Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 17
ОглавлениеApril to August ’65
There’s no other person who could give better speeches, not Dolores, not Chavez. . . . Camacho was the best and he really had an impact on people. . . . He used to give you a lot of history, and I remember he used to get the bullhorn and he could go for forty minutes to an hour on the bullhorn, and everybody was just observing, just listening. So I learned a lot from that guy.
—Pablo Espinoza, grape worker and NFWA volunteer, 1995
Epifanio Camacho caused a little stir in the NFWA office in the spring of 1965. “A dark-skinned, jovial, high-spirited man whose remarkable body and movements suggest the grace and strength of a panther” is how an early chronicler of the UFW described him. Bill Esher, too, noticed him right away. Camacho had walked into the Delano office looking for help, but he was not helpless himself. He approached Cesar Chavez as an equal, not a supplicant. Chavez was both intrigued and wary. Esher watched them, listened to some of their conversation, and saw Camacho’s “power and emotion” matched by Chavez’s “presence and cunning.” Esher marveled at the skill with which “Chavez cooled him down without losing his respect.” It was, he thought, another measure of Chavez’s organizing genius. Gilbert Padilla saw the encounter somewhat differently. Camacho, a rose grafter in the nearby town of McFarland, had come with a plan for a strike, and Chavez didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but he was happy to sign up a new recruit to the National Farm Workers Association. “Chavez was just playing around,” keeping Camacho on board, without taking what he said seriously. But Camacho kept coming, kept insisting, talking up his plan to everybody in the office. And it sounded like a good plan to Gilbert Padilla. The rose workers were highly skilled; it would be hard to replace them. Padilla told Camacho that if they could get it well organized, they should go ahead and strike.1
There was nothing of Don Sotaco in Epifanio Camacho. A few years older than Chavez, he had been born into poverty on a small ranch in Tamaulipas in rural Mexico.2 At eighteen, both of his parents dead, he had joined the Mexican army as a way of getting off his brother-in-law’s ejido and out of small-town life. He had had only a couple of years of schooling, but he had learned to read, and he remained picado—hungry for more. He liked army discipline, but for reasons he didn’t understand back then, he could barely bring himself to salute his superiors or the Mexican flag. He stayed in the army no longer than he had to, worked for a while as a carpenter, and then, motivated by the cheap detective novels he favored, joined the police force in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas. He liked the tough-guy, macho ethos of police work, and as he believed what he had been reading in the paperback novels, he also saw it as a way of serving the Mexican people. He was not prepared for the petty corruption of the Victoria cops, and when the opportunity came, he moved on to the Tamaulipas State Police, hoping to find there the desired combination of public service and heroic action. What he found instead was more corruption and utter contempt for poor people. Most disturbing was the routine torture of prisoners, through which the police extorted confessions and bribes. His complaints only brought suspicion down on his own head, and soon he felt completely isolated at work. He quit and ran for the border.
In Matamoros, just shy of the Texas border, he scrounged for work and food. A couple of times, arrested as an indigent, he saw the inside of the city jail. Once he spent three days in solitary after he refused the two other choices: pay a small bribe to the guards or clean the jail toilet. In the early 1950s he regularly crossed the border for work, was picked up a couple of times by the migra, and taken back to Matamoros. Once the Border Patrol picked him up in Corpus Christi, where he was digging graves in a Catholic cemetery. His boss, a priest, was so upset at his being hauled away that when Epifanio returned, the priest went back with him to Matamoros and signed the papers that made Camacho a legal immigrant. On June 6, 1955, Epifanio crossed the border legally for the first time.
For three years he dug graves and picked cotton in Texas and more cotton in Arizona. Loaded lettuce in the Imperial Valley. Picked peaches, apricots, and plums—the ladder crops—in the northern Central Valley, raisins outside of Fresno, wine grapes near Delano. Finally, he worked in the roses in what would become his home town, McFarland. Never partnered up with anyone, as most farm workers do, he remained a bit of a loner. His old pickup truck, with its hand-painted Spanish slogans—“To Wander Is My Destiny”; “Don’t Take Me Lightly”; “I Was Once a Virgin, Too”—were puro Mexicano, as was his conviction that his wife should not work outside the home, as well as his romantic, revolutionary rhetoric.3 He was also anticlerical, a viewpoint he shared with many other farm workers—but his complaints against the papacy and the Catholic Church were somewhat more developed than most. His opinions, which had been shaped by that significant strand of Mexican revolutionary ideology that sees the Catholic Church as a central reactionary institution, were reinforced by the strong anti-Catholicism of his wife, Salome, who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Together, the two were different from most of their neighbors: very Mexican and in some ways more culturally conservative. And while Salome was aggressively Protestant, Epifanio was just plain aggressive.
Always willing to fight for what he felt was right, or to defend his acute sense of honor, he frequently found himself in disputes with his bosses. That had started way back in Mexico, when he was barely an adolescent and had hired himself out to a neighboring farmer. The wages were supposed to be one peso a day, but he received only fifty centavos because, according to the foreman, he was only a child. Camacho had been doing as much work as the men beside him, so he went directly to the farmer to ask for the full wage. The boss said nothing. Instead, he reached into the belt behind him, pulled out a pistol, and fired it into the air. Epifanio the boy turned and ran. Camacho the man would never again be naive about the power of his employers. But the gun blast had worked only temporarily, as Camacho’s fear passed, and he continued to petition his bosses for the wages he thought he had coming to him.
That is how the problem started in the roses, and that is what led Epifanio Camacho to Cesar Chavez and the NFWA. Camacho had become a champion rose grafter, paid by the number of stalks that he and a fellow worker could cut and and then graft with the desired variety of rose. Since the stalks were less than a foot above the ground, the work had to be done while squatting, or on your knees, or completely bent over. The graft had to be inserted carefully or it would not take. Since it was piece work, it had to be done as quickly as possible in order to make decent pay. Only a few people managed to become good at it, but for those who did, the wages were relatively high. An accomplished rose grafter such as Camacho could make $30 or $40 a day, which in the early 1960s was three or four times the minimum wage. Officially the pay was $10 for every thousand plants to the man who cut the stalk, and $8.50 for the man who went behind him and tied in the new rose, but there was a catch: $2 of that piece rate for every man was held back, not to be paid until the following year on the condition that 90 percent of the grafts took. In practice, that $2 was almost never paid, and so the real wage for even the most skilled and efficient workers was effectively 20 to 24 percent below the official wage. Like that Mexican farmer’s pistol shot in the air, the withheld $2 was a naked expression of the bosses’ power, as everyone knew that it had nothing to do with the success or failure of the grafts. Some workers went back to the fields the next year and checked the plants to see how they were doing. Not too many people did that, though, because once they saw that the plants were thriving, there was nothing they could do with the information; it was just bitter proof of how badly they had been cheated.
Camacho decided he would no longer put up with the yearly insult. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to get his fellow grafters to go with him, he went directly to his boss at Montebello Rose and demanded to be paid his full wage. Camacho had to threaten to change companies before the boss eventually relented. He would mail the money directly to Camacho’s house, on condition that he not tell his fellow workers. The boss lived up to his end of the bargain, but not Camacho. He told the others, and even showed them the first year’s check, but the following years he stopped, because the others still weren’t ready to demand their own back wages.
What ultimately led him to the NFWA began with a couple of weeks’ work at Konklyn Nursery in 1964, after the season was over at Montebello. The next year, after checking that the grafts had taken, Camacho got ten other grafters together, and they went to see Mr. Konklyn about their back pay. Konklyn said that they hadn’t hit the 90 percent mark and refused. Epifanio called him a liar. The dispute wound up at a hearing before a state labor commissioner in Bakersfield, which only Camacho and Konklyn attended. The workers who didn’t show up were regular Konklyn grafters, and they thought it likely that if they won their back pay, they would lose their jobs.
At the hearing, Konklyn argued that there never was any agreement to pay $2 per thousand for a 90 percent success rate. Rather, he occasionally tipped workers whose previous year’s grafting had turned out to be particularly successful, and he had come to Bakersfield that very day with a check of $30 for Mr. Camacho, who was, indeed, an excellent and careful worker. Camacho, who was owed $62 for the two weeks’ work, threw the check to the ground, exclaiming that he had never taken an unearned penny in his life, and he wanted no tips, only what was owed him. The commissioner reproached him for ungratefulness and declared the hearing closed. Camacho refused to leave; the commissioner called the cops who carried Epifanio out of the office and released him. He did not feel defeated. It had been a matter of principle. But when he returned to Montebello, the foreman refused to let him start work. He had been fired. No other rose company nor any other agricultural outfit in the area would hire him. He couldn’t even get a job in the sugar beets, the absolute worst-paid job around, paying as little as $3 a day on bad days. He was on the bola negra, the blacklist. In the spring of 1965, he had to steal food from the fields at night so that he and his wife and their two daughters could eat.
Meanwhile, he kept talking to other rose grafters about the back pay. His story got around. Someone told him to look up Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association. He had never heard of either one, but he had no trouble finding the association’s storefront office in Delano. Cesar was courteous enough, interested in Camacho’s life and his work (they even went out to the roses together, so that Chavez could see how the grafting was done), but Chavez insisted up-front that the NFWA wasn’t set up to organize strikes. Camacho pressed Chavez: Just what was the strategy of his group? Chavez explained that eventually they might get involved in strikes, but now they had to focus on building the organization, making it so big and strong that the members could truly help one another, and so powerful that they could force the politicians to pass laws that would give farm workers the same benefits that other workers already had: a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, good pensions. Camacho was not convinced, but neither was he easily deterred. He paid his $3.50 and joined the association, in hopes that he could change Chavez’s mind. In turn, Chavez suggested that Camacho set up a meeting of workers at his house, and promised to come and listen to their stories, and see what he could do to help.
Only four workers came to Epifanio’s house for that first meeting, but Camacho was still eager and Chavez always liked to pyramid house meetings, so together they scheduled another one. This time, Camacho focused his efforts on a single company, Mt. Arbor, and almost all the grafters, about thirty men, showed up. After a long discussion, they decided they wanted to strike. Chavez did not oppose their decision. A third meeting was scheduled, both to see if the men’s resolve would hold and to decide the details and demands of the strike. Camacho had won Chavez over. The NFWA dropped everything else and prepared for its first strike.
One last pre-strike meeting was held at Guadalupe Church. All of Mt. Arbor’s rose grafters came. The NFWA contingent included Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and Jim Drake. Cesar chaired the meeting. The workers set their wage demands, agreed to hold out for a contract, and decided that the NFWA would represent them in negotiations with the company. They also agreed that a picket line was unnecessary, as there weren’t enough skilled grafters to scab effectively. By not picketing, they would also be less exposed to potential blacklisting if it turned out that they lost the strike. They would simply not go to work, an old farm worker tactic used by the Wobbly-Magonistas, who had given it various names: walk-away, fade-out, stay-at-home.4 At the end of the meeting, Huerta handed Chavez a ten-inch wooden crucifix with a broken cross piece. Cesar held it in the air before the small assembly. He wanted the workers to swear on the cross that they would honor the strike and not go back to work until there was a contract. He passed it back to Huerta, who handed it to one of the men. He swore fidelity and passed the crucifix to the next man. Camacho was shocked. He believed in God, but didn’t believe that politics and religion should be mixed like this. He wondered what Jim Drake, the Protestant minister, thought. Camacho didn’t want to complicate the proceedings with a public refusal, so when the crucifix reached him, he also swore that he would be loyal to the strike and the other men. But he was angry at Chavez for not checking with him on this particular tactic before the meeting. And he believed that it was only a tactic, meant to extract the deepest possible commitment from the grafters, as Chavez had not talked to him about religion in the thirty days that they had been working together.5
The strike lasted three days. The workers had been right about the incompetence of scab workers: when the Mt. Arbor management brought in a small crew of Filipino strikebreakers, they couldn’t do the work. And the other grafters in town—about two hundred men, almost all known to one another—were not interested in breaking their compatriots’ strike. The company’s only hope was to get the strikers to return to work. For all three days of the strike, the NFWA leaders were up before dawn, scouting the workers’ homes, knocking on the door of any house where the lights were on to make sure that the grafter who lived there was not preparing to go to work. Once, when Dolores Huerta doubted the word of one of the strikers, she blocked his driveway with her truck, locked it, took her key and left. Dolores’s bold act, prefiguring many to come, was much celebrated inside the NFWA, and later became one of the main stories told about the rose strike—the heroine organizer preventing a reluctant worker from scabbing. The story, however, inverted the actual trajectory of the struggle, because it had been a bold worker, Camacho, who had activated the reluctant NFWA organizers.
The day the strike started, the NFWA tried to begin negotiations with the company. Huerta went to the local Mt. Arbor office, where a company official called her a Communist and briskly escorted her out of the building. The parent company, Jackson & Perkins, was more polite to Chris Hartmire, but it also refused to negotiate. Its representatives were curious about the nature of the NFWA, though. They pressed Hartmire on whether it was a union.
On Wednesday, day three of the strike, company foremen visited many of the striking grafters. Their message was both an offer and a threat. They would accept all the wage demands, including dropping the 90 percent scam, but they would not sign a contract. Anybody who did not show up for work on Thursday would never work for the company again. That night Chavez, Jim Drake, Gil Padilla, Bill Esher, and Wendy Goepel were in a little trailer behind the office talking about the strike; they were divided on how to respond to the company’s offer. When a small group of grafters knocked on the door and asked Chavez to come outside, Padilla, who advocated holding out for a contract, suspected that these workers wanted to go back to work. He urged Cesar not to talk to them, to tell them to wait until the next day when all the strikers could have a formal meeting to discuss what to do. But Chavez, who favored accepting the wage concessions without a contract, went outside and gave the workers his permission to return to work without a general meeting. Padilla was furious. He knew the strike was over. After the group of night visitors went back to work on Thursday, everybody returned on Friday. The company backed down on its threat, accepted all the men back, and kept its promise on the wages. And within a couple of weeks, all the other companies had been forced to raise their wages, as they did not want to lose their best grafters to Mt. Arbor.6
El Malcriado hailed the victory, and the NFWA organizers assessed its meaning. Jim Drake thought that they might possibly have won a contract and was disappointed when the strikers went back to work, but ultimately he agreed with Chavez: “It was premature, we didn’t have enough people, we didn’t have the masses of farm workers. It was a very special situation; Epifanio was a very special person. It was better to get the raise and get out.”7 Padilla saw the incident as a lost opportunity, and an example of the NFWA’s confusion over its own goals. If the association had been a union, if Hartmire could have said to the parent company, yes, we are a union, then the company might have negotiated with them. Camacho, he argued, had been exactly right about the situation in the fields: nobody who was capable of doing the work was going to scab. If the men had held out, and if the NFWA had been unequivocal, the strike might have been a total victory. But Camacho was not at all discouraged. The workers had won the full raise they demanded. He wasn’t even that disappointed that the blacklist against him in the roses remained in effect. He was energized by the strike. Soon he got a job in the grape vineyards. He told his friends to be prepared, because strikes were contagious.
For the California growers, the end of the Bracero Program had become the worst kind of concession: the growers’ defeat, rather than dampening farm workers’ enthusiasm and channeling their battles into more acceptable venues, as concessions often do, only encouraged workers to fight, and with a more threatening set of demands. Rarely has the age-old fear of appeasement turned out to be more prophetic: the growers gave an inch, and farm workers took a mile.
The rose strike was part of a general rebellion that broke out in the fields in 1965. The California Department of Employment officially acknowledged that there were sixty-three agricultural “labor disputes” that year.8 It is certainly a low estimate. The on-the-ground battles between farm workers and their employers in 1965 have become part of farm worker lore—and one of the reasons workers remember that time so well is that they won many of those fights. Officially, wages rose from an average of $1.33 an hour in 1964 to $1.50 an hour in 1966, but again, the official figures seem to have underestimated the change. All the farm workers I talked to who were in California in 1965 remembered the general upheaval after the termination of the Bracero Program, and many reported that wages rose sharply. Pablo Camacho, for example, remembers that in 1965 his boss not only raised his wages but also began to pay his rent and give him gas money so that he would not move to another job.
The strikes and accelerating wages were largely a consequence of the labor shortage that followed the shutdown of the Bracero Program. The growers and the INS had anticipated the problem and had done what they could to head it off. Starting in 1961 the Immigration and Naturalization Service began a massive distribution of green cards to Mexican farm workers. The agency kept no record of how many cards they gave out, but estimates go as high as 100,000; by 1969 the INS figured that there were 750,000 Mexican with green cards in the United States. In addition, between 1960 and 1969 the INS issued more than 2.2 million “white cards,” designed as temporary permits but used by farm workers to immigrate illegally to the U.S.9
But green cards and white cards weren’t enough in 1965. California growers, especially those far from the border, still had to scramble for workers. They tried to use Los Angeles County welfare recipients, members of the Lakota Sioux tribe from North Dakota, Navajos from New Mexico, high school football players, and housewives, but they still couldn’t find enough experienced workers to get the job done.10 Knowing they had the whip hand, farm workers once again moved onto the offensive. The galloping farm worker movement interfered with the plans of the NFWA, which was concentrating on self-help programs and was not prepared for mass activity. But the NFWA was flexible enough to change course, and it began to endorse the strike activity. Chavez—suffering from a bad case of pneumonia—did not have too much to do with this new direction, although he gave it a critical, lukewarm endorsement. (He had to go to the hospital in Bakersfield soon after the rose strike ended, and then spent a few weeks home in bed.) It was mostly the Migrant Ministry—sponsored staff, supported by enthusiastic articles in El Malcriado, who aligned the NFWA with the quickly ascending farm worker movement. Nobody voted on the policy change; it just seemed to happen, as if the organizers had stumbled into a small stream, liked the feel of the water, and got swept into the rapids.
The NFWA’s next battle was a rent strike over bad conditions in a labor camp that Migrant Ministry organizers learned about while going door-to-door passing out contraceptive foam to farm worker women. The Woodville and Linnell camps, built by the Farm Security Administration in 1938, contained 400 structures, the majority of which were small one-room shacks, made completely out of heavy tin, or wood siding with tin roofs. For ten years the FSA had provided these “houses” to farm workers free of charge. In 1950, the FSA gave the camps to the Tulare County Housing Authority, which charged rents—$18 to $38 a month by 1964. In 1965, the authority wanted to raise the rent by as much as 47 percent. The increase was especially steep for farm worker families that had to rent several structures so that all of their children would have a place to sleep. As an added insult, the rent was being raised for shacks that had already been condemned by the Tulare County Health Department. To keep the inside temperatures bearable during the summer months, tenants had to find heavy carpets or old mattresses, throw them over the roofs of the hovels, and keep them soaking wet day and night. After hearing the residents’ complaints, Gilbert Padilla, David Havens of the Migrant Ministry, and Jim Drake decided to try to organize some kind of rent strike.11
One of the main complainants was Pablo Espinoza, who was occasionally employed by the housing authority to do some work in the camps, and was a member of a large extended family that rented several shacks in the Woodville camp. Espinoza, who later became a farm worker leader in the UFW, was the fourth of twelve children in a family that in the 1940s and ’50s had followed the sugar beets from the Rio Grande Valley to Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Ohio, moving from one labor camp to another. Everywhere they went, blacks, whites, and Mexicans lived in different areas but usually shared the same toilet and shower facilities, when they existed. In Mississippi the family stayed in former slave quarters. Pablo was born in one camp, learned to read Spanish in another, fell in love in a third, and lost his mother in yet another temporary home, to severe hemorrhaging that followed the birth of her last child.12
As Pablo came into early manhood, the family’s migratory route shifted from south–north to east–west: three generations traveling together began to follow the cotton from the lower Rio Grande Valley to West Texas, Arizona, and California. In 1960 the entire family came to Tulare County, where most of them settled, working in the wine grapes, tomatoes, and sugar beets. Only Espinoza’s father continued his yearly travels, by this time almost a pilgrimage, back to the lower Rio Grande Valley.
Pablo was quick to pick up on Gilbert’s way of thinking, as he was quick to pick up on everything. Having no more than a fourth-grade education, he had learned mathematics and English while working in a cotton gin, and now he learned politics from Padilla, whom he called “our first professor.” He became a primary spokesman for the rent-strikers. Their strategy was simple. The tenants, organized into formal camp committees, refused to pay the rent hikes. Instead, they paid the old rates into a special escrow account. Next, they organized a seven-mile march from Linnell to Visalia; a couple of hundred people walked in mid-summer heat: residents of the camp were joined by various supporters, including representatives of the American Friends Service Committee (John Soria was one), Citizens for Farm Labor, and Students for Farm Labor, one Sister Immaculada, clad in an all-white habit, and Brother Gilbert, a member of the Christian Brothers order who taught at Garces High School in Bakersfield. A farm worker march of that size, and with that kind of broad support, stirred some liberal California politicians to sponsor an investigation into the Tulare County Housing Authority. Before the summer was over, the rent increases were formally rescinded, and promises were made (and eventually kept) to rebuild the camps.
That summer of 1965, El Malcriado began to promote strikes openly. In its first six months, it had championed the self-organization and self-respect of farm workers, and had encouraged workers to unite and fight for a better life, but its primary focus was on the benefits of NFWA membership. The overwhelming weight of cascading events, however, shifted the paper’s focus. First the rose strike, then a victorious strike of grape pickers, represented by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, in the Coachella Valley, next the rent strike and march, and finally another (unsuccessful) walkout of grape workers. El Malcriado enthusiastically featured them all—and called for more. “How to Strike” read a bold headline in early August, with the following suggestions:
1. Talk to your crew: make sure everyone is with you.
2. Make a strike committee.
3. Come to the association for advice and help.
This method of linking up with rank-and-file militants had been used by AWOC in the strike happy years between 1959 and 1961, but had been explicitly opposed by the NFWA at its founding convention and throughout its first three years of existence. The next issue of El Malcriado made an even greater departure, promoting strikes as the main way of gaining power, and even resurrecting the old Wobbly idea of “one big strike” that would transform the whole relationship between the workers and their bosses. The article is a lovely mixture of the old NFWA approach and El Malcriado’s new attitude toward the more traditional methods and ideology of farm worker struggle.
WHAT CAN ONE MAN DO?
Q. Is there any fast way to make wages and working conditions improve?
A. No. For people to learn their own value and to learn not to be afraid takes a long time.
Q. What is the way it can be done?
A. Through many small strikes and a final grand strike, the people will become strong enough to tell the growers how much they are worth and to get it.
Q. But what can one man do?
A. Everything! The roots of this country, and the roots of the Mexican Revolution, were established by a very few men. It is always a very few men who are responsible for the great social changes in the world. It was one man, for example, Gandhi, who led the huge country of India out of slavery. You, also, are one man.
Q. Exactly how can one man do what needs to be done?
A. One can first learn how to fight and then find ways to struggle against the system that keeps the farm worker poor. For example it was one man that started the action in the Rose Strike this year that led to big wage increases for all the workers in an entire crop.
Q. Where can one man start?
A. By joining together with his fellow workers in the association, which is working toward the big strike.13
“We were the malcriados, the bad boys,” Bill Esher said years later, “and we were thrilled by the strike wave. But Chavez went back and forth. Some days he was the very spirit of the Mexican Revolution, but other days he was a conservative man running a small business, worried about its survival. His Mexican Revolution side welcomed the strikes; his conservative side was worried about them.” Esher acknowledged that Cesar’s concerns were legitimate, but he himself wasn’t much worried by the growing farm worker rebellion:
By the summer of 1965, there was no uniform strategy. Things were out of control, completely. I didn’t worry about that. I was excited by the growth of the movement. I knew the history, that the growers had crushed big farm worker movements in the past, and that the same thing could happen to this one. But at the same time I loved all the action, all the rebellion, and I wanted to encourage it. Cesar was tremendously excited too, but he was also afraid. He was working on two levels: he wanted people to move, to be willing to take on the growers, to strengthen their own self-respect by taking things into their own hands, but at the same time he didn’t want people to do things that would lead to defeats.14
A few months before El Malcriado’s declaration of neo-Wobblyism, the newspaper had moved a few houses down the street, and was no longer being written and laid out in the NFWA office. Chavez was not writing many of the articles and was no longer the translator. Esher still talked over the coming articles with Cesar before he wrote them up; he almost always followed Chavez’s suggestions, and never defied any of his clear directives. But by mid-summer of 1965, Esher was clearly the person most responsible for the content, and Chavez and the executive board didn’t really know what was going to be in the paper until it came out. Sometimes Chavez would criticize an article after he read it, but Esher doesn’t remember any particular criticism of the two neo-Wobbly calls to action. Esher thinks those two articles were possibly influenced by the presence of Eugene Nelson in Delano. Nelson, an old friend of Dolores Huerta’s, stopped by Delano with his daughter that summer on his way to Mexico, and stayed for the next couple of years. Esher and Nelson got along well:
I was familiar with the Wobblies from my old Catholic Worker days, but Gene was the first card-carrying Wobbly I had ever met, although he was a revolutionary artist rather than a worker. He was really enthusiastic about the strikes, as they fit perfectly with his ideas about change. I was talking to him a lot, and those articles sound a lot like him. Of course, you can see Cesar’s influence, too, with the mention of Gandhi. At the time, Cesar and I were both reading the same book about Gandhi, passing our one copy back and forth, and talking it over whenever we got a chance.15
Chavez’s mixed reaction to the growing strike movement would soon not matter at all. Farm workers were not waiting to see on which side of the fence he finally landed. Their strikes increased, in number and intensity. In September they tumbled into Cesar’s own backyard, less than two miles from the NFWA’s office door. Chavez faced a stark choice: would he seize the opportunities created by the growing movement or seek a safe haven where he could wait out what he feared would be that movement’s ultimate ebb and probable defeat? Although Chavez chose hope, his fears were well founded. For the NFWA, as conceived by its founder, could not survive the crucible of the strike. The association was transformed—nay, doomed. A union was in the birth canal. And Chavez, despite all the years of struggle and effort he would give to nurturing this new creation, was never entirely satisfied with what became of the new child.
