Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 18

10 The Grape Strike

August to November ’65

It takes a lot of people, working much of the year, to grow table grapes. Grape vines left to themselves do not produce uniform bunches of grapes suitable for shipping, unlike, for example, lettuce seedlings, which grow into heads of lettuce with a minimum of weeding and thinning. Vines have to be pruned, tied, and girdled. The developing grapes must be thinned and tipped. Finally, just before the harvest, some of the leaves must be pulled off so that the grapes will be exposed to the sun and become sweeter. People with tools in their hands do all of that work. None of it has ever been successfully mechanized. Without this extensive pre-harvest demand for labor, large numbers of farm workers would not have been able to establish permanent residency in the area around Delano, and the two large communities of nonmigrant, professional farm workers—the Mexican Americans of the barrios and the Filipinos in labor camps, which the NFWA and AWOC were trying to organize—would not have existed.

Table grapes require not only a large number of workers but, at various points in the growing cycle, a significant supply of relatively skilled ones. In the Delano area, pruning extends from December to March and involves 2,000 people at its peak, usually in January. Before 1970 all of this work was done by men; now some women prune. How a vine is pruned goes a long way toward determining the quantity and quality of the grapes it will bear, as well as what the viticulturists call the “vigor” (rate of growth) of the plant. Nothing can be done to make a poorly pruned vine produce enough good fruit in the upcoming season, while an especially bad job of pruning can ruin a vine for years. One grower estimates that a pruner makes 200 difficult decisions in any eight-hour workday; learning to prune “comes best and most easily from years of pruning along with older workers, in the comforting shade of their years of experience.”¹

Pruning is followed by spraying (sulfur, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers) and careful irrigating, neither of which is labor-intensive. A large amount of labor is then needed to tie the spurs to the trellises. This work is done by men and women and requires stamina and patience but not any specialized knowledge. Girdling and thinning come next, in the spring. Girdling is particularly difficult. Workers cut through the hard bark of the vine, completely encircling the stalk, usually down low at the trunk. This cut, when done correctly, forces the sap of the plant to remain in the upper part of the vine and increases the amount of sugar that the vine stores in the grapes, as well as the actual number of grapes. The cut is a delicate one: if too shallow, the sap won’t rise; if too deep, the vine will die. And the surgical use of the special knife has to be done while bent over, by men who are working as fast as they can, because girdling is always done by individual piece-rate workers. Thus, the girdlers are the most skilled of the grape workers, and when they learn the job well enough to do it quickly, they are the best paid. At the same time that the girdlers are working, many men and women thin and tip the grapes. Left to themselves, grapes come in odd-shaped bunches, with the berries so densely packed that they impede on one another’s growth and remain small. Thinning and tipping produces the characteristic shape and size of the bunches that end up at supermarkets. About 3,000 people are needed for thinning and tipping, which continues into the early summer. Large numbers are also employed in the last pre-harvest job, “pulling leaves,” exposing the bunches to the sun in midsummer, and 5,000 are needed for the harvest, which in Delano usually lasts from August to November.²

The Delano grape growers, dependent on all of this labor, were particularly anxious about the possibility of any significant jump in workers’ wages. Perhaps more worrying was the long-term decline in U.S. per capita table grape consumption, from an average high of 6.8 pounds per year from 1934 to 1938 to a low of 3.7 pounds in 1965.³ Unable to agree on a marketing order that would keep some vineyards out of production, the growers faced an extremely unwelcome conclusion: they had planted too many vines, and unless consumption patterns changed, they stood to lose plenty of money. They could partially cover their losses by selling their grapes for wine-crush—many varieties can go both ways, although high-quality wine grapes make poor table grapes—but the crush price is far below the fresh price. A grower who paid for all the pre-harvest work necessary to produce a table grape and then, because of an oversupplied market, decided to sell for crush would not even make the average return of a straight wine grape grower. If, on the other hand, a grower decided to avoid the pre-harvest costs of fresh grapes and produce just for the wine market, he would have to write off whatever capital investment he had made in packing sheds and cooling facilities, as well as missing whatever chance he might have to take advantage of a quick upturn in the table grape market, where large profits might make up for the long years of soft markets.

None of the choices were good, and in 1965, men whose wealth was based on the production of table grapes faced an uncertain future. Would the long slump in grape consumption ever be reversed? It was hard to tell; until the 1920s, table grapes had never been an important product of the vine. Although vineyards are nearly as old as agriculture, first mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphics around 2400 BC, the ancients were not much interested in eating grapes. Noah used his vineyard to make wine, as did the Greeks in Homeric times. The French, who received grape cuttings from the Phoenicians and started planting vineyards in 600 BC, were wine drinkers, not grape eaters. Franciscans and Jesuits, who carefully carried cuttings to California and other far reaches of the New World, drank the grapes they grew. Only during the Gold Rush did people eat enough grapes to create a small local market, and local it had to remain because fresh grapes could not travel far before they spoiled. Grapes started being put on refrigerated rail cars and moved around the country in large quantities only because Prohibition legislation allowed individuals to make up to 200 gallons of wine for their own consumption. Strong spirits and beer received no similar legal dispensation, and with most U.S. wineries closed down, the field was clear for the household winemakers. Prior to prohibition, average U.S. wine production was about forty-five to fifty million gallons. By 1930, makeshift vintners were brewing, even by the low official count, 145 million gallons of wine. The price of grapes, which had topped out at $75 a ton before 1919, had doubled by 1920, with some selling for $300 a ton within two years.⁴

California growers planted more than 128 million new vines between 1919 and 1925, an increase of more than 50 percent. Vines producing the more hardy table grape varieties that could also be used to make wine (like Thompson seedless grapes) were especially popular and increased by 250 percent.⁵ Most of this new acreage was planted on the eastern outskirts of the old Tulare Basin, by relatively poor Italian and Croatian immigrants who bought cheap dry land and used the relatively new centrifugal pump to tap ground water and irrigate their vineyards. Led by Joseph DiGiorgio, the more successful new growers threw up packing sheds as quickly as possible, and in cooperation with the railroads, they improved and extended the infrastructure necessary to keep the fresh grapes cool on the trip east. Bunches of fresh grapes, the vast majority grown in and around Delano, began to appear all over the country. Most were destined for wine vats, but some made their way to the dinner table, and a new national market was born.

But bust follows boom, and by the mid-twenties the table grape market crashed. The new growers had put in too many vines. Some of them went broke even before the Depression officially arrived. A few dozen survived the crisis and acquired holdings of thousands of acres. But when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the problem of oversupply intensified. Per capita sales fell consistently. No one knew where the bottom was.

The immigrant farmers who had prospered through the various ups and downs in the market had acquired enough land and had diversified into other fruit so that their dominant class position was secure. But this was a small group of people. Although there were thousands of table grape growers in California in 1965, only thirty-eight in the Delano-Arvin area also owned the packing sheds, enormous cold storage warehouses, and shipping facilities without which a table grape was a useless commodity.⁶ These grower-packer-shippers charged the smaller, dependent growers for precooling, inspecting, storing, and selling the crop. Often they also provided the smaller producers with their harvest crews, and charged them a fee for picking and packing. In bad years—and the years had not been particularly good for a long time—the vast majority of growers often lost money, but the grower-packer-shippers were somewhat insulated from the weakening market. In 1965, the small and medium-sized growers, by this time heavily mortgaged and in debt, were in a near panic about the prospect of a significant rise in wages. The grower-packer-shippers—the DiGiorgio, Giuamarra, Divizich, Merzoian, Steel, Zaninovich, Pandol, Bianco, and Caratan families, plus a handful of others—while not nearly as threatened, were still uneasy about the industry’s long-range prospects. Jack Pandol had averaged only $22,500 in net income between 1961 and 1965 on a 2,000-acre ranch valued (along with all its equipment) at about $4 million, with gross annual sales of $1.35 million. As Pandol told the writer John Gregory Dunne in 1965, “A business that grosses that much and nets that little is in trouble.”⁷

These grower-packer-shipper families, all of them Catholic, some of them still headed by the patriarchs who had acquired the Tulare Basin land and put in the first vineyards, had settled in the area around Delano. Of the big grape growers, only Schenley and DiGiorgio were absentee landlords, and even the local DiGiorgio operation was run by one of the old man’s nephews, who lived near Arvin. These people, especially the Slavs (as the Croatian families are called around Delano), formed an insular community, where intermarriage was common, where even the second generation spoke with a slight Croatian accent, and the highlights of social life were grower luncheons, children’s christenings and first communions, dances at Slav Hall, and an occasional night on the town in Bakersfield. Even after they became rich, most remained wedded to agriculture and did not branch out into the professions. (Dunne noted that there was not one Slav doctor or lawyer in Delano).⁸ The fathers and sons were hands-on directors of their farm businesses, and although they didn’t prune, thin, girdle, pick, and pack themselves, they knew how that work was supposed to be done. Most of them got up early in the morning and spent a lot of time going over the various tasks of the day with supervisors and foremen. Their family stories were all about dedication and hard work, and many were intensely proud of what the first-generation immigrants had accomplished. They started out poor and now they had money. They were typically neither golf players nor country club bar sitters. They had plenty of land, big air-conditioned homes, nice cars, private planes, and expensive private educations for their children. They were more than just wealthy. They were an authentic rural bourgeoisie, but they were still proud of their peasant backgrounds, and were determined to remain rural small-town people. They were even proud of their insularity and lack of sophistication. Their one venture into big city life was their significant financial and political support for the Democratic Party.

The interests of these families were directly threatened by the farm workers’ demands for higher wages and union recognition. Aside from a direct calculation of cost, their whole understanding of themselves mitigated against any easy accommodation with a Mexican or Filipino union. The big growers had no doubts about their own story. They had worked hard and prospered. Their compatriots who had not worked hard, or who had made bad decisions, had failed. Wasn’t that the way of the world? Why should it be different for other poor immigrants? They lived in a world of easy assumptions about inherent racial inferiority and deficient national character, which went a long way toward explaining to themselves not only why they were successful and others weren’t but why it should remain ever so. In the Delano grape fields in 1965, racism and national chauvinism were not just historical and ideological baggage warping the world outlook of the major players; they were still part of the organization of production. Although different wage rates according to race were no longer the rule, on the large ranches Mexicans, Filipinos, blacks, whites, and Puerto Ricans still lived in separate camps, worked in separate crews, and often specialized in different jobs, which did have different rates of pay. Such strict divisions made it easy for most everyone to maintain the longstanding stereotypes graven into California history: Filipino gambling and excessive sexuality; Mexican thievery and dishonesty; Negro indolence; Puerto Rican hot tempers; and Okie filth. Those fictions, combined with the self-congratulatory family stories of the big growers, served to blind the Slavs and Italians to the real life histories of their workers. But was it not better to be blind? Clear vision might have produced an uneasy conscience, and any self-doubt about the justice of their cause might have interfered with the growers’ defense of their own power and interest.

As the Delano grape harvest began in late August, the Filipinos who worked for Marco Zaninovich decided that they wanted their boss to pay them the $1.40 an hour and 25 cents a box that grape workers had won in Coachella earlier in the year. It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Most of the Pinoys had worked for Zaninovich for more than a decade—some had even planted the first grape vines for him back in the 1920s—and over the years they had learned how to negotiate. A respected elder, who was also often a leadman or foreman, would let Zaninovich know what the men wanted. Usually, the negotiations were carried on without rancor, even when the workers backed them up with slow downs, short work stoppages, and other semi-ritualized job actions. Zaninovich was the boss, and his power was respected. But the highly skilled Filipino workers, who were almost always completely united, had their own measure of power. Even though they had suffered from discriminatory wage rates in the 1920s and ’30s, by the 1960s they were, on average, the highest-paid ethnic group in California agriculture.⁹

But this time the informal negotiations did not go well. Zaninovich was in no mood to give in. Even though the Delano growers had not used braceros, they feared that the labor shortage around the state would push up wages everywhere. The successful strike in Coachella, in the midst of statewide uncertainty and labor troubles, seemed to justify their fears. And the Delano workers were asking for a significant raise. A $1.40 minimum plus a piece-rate incentive would push the wage to around $2 an hour, about a 33 percent jump over the previous year.^* The growers had beaten back the workers’ attempt to extend their Coachella victory into Arvin, and they had decided that they wouldn’t knuckle under in Delano, either.

The workers had another option besides the limited job actions. They could stay away from the fields entirely; they could strike. They had done it several times before, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but usually minimizing their losses by returning to work quickly if they could not win their demands. Often they would strike without picket lines, just as the rose grafters had done; though “a stay at home” for the Zaninovich Filipinos meant remaining at the company-owned labor camp in the midst of Zaninovich’s fields, playing cards, eating and drinking a bit, and waiting to see what they could extract from the boss. Starting September 5, 1965, that’s what they did.

The first day of the stay-at-home, Larry Itliong came by for a talk with Zaninovich. Itliong was the head of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee operation in the area. He had been involved in labor fights almost since the day he got off the boat from the Philippines, in 1929; he had been a Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (C&A) organizer in the early 1930s, and then a paid organizer off and on for various Filipino unions. Since 1959 he had been in charge of AWOC’s Filipino membership. He knew the work and was an excellent card player (Gilbert Padilla says that often he would collect union dues by going to a camp, playing an evening of cards, and if he won, which he usually did, making a show of subtracting each man’s union dues from his winnings). He was generally respected as a shrewd, knowledgeable, capable representative of the workers to their bosses.

Itliong wanted the men to give up their stay-at-home and go to the vineyards. He didn’t think it could work. The victory in Coachella had been a bit of a fluke, he said. Coachella had received a hit of especially hot weather, which made the growers even more eager than usual to get the grapes picked. But in Arvin, where AWOC had first tried to extend the new pay raise, the cops had arrested twenty-four people just for being on the picket line. Now, in Delano, Zaninovich couldn’t give in to the demands even if he wanted to. To do so would shut him out of Delano’s tight Slav community. Better to go back to work, he said, and wait for a better time. But the workers weren’t having it. The strike in Arvin had been mostly Mexican pickers who were relatively easy to replace, they said, while they were Zaninovich’s best packers; he wouldn’t risk losing them. And the hot weather had lasted, so the pressure was still on. They decided to keep playing cards.¹⁰

The stay-at-home spread. Filipino workers at other companies refused to leave their camps. Despite his doubts, Itliong had little choice but to prepare for a formal strike vote. Hundreds of men came to Filipino Hall on September 8 and voted to strike. Some went on picket duty the next morning, but others, concerned about losing their homes in what might be a relatively long strike, decided to wait it out in the camps. The growers had other ideas and employed a tactic they hadn’t used since the battles of the 1930s: they turned off the gas, water, and electricity. But the strikers were not easily bullied; they continued to sleep in their beds, built outdoor toilets, and cooked their meals on campfires. The growers then busted the stay-at-home by busting up the camps, first using private security guards, who scattered the strikers’ food, moved their belongings out of the bunkhouses, and barred the doors. Later, police evicted the men from company property. Hundreds of Filipinos moved to Delano’s west side, walking the streets, hanging out in the bars and cafés, sleeping at Filipino Hall. The hall, a place usually used for card games, dances, and various patriotic celebrations, was about to become a bivouac in a labor war.

Entering the 1960s, Filipino workers were the main bearers of the limited tradition of conventional unionism in the California fields. In the 1920s, when the national average for production-line factory workers was under $5 a day, they had pushed their average earnings above $6, thanks to their exclusive control over who worked in the asparagus fields, their near monopoly on the difficult skill of cutting asparagus, and their unity in various Filipino-only associations.¹¹ Between the springs of 1932 and 1934, they were the leading ethnic group in ten separate successful strikes, one of which even secured formal recognition of the C&A as the workers’ bargaining agent, one of the few times the Communist-led union forced a grower to sign a contract. Carey McWilliams reported that by 1934, the independent Filipino Labor Union (FLU) had seven locals throughout California with about 2,000 dues-paying members. Its most stable local, in Santa Maria, operated out of a labor temple built with $8,000 from union dues.¹² Propelled by a victorious strike in 1934, and working in close cooperation with independent Anglo and Mexican unions, the Santa Maria FLU local signed contracts with the local Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association. Those contracts were strengthened through a successful 1937 strike, and in 1939 they included preferential union hiring, overtime pay, provisions about working conditions, and a joint labor-management grievance board.¹³

But for all the successes of the FLU, it was not as powerful as the Filipino Agricultural Labor Association, or FALA, which scored its first great victory in a one-day stay-at-home by 5,000 Stockton asparagus cutters in 1939. No one worked that day in 40,000 acres of ready-to-harvest asparagus, and the growers immediately capitulated and signed a collective bargaining agreement. The FALA, whose membership included not only workers but professionals, small businessmen, labor contractors and foremen, followed up that victory with strikes in the Sacramento Delta’s Brussels sprout, tomato, and celery fields, all of which resulted in signed contracts and union recognition. The next year, the power of the union was somewhat diminished as the growers organized a company union with a group of breakaway Filipino contractors, but FALA still had some 7,000 workers under contract in the delta region and nearly 30,000 members in other parts of the state, organized into separate, independent locals. These remarkable achievements, virtually unacknowledged in the conventional chronicles of endless farm worker defeats leading up to the supposedly singular victory of the UFW, continued in force until World War II, when the FLU and FALA memberships were depleted by the entry of so many Filipino farm workers into the U.S. Army. Bracero labor made it difficult to rebuild the two unions, but Filipino workers maintained a level of militancy and organization which made them, since AWOC’s inception in 1960, the strongest contingent of farm workers in the AFL-CIO sponsored union.¹⁴

For the Filipino farm workers who launched the stay-at-home in the Zaninovich camp this rich union tradition was the story of their own lives. They had lived it, they had authored it, they were the men who had sometimes lost and often won. They were mostly “Manong,” the first generation of Filipinos who had come to California as young men between 1923 and 1934. The union victories in the thirties were among the great adventures of their youth. Those exploits, well told and therefore well remembered, were part of the sweetness of their bittersweet lives. The internal solidarity and unity in action that had made these triumphs possible were not apart from a daily life that combined hard work and great suffering with an almost unfathomable closeness and mutual affection. The closeness had been forced upon them. The 20,000 souls who had worked together in the California fields since the mid-1920s lived thoroughly segregated lives: restricted to a small variety of jobs; cramped together in labor camps, or in the cheap hotels and rundown apartments of various “little Manilas”; cut off from family life by the fact that few women emigrated from the Philippines and that until 1948 it had been illegal in California for whites or Mexicans to marry Filipinos.^* Stranded in small islands of male friends and fellow workers, they learned to take care of each other. They rented rooms together where they shared beds, food, and money. They pooled resources and bought jointly owned cars or an expensive suit of clothes which they would take turns wearing as they posed for pictures to be sent home or when they went out for a night on the town. Some were able to extend their internal solidarity out into the world. The Manong produced a high percentage of radical internationalists, labor union activists, socialists, and Communists. Many others remained quite insular, true only to their shared bachelor society, passing their time working, playing cards, and raising and fighting their beloved roosters. Some, only a few, lived off various scams and con games, often taking advantage of the naiveté of their more trusting brothers. But most of the Manong lived deeply interrelated lives, their fates woven closer and closer together as the years went by, until the 1965 grape strike gave them one last chance to walk together onto the public stage and one last story to tell.

By the time of the strike, however, the Manong did have some company. After World War II, many Filipino veterans became citizens, traveled to Hawaii and the Philippines, got married, had children, and then returned to the U.S. and farm work. When their sons grew old enough, some followed their fathers to California, and joined them in the fields. By 1965, these men were in their early twenties, ready to become the “Huks” of the strike (a reference to the Hukbalahap guerrillas who had fought the Japanese occupation in World War II)—so called for their militancy on the picket lines and their guerrilla actions in the fields.¹⁵

Rudy Reyes, who would become a soldier of the early UFW, was part of this minority within a minority, but his story is different from those of his fellow Delano Huks. His dad, an early Manong, joined the Coast Guard well before World War II, met his Filipina wife in Hawaii, and after the war moved his family to Seattle, where he got a job as a draftsman. Reyes, born in 1941, grew up in a prosperous working-class family and got good grades in high school, but instead of going to college he went to the fields. “I wanted to learn, yes, I wanted to learn . . . but not in college. I wanted to learn to be a hobo. I was a reader; I had read Hemingway and Kerouac, and I wanted to hit the road. It wasn’t hard to find hobo life. I went down to the Seattle waterfront and just signed up.”¹⁶

Rudy traveled with Native Americans, whites, and blacks on the hobo circuit. They would work for a little while at a small ranch, then move on when they had enough money in their pockets. They worked only when they had to. Otherwise it was stealing fruit and vegetables from the fields, making big pots of soup, hanging out, and telling stories. There was quite a lot of drinking, but not everyone was a drunk. While working in the apples in Yakima, Washington, he linked up with a black man named Billy, who was a little bit older and taught him how to ride the trains. They ran into some of the same people everywhere, and Rudy became a somebody in his own chosen world. “There weren’t many fights,” said Reyes. “Hobos are actually a pretty peaceful bunch.”

But Billy was a tough, strong man, and people gave him a wide berth. One time we were together in a railroad yard in Seattle, and five or six drunk white tramps stumbled upon us. They either didn’t know Billy or they were too drunk to realize who he was. They said they were going to kick the shit out of us. Billy told me to give him my knife and leave. I gave him the knife; he knew how to use it better than I, but I didn’t leave. I picked up a rock instead and hurled it at the drunks. It wasn’t much of a fight; the men were too juiced up to be dangerous and soon ran off. But I knocked one down and started to kick him as he lay on the ground. Billy grabbed me. “No, no, Rudy. Don’t you dare kick a man when he’s down. We done defended ourselves. That’s all that matters. Let’s get out of here.” I never forgot those words. They have always been my guide when it comes to violence.

Reyes kept on reading: cowboy stories, mysteries, nonfiction. At one hobo camp, he found a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. For three days running the book was hardly out of his hands. He was reading about white tramps in a camp dominated by white tramps, old Okies. As he read about the Joads, he just looked up from the book and there they were. The only things missing were the cars and the strikes. Cars didn’t interest him. But strikes? Hemingway and Kerouac hadn’t said anything about strikes. And the people Rudy ran with thought of themselves as hobos, not farm workers, although farm work is what they did. They never got involved in a labor dispute. If they didn’t like something about a job, they just left it. Sometimes everyone went at once, knowing they had left the farmer with a big problem, but they didn’t call it a strike.

Reyes had heard about Delano up in Washington; people said you could make good money in the grapes. He was in Los Angeles in 1965, in Watts, when he decided to head north. The Watts Riots had broken out, and “it was a lot of fun for a while . . . like a big party. Then the cops came and started shooting into the crowd . . . [and] it turned ugly.” He took a freight train out of LA and wound up in Delano’s Chinatown. “I walked into the Manila Café. I didn’t have to be too smart to figure out that was a good place to start.” The next day he was in a Filipino labor camp owned by Vincent Zaninovich, Marco’s brother. An AWOC enthusiast, Julian Balidoy, younger than the Manong, who were the majority in the camp, but older than Reyes, told him that a strike was coming soon. Rudy wanted to start right then; he was twenty-four years old.

In September 1965 there was nothing inevitable about Mexican solidarity with the Filipinos. Such solidarity was not unheard of in California’s agricultural history, but it was the exception. More Filipino strikes had been broken by strike-breaking Mexicans (and vice versa) than had been helped by acts of interethnic solidarity. And this time, the Filipinos were particularly vulnerable. They were mostly an aging, shrinking part of the workforce, and if the local Mexican majority decided to scab, not only was the Filipinos’ strike doomed, but the Filipinos’ very presence in the vineyards might be jeopardized.

The National Farm Workers Association’s decision to join the strike, unlike the act of defiance that began it, was made by the association’s leadership rather than by the rank and file. The workers were confused and divided. What should they do? Some were already crossing the picket lines; most continued to pick grapes on the ranches where there were no strikes. A few of the Mexicans saw the same opportunity that the Filipinos had seen, but no Mexican work stoppage, organized from below, added its weight to the Filipino action. Instead, people came to the NFWA office to see what the association was going to do now that the struggle had arrived at its own doorstep.

Formally joining this strike would require a commitment different from anything the association had ever attempted. Potentially some 5,000 workers might be involved, and the fight would engage a group of powerful and hostile bosses directly. The NFWA leaders did not want to be dragged into such a battle against their will if, in their best judgment, they were sure to lose. The leaders had to make that judgment. They could not avoid making it, as there were no local Mexican strikes in progress, no farm worker militants pulling them along and making the decision for them. No delegation of striking Filipinos came to Cesar Chavez and asked for his support. Rather, Mexican workers came and asked him what he was going to do. It was mostly the more militant ones who wanted to know, but they would not act on their own.

Manuel and Esther Uranday, dues-paying NFWA members, remember rushing into the office and telling Chavez about the strike and catching him by surprise. Bill Esher remembers the same moment: “Damn them,” Chavez said, “we will have to either break the strike or join them. We’re not ready for this.” Cesar swore in Spanish, sat at his desk for a while “holding his head in misery,” and then went to the bathroom, the only place he could escape the excitement and tumult of the office. Esher remembers that he was in there for half an hour. When he finally came out, he was “grim, without hope or joy.” But he told Esher, “We are going to join them.”¹⁷

But joining them would not be easy. Chavez called Padilla in Porterville. “The world’s coming to an end, Gilbert; the Filipinos are out on strike. Come on down.” When Padilla arrived, Cesar still seemed unsure about what to do. He asked Gilbert to go over to Filipino Hall to see what was happening. Padilla walked in on an enthusiastic meeting of a few hundred people. Five languages were flying around—Tagalog, Ilocano, Viscayan, English, and Spanish. The AWOC chief, Al Green, was there, but seemed to have very little to do with the strike. Larry Itliong chaired the meeting, and although there was a lot of talk about the wage demands, Padilla heard little mention of the issue of union recognition. Padilla had a friendly conversation with a few Mexican members of AWOC, and later, when Chavez, still hesitant, asked, “Well, what do we do?” Gilbert, caught up in the excitement of the mass meeting, had no doubts: “We are going to strike.”¹⁸

Itliong was friendly but somewhat standoffish in his first conversation with Padilla. He didn’t take the NFWA seriously. If its members really wanted to help, they could all join AWOC, he said. After that, Bill Esher wrote up a leaflet calling AWOC the “union of the north” (a reference to its Stockton headquarters, which implied that NFWA was the authentic Delano-area farm worker organization) listing the demands of the strike and the growers being struck. It ended with an injunction: “The Farm Worker Association asks of all Mexicans: HONOR THIS STRIKE. DON’T BE STRIKEBREAKERS.” Chavez issued a press release that said, in part, “Now is when every worker, without regard to race, color, or nationality, should support the strike and must under no circumstances work on those ranches that have been struck.” A special edition of El Malcriado gave unconditional support to the AWOC strike.¹⁹

Meanwhile, dozens of Filipino pickets walked in front of the packing sheds and cold-storage facilities alongside the railroad tracks that run through the center of Delano. On the working-class west side the talk at bars and cafés was dominated by strike stories: the foreman who shot at an evicted Filipino because he wasn’t leaving his camp fast enough; police cars patrolling in front of Filipino Hall; the vulnerability of the wooden packing sheds to fire; late-night actions against water pumps. The NFWA was essentially on the sidelines. Padilla, Huerta, and Esher were anxious to be at the center of the battle. Chavez was cautious. Some Mexican farm workers were crossing the picket lines, but at one ranch, a young woman led her Mexican crew out in support of the strike. Chavez called an executive board meeting for September 14 to decide what to do.²⁰

The meeting saw Chavez at his strategic best. At the very least the NFWA had to continue to support the AWOC strike, he said. If not, the Filipinos would blame the Mexicans for what was surely an upcoming defeat. The inevitable mutual recrimination would destroy all possibility for Mexican-Filipino cooperation. AWOC would be more damaged than the NFWA, but both groups would have a hard time organizing after such a major loss. No one at the meeting disagreed with that. The question was whether to go beyond support for the AWOC strike, and exactly how to do it. Itliong’s suggestion that the NFWA dissolve itself into AWOC was unacceptable, and yet he had offered no other way for the association to become more involved. No half measures came to mind. If the NFWA wanted to go beyond a statement of solidarity, it would have to call its own strike. Chavez acknowledged that if the question were put to a vote at a mass meeting, people would decide to extend the strike to their own ranches. But he also argued that the enthusiasm would soon pass, the growers would hold firm, and most people would go back to work. In many ways the most prudent course was not to call a mass meeting and not to commit the NFWA any further. But that meant watching AWOC lose, and suffering all the consequences.

Chavez concluded that the NFWA had to enter the strike, despite his own assessment that the workers were not powerful enough to win. Was the organization, then, walking into a disaster? Cesar answered his own question: maybe, but not necessarily. If it could effectively involve outside supporters in the strike, it might overcome the unfavorable local balance of forces. He pointed out that Padilla and the Migrant Ministry had done just that in the rent strike. A vast mobilization of outside support might even turn this more conventional battle into a winner. It was a gamble, a long shot, Chavez argued, but what other choice did they have? They should join the strike, not be discouraged by expected early setbacks, and try to make the strike last long enough so that the power of their supporters could be felt locally. They must not strike and run.

Such a notion was much in the air in the late summer of 1965. Over the previous few years, the civil rights movement had mobilized liberal supporters in the North in an effort to overcome the seemingly all-powerful local forces supporting segregation in the South. That strategy had had its ups and downs, with SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Council disagreeing about its ultimate effectiveness, but it had just scored a spectacular national victory with the Selma march and the subsequent passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Chavez specifically cited those gains, and the strategy behind them, at the meeting, as he had been thinking about the applicability of civil rights strategy to the farm worker movement for some time. Six months earlier he had told a meeting of Mexican American leaders, according to one of the people at the meeting, Bert Corona, “that the reason the farm workers’ organizing drive could win in the days ahead was because they could ally themselves with a new feature in American social and political activity—the movement for civil rights, the movement of the youth, and the movement of the poor.”²¹

And who better than Chavez to see that the strategy of the civil rights movement could be used by his newly developing National Farm Workers Association? His Community Service Organization had been essentially a Mexican American civil rights group—it was no great stretch to think of the NFWA more as a continuation of the Mexican American civil rights struggle than as a conventional effort to organize a union. Not that the two conceptions of the NFWA could be easily separated, even theoretically. As the organization’s leaders often argued, one of the reasons that wages and working conditions were so bad was because farm workers were not covered by the same laws as all other Americans. Legally they were second-class workers, only recently granted workers’ compensation (owing primarily to the lobbying efforts of Dolores Huerta, coupled with the voter registration campaigns of the CSO and the NFWA), still lacking unemployment insurance, not covered by organizing rights under the National Labor Relations Act, with separate and unequal coverage by Social Security, child labor, and minimum-wage laws. In its first two years, the NFWA had placed considerable emphasis on political action (forging temporary alliances with liberal Democratic politicians and participating in Sacramento legislative hearings) to change this second-class status. Righting those wrongs was surely as much a civil rights battle as it was a union fight. As Chavez had been arguing for some time, this conception of the NFWA not only made good sense in the fields, it made perfect sense in terms of the overall political situation in the country. Who was more popular with the general public, civil rights leaders or union officials?

Once Chavez came to believe that joining the strike was the least worst choice, he urged the others to make that choice with full energy and enthusiasm. They were not hard to convince. Here was another mark of his political agility: he proposed to make a virtue of necessity. The Filipino strike and the enthusiasm of the workers was a great opportunity, he concluded, because the NFWA could transform this local struggle into a statewide and regional fight. Chavez was not clear on how that might be done, but he mentioned, almost as an aside, that they would have a better chance if they fought nonviolently: the strikers should not use the guns, sticks, and chains that had been taken to hand in almost all earlier farm worker battles.

A mass meeting was called for September 16, Mexican Independence Day—two days hence. People would be ready to celebrate, and speakers could evoke the radical traditions of Mexican nationalism when urging workers to join the strike. But only an experienced crew could arrange for such a meeting in two days’ time, as they would have to rush through all the necessary preparations—securing the hall, printing and distributing thousands of leaflets, arranging for numerous radio announcements, and planning the agenda. By all accounts the mood at the mass meeting was upbeat and energetic. A relaxed, humorous Gilbert Padilla chaired the meeting; a norteño trio sang patriotic songs; NFWA treasurer Tony Orendain warmed up the crowd (attendance estimates range from 800 to 1,500) by leading various vivas—“Viva la Causa! ” “Viva la Huelga! ” “Viva Cesar Chavez! ” The local hero Epifanio Camacho gave the most impressive speech, calling on the workers to become the true “sons of Zapata.” A subdued, modest Chavez tried to impress upon people how hard the struggle would be, and made a plea for nonviolence. Speakers from the floor recalled earlier battles, one even alluding to the 1933 Pixley martyrs, who had been murdered in the historic cotton strike. The crowd interrupted the speakers with rhythmic clapping and various vivas of their own, and clearly endorsed the strike, which was set to start the next Monday morning.

They had a weekend to prepare. The staff called the Oakland Catholic Worker collective and the Bay Area Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and two SNCC organizers came down immediately. Certified letters were sent to the growers, asking for negotiations. Chavez approached Delano’s mayor and a friend in the California State Mediation and Conciliation Service, hoping that they could convince the growers to talk, but the growers rejected all offers. Picket captains were appointed and assigned to various ranches. Huerta met with Itliong, who dropped his request that the NFWA join AWOC, and welcomed its direct participation in the strike.

All that remained was a meeting with AWOC’s Al Green. Hartmire set it up, with himself as the mediator. Chavez and Drake represented the NFWA; Green came alone. Chavez, whose NFWA had little money, proposed a joint strike fund to Green, who had access to plenty. AWOC was paying as much as $40 a week to the Filipino strikers. Green said no, he wouldn’t share funds. Nor would he agree to a joint strike committee or sign a mutual nonraiding pact. He did agree that the two groups should make the same strike demands and cooperate fully in what, technically, would be separate strikes. After the meeting, Green and Chavez stood together to have their pictures taken.

Green left town immediately afterward. He was still disdainful of the NFWA and “that Mexican,” as he called Chavez. He was not interested in the strike; Itliong could run it. He was confident that his backing from the AFL-CIO and his close relations with West Coast Teamster leaders meant that he held all the important cards in AWOC’s rivalry with the NFWA. In fact, everything had been worked out by those below him, and the meeting had done little more than fill him in on the news. His hand was far weaker than he assumed. The AFL-CIO money would do him little good. That Mexican, the little man he had just brushed off, was several jumps ahead of him, about to become a darling of history. And although history often chooses her darlings capriciously, this time she did not. Her favors were bestowed on the one who best understood her current passions and inclinations.

The first day of the strike, Monday, September 20, about a hundred people showed up at the NFWA office ready to picket. Most of the others who had voted to strike four days earlier went back to work. Were they really on strike? No official union offering even minimum benefits had called this strike, nor had there been a spontaneous walkout to set it off. The doubt was so pervasive that even Teresa Fabela, Helen Chavez’s sister and sometime babysitter, went to work at the Mid-State Vineyards. This wasn’t a serious familial betrayal; it was just a reflection of the general confusion.²²

People may have gone to work not knowing whether the strike was on, but once the pickets appeared, many walked off the job. Enough people joined in the first two weeks—several hundreds for sure, perhaps thousands—so that production was seriously reduced. The NFWA leadership transformed the quickly escalating number of volunteers, both farm workers and student, church, and labor supporters, into an effective organization. They drew a tight circle with a nine-mile radius and declared it the official strike zone, where no on could work.²³ Beyond the circle, work could proceed as usual. This had always been a common, informal strike tactic among farm workers; now, the skilled, experienced organizers of the NFWA formalized it by organizing car pools to take workers to other jobs away from the strike area. The organizers also got official strike certification at some thirty ranches within the strike zone. State certification came with documentation that showed that at least one worker at the ranch had gone on strike, which prevented the state employment service from legally sending workers to those ranches and also made it more difficult for the growers to claim that no strike existed. The NFWA organized a set of “flying squadrons,” which, just like the roving automobile picket lines of the cotton strike thirty-one years earlier, set out in the early morning, armed with the workers’ knowledge of picking patterns and their own informal intelligence reports, to find and harass the remaining scabs.²⁴

The first great triumph of the strike was the newfound warmth and solidarity between the Mexican and Filipino strikers. The AWOC was supposed to picket certain ranches and the NFWA others, but from the beginning the Filipino and Mexican picketers intermingled, stood up to the police and growers together, and jointly tried to convince the workers to leave the fields. Gilbert Padilla’s experience was representative. “For the first time I began to talk to the Filipinos as brothers and friends. Before that we never talked to them, and they never talked to us.”²⁵ Out of conversations like that among hundreds of workers came the invitation from the Filipinos to the Mexican strikers to come eat at Filipino Hall. Food was free there for AWOC strikers, paid for by the AFL-CIO. Meanwhile, the NFWA pickets had been trying to get by on baloney sandwiches from the association hall or on the small amounts of food they could afford to prepare at home. Neither sufficed, and many NFWA strikers came to the picket lines hungry, a fact not lost on the Filipino strikers. The invitation to Filipino Hall came without prior approval from either Green or Itliong and without the knowledge of the NFWA leadership. This was just the kind of cooperation that Green had denied Chavez at their meeting just before the strike. But looking at it from the bottom up, how could there be any objection? There seemed to be plenty of food. Letting the Mexicans eat at the hall did not mean that the Filipinos would have any less. And what better way to strengthen the bonds of solidarity? Two sets of strikers sitting down to eat together, the Filipinos sharing one of the most prized parts of their culture, unable to hide their pleasure as some Mexicans began to appreciate the Filipino food they had long ridiculed. Those meals made Filipino Hall into Strike Central, and the memory of that shared pleasure would endure long after most of the Filipino and Mexican strikers had gone their separate ways.

But Chavez had been right; this time his pessimism about strikes proved to be well grounded. This was no little skirmish that the growers would be inclined to settle quickly. They were reluctant to give ground on wages and even more opposed to recognizing either of the two organizations as official representatives of the workers. Through an extensive network of labor contractors, the growers recruited strikebreakers from outside the area—first from Tulare, Stockton, and Bakersfield, later from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and finally from as far away as Oregon, Texas, and Mexico. Local judges issued injunctions that set limits on the picketers’ ability to gather in large numbers or get close enough to talk to the scabs. The Delano police and California Highway Patrol faithfully enforced the injunctions, and were quick to arrest aggressive strikers but slow to constrain equally aggressive foremen and supervisors. The police were particularly reluctant to take on the growers, some of whom drove their cars dangerously close to the picket lines or threatened strikers by firing shotguns in the air. Other growers quietly met the strikers’ wage demands, encouraging people to come back to work and allowing those who did to argue in their own defense that the main demand of the strike had been won.

As many local Mexican strikers returned to their jobs, the Filipinos began to waver. Their biggest concern was the possible loss of their homes, as the growers began housing strikebreakers in the old Filipino camps. At what point would they lose their place in the camps indefinitely? Where else would they live? They couldn’t live in the Filipino Hall forever. In the first weeks of October, when it seemed clear that the strike would not be strong enough to force the growers to capitulate, the Filipinos started to return to the camps. The foremen, who were often the authentic leaders in the Filipino bachelor community and intermediaries between the men and the bosses, led the return. Pete Velasco, who later became a member of the UFW Executive Board, was one of only two foreman who did not go back to work. Although the AWOC officially remained committed to the strike and Itliong continued as one of the important strike leaders, most of the rank-and-file AWOC activists also resumed work. The minority of younger Filipino strikers, who tended to be more mobile—working in Alaska’s canneries, on the Seattle waterfront, and in the Stockton asparagus, as well as in the Delano grapes—simply moved on to another town as the strike’s power diminished. When the harvest ended in November, fewer than a hundred Filipino strikers remained at Filipino Hall. For most of those men, their act of defiance in early September came to mean the end of their working lives.²⁶

In the aftermath of the strike, the NFWA leadership and the growers argued over how many people actually had participated. The growers claimed that no more than 500 people walked out in the first couple of weeks and that most of them subsequently returned. The NFWA claimed that 5,000 had walked out and that the vast majority never returned but were replaced by scabs, mostly people from Mexico. Great efforts were made on both sides to establish the validity of their own figures. But the debate was beside the point. In the long run, the number of people who originally left the fields and what percentage of them returned, mattered not one whit. The figure that counted in the battles to come was the number of loyalists who in the process of the strike were recruited, body and soul, to the NFWA and Cesar Chavez. Many of them were outside supporters, not farm workers, but the majority were exactly the people whom the NFWA had been trying to organize since 1962: the Mexican American farm worker families who had settled in the small towns of the southern Central Valley.

Although the strike’s first great accomplishment among farm workers was the solidarity of the Mexican and Filipino strikers, its most lasting achievement was that about a hundred original strikers, plus a few other militant farm workers who came to Delano to get in on the action, joined the farm worker families who had been fully committed to the NFWA before the strike. These people together, somewhat more than a few hundred strong, remained fully committed to the strike even as the growers managed to resume full production in October and November. They got up early in the morning and went to the picket lines, and often volunteered at the NFWA office in the afternoon and evenings. In the early days they survived on nothing more than the donations of food and clothing that poured into the Delano office, plus the once-a-day meals at Filipino Hall. Many of these people remained part of the union family over the next five years. Some of them turned their lives upside down, leaving the small towns that had been their homes and traveling to the nation’s largest cities to become the crucial players in what came next the biggest, most successful boycott in U.S. history.

* Depending on the conditions workers could usually pick two to four boxes an hour, so the twenty-five-cent incentive the workers wanted would add a minimum of fifty cents an hour. The previous year the wage was $1.25 plus ten cents a box, putting the hourly average at about $1.50. (See Dunne, Delano.)

* Law has it limits. Some Pinoys went to Arizona or Mexico where they could get legally married and others set up households with women and children in what I suppose could be called illegal families.