then it was too late.

Certainly, the strike wave of 1959–62, of which the Imperial Valley lettuce strike was the most significant single event, did not end Public Law 78 immediately, but given the slow pace at which legislation usually responds to social reality, it didn’t take long for the workers’ movement to have its effect. Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern first introduced legislation to end the program in 1960. California’s Senator Claire Engle, visiting Mexico during the Imperial Valley strike in 1961, told Mexican legislators that largely because of the strike he did not expect the Bracero Program to be renewed again by the U.S. Congress.²⁶ In 1963 the program barely got enough votes to continue. In 1964, it passed only after its proponents promised that this would be its last year. Even Time magazine in 1961 got the story better than the historians who now claim that “farm labor activity during the early 1960s was comparatively weak and ineffective.” At the end of its six-paragraph article on the Imperial Valley strike Time concluded, “With a foot in the ranchers’ gate, the unions are now hoping to kick the gate down.”²⁷

Cesar Chavez was a minor player in the 1960–61 Imperial Valley strike. He had come to the valley as the executive director of Community Service Organization, the job he had taken after he left Oxnard. John Soria remembers seeing him at some of the picket lines and at the big rallies, quietly taking them in. But Chavez did more than that. He helped organize local Mexican Americans into what he called the Committee to Advance the Valley Economy. The group circulated a petition supporting the workers’ right to organize and issued leaflets detailing how much money the Imperial Valley was losing because braceros sent their wages back to Mexico. It also picketed the grower-sponsored Citizens to Save the Harvest when mostly wives and children of the growers made some widely publicized but ineffectual attempts to pack lettuce in the struck fields. Less than a year later, as strikes continued to batter California growers and formal labor organizing was in disarray, Chavez returned to the Imperial Valley for the CSO’s annual convention. He tried to convince the delegates, many of whom he had brought into politics, to commit CSO resources to organizing farm workers. When the delegates refused, he resigned, abruptly leaving the organization that he had been building for ten years. Bud Antle was not the only man in California to guess the shape of the future.