Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 20

11 Moral Jujitsu

September ’65 to January ’66

Generations of California growers and police officials have done what they could to keep farm workers separated from their potential allies in the rest of the country. In the 1950s, the DiGiorgio Corporation managed to get a court order to ban and destroy all copies of a film about a farm worker strike. In the 1930s, reporters were arrested in rural California counties for filing harvest strike stories in big city newspapers. In 1934, Imperial County’s Sheriff Charles Gillett prohibited a Nation journalist from sending a cable to New York from a local Western Union office. Despite the sheriff ’s efforts, news did get to Los Angeles about the 1934 strike, and about twenty people set out for the Imperial Valley on what they called a “Good Will Tour” to bring aid to the strikers. The sheriff and his deputies stopped them at the Imperial County line, where everyone in the caravan was handcuffed and arrested.¹

Even more than geographical distance, however, race and language separated farm workers from other people. With the brief exceptions of fruit tramps in the early 1900s and Okies in the late thirties, California farm workers have been primarily Asian or Mexican immigrants who were often monolingual in languages other than English. The fictions of race were hard enough to break through, but not being able to talk to other people made it especially difficult to reach out to them for aid. The isolation of farm workers was even codified in law. In 1936, farm workers were purposefully written out of the National Labor Relations Act, and between 1941 and 1965, a large percentage of farm workers were braceros legally separated from other U.S. workers.

But space and race were very different in 1965 than they had been thirty years before. Television, radio, faster cars, better roads, and both commercial and private airplane travel had shrunk the country and brought the California fields closer to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. World War II, the Jackie Robinson–led integration of major league baseball, and the early civil rights movement had transformed many people’s attitudes towards race. The fact that farm workers were mostly “nonwhite” was no longer a guarantee that other sectors of society would not support their struggles. Interracial solidarity had blossomed in the early sixties. Many white Americans had been willing to support African Americans, opening the possibility that they would also support Mexican Americans, and even Mexican immigrants.^*

When farm workers first refused to go to work in Delano in 1965, they were still isolated, largely unknown to the dominant, citified American culture. But the conditions that had produced that isolation had changed. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the stage was set for farm workers to reach out to potential white supporters in American cities—but a set stage does not a drama make. Farm workers needed a strategy to connect them to their potential supporters in the cities. They needed someone to help them find a way out of their rural, racial, linguistic, and legal isolation. They found that someone, and he found the boycott.

Cesar Chavez first heard about the possibilities of a boycott soon after the grape strike began. Jim Drake was driving him to a fundraiser on the California coast, and in the relative calm of the drive, he told Cesar the story of the Irish campaign against Captain Charles Boycott, a story Drake had stumbled upon in a book whose name he had forgotten. In the late nineteenth century, Captain Boycott’s job was to collect rents from impoverished Irish peasants and turn them over to wealthy Anglo-Irish landlords. Led by a small-town priest, the peasants, some of them literally starving, decided to stop paying the rent and to ostracize the rent collector from the community in which he lived. No one would sell him anything, nor would anyone buy his goods. Laborers refused to work on Boycott’s small piece of land. He and his wife were isolated, shunned. The Irish government sent a regiment of troops to defend Boycott, but he didn’t need defending. No one had threatened him with violence. Useless, the troops quartered themselves on his land, chopped down his trees for firewood, and ate his livestock. The campaign became famous, not only in Ireland but in London and New York, and was promoted by the Irish Land League as a nonviolent alternative to the contemporaneous armed struggle for Irish independence. Boycott was ruined, a prisoner in his own home, and finally left town in disgrace.²

Drake could see that the story pleased Chavez. How could it not? The boycott required thorough organization. The peasants’ poverty and Catholicism had helped unite them. At the center of the story was an organizer, a small-town priest. But Cesar did not immediately take hold of the idea. The campaign against Captain Boycott had been a local affair. Local folks had made their power felt against a local enemy. Sure, other Irish peasants used the same technique against their own tax collectors—in that sense it had spread—but what Chavez was looking for was a way of involving other forces in the grape strike, not of moving the strike to other areas. He agreed it was an excellent story, but he would not commit himself.

At the time, labor boycotts—strangled by law and lacking appeal because of the general disdain toward AFL-CIO officialdom—had degenerated into the largely ignored “Unfair” lists in the back of union newspapers. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott repopularized the word, but in that case the people doing the boycotting were the actual participants in the conflict, not outside supporters. Northerners picketing Woolworth stores after the 1960–61 Greensboro sit-ins were a better example. But although those picket lines were important in linking the civil rights movement and the new student left, they were not particularly instrumental in ending the segregation of southern lunch counters. That victory was achieved closer to home, in the southern cities themselves.

Ultimately grape workers and their supporters reawakened the country to the power of the boycott. Their example spurred the Chicana-led boycott of the Farah Pants Company from 1972 to ’74, which was consciously modeled on the farm workers’ efforts. After Farah capitulated, the National Council of Churches launched an unprecedented worldwide boycott of the Nestlé Company for its aggressive marketing of baby formula to third world mothers. When the church action forced Nestlé to back off its attack on breastfeeding, the boycott became a standard weapon in contemporary social struggles, finally picked up by organized labor in the early 1980s as a part of its anticorporate campaigns. But in 1965, a boycott did not quickly come to mind as a way of spreading a union fight. It took NFWA leaders a full six months of experimentation and discussion before an unexpected victory made the boycott their primary strategy. Even then it wasn’t so much that the leaders chose the boycott—it was more like the boycott chose them.

When Drake first floated the idea of a boycott, picket lines were still active in the grape strike, and the NFWA was asking supporters to send them money, food, clothing, and endorsements, or to come to Delano and help build the strike. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the left was thriving, filled with energy, and quick to respond. Ann Draper, a socialist official of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and a member of the Executive Board of Citizens for Farm Labor, organized a food and clothing caravan to Delano in the first weeks of the strike. She also brought $6,000 in cash. Students from the Bay Area who had just lived through the victorious Free Speech Movement and were now building the antiwar movement at full bore, came to Delano with their enthusiasm and sleeping bags. Many young radicals driving between LA and San Francisco made a semi-obligatory stop at the Delano picket lines. Independent union militants stopped by. Priests, rabbis, and Protestant clergy from all over California spent time picketing and issued statements and decrees. So much used clothing arrived that the strikers could pick and choose, and finding a place to store the extras became a problem. These moral and physical contributions were important in holding the strike together in the early days, but they were not a dramatic enough extension of the scope of the battle to make a significant difference in its outcome.

The major news outlets ignored the strike: the big papers ran a few small paragraphs, but there was nothing on TV outside of the Central Valley. The only regular newspaper reports were from Ron Taylor of the Fresno Bee and from a few left and labor publications: The Valley Labor Citizen, a weekly publication of regional labor and trade councils, edited by the brilliant photographer George Ballis; The People’s World, published by the California Communist Party; and The Movement, put out by the Friends of SNCC, which publicized and analyzed developments in the rapidly changing black and student movements. “How to get the story in the news” was a common topic of conversation in Delano, just as it was becoming a major consideration in the bourgeoning antiwar movement, and among all U.S. political actors. Portable video cameras, first introduced in the early 1960s, had changed the nature of TV news. Live radio reports were becoming increasingly popular. A large group of liberally inclined young newspaper reporters were out looking for stories. Those they did pick up could have a national impact many times their local weight. If the strike could be presented in a way that pricked popular interest, shutting off the news from the Central Valley would require much more than closing down the local telegraph office.

Chavez’s original idea of promoting the strike as a civil rights struggle provided a basis for winning sympathy from the general population and the rank-and-file producers of the news, but it didn’t automatically guarantee coverage. Farm workers were more unknown to the rest of the country than were the South’s young blacks, whose consistent courage in the face of brutal repression had pushed them into the headlines. Farm workers didn’t speak English, were not yet servants in other people’s homes, did not have the African Americans’ deep, twisted historical ties to their white neighbors. They were considered aliens and sojourners, as well as subordinates. Their labor camps were more isolated from rural communities than the typical black section of a southern town. The farm worker strikes that followed the end of the Bracero Program were big news in farm communities but hardly mattered to anyone else. The NFWA had to make them matter if they were going to win.

Originally, only two people in the NFWA leadership had any extensive experience with the media: Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. In her years as a lobbyist in Sacramento, Huerta had talked to many newsmen and participated in scores of press conferences. She was smart, fiery, and beautiful. She was good copy, and she learned how to use herself to promote her causes. Chavez’s style was completely different, but even in his role as the behind-the-scenes Alinsky organizer of the CSO he had built good relations with farm town reporters, so that he had a feel for what those reporters wanted and how to make as big an impact as possible.

Early in the strike, Cesar started talking to Gilbert Padilla, Jim Drake, Dolores Huerta, his cousin Manuel Chavez, and Chris Hartmire about what he called “moral jujitsu,” which he offered as a tactical solution to the problem of spreading the word and getting the story into the news. Chavez attributed the idea to Gandhi: the Mahatma had used it to defeat the English in India, and the NFWA could use it to beat the growers in Delano. Several degrees more subtle than Alinsky’s “dirty tricks,” moral jujitsu was a tactical approach that allowed Cesar to give full rein to his strategic sensibility and avoid the difficult political calculations of ends and means, the problem of doing bad in order to achieve the good. The growers had more strength than the NFWA, but just as the jujitsu expert with subtle feints and skillful shifts of weight can take advantage of his opponent’s thrusts, Cesar proposed to turn the growers’ power back upon themselves. Such a strategy seemed to present no moral danger, and although it might prove difficult to execute, it was not conceptually complicated.

One of the growers’ main strengths was their influence with the Delano and Kern County police, sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges, who had a legal monopoly on the use of violence and could be quite discriminatory in how they applied the law. Police harassment didn’t make the difference between winning and losing, but it made life more miserable for the picketers, and it was a measure of the growers’ local power—power that Chavez proposed to turn against them.

His first opportunity came in the form of the overzealous Kern County sheriff, who, seemingly on his own, decided in mid-October to interpret the court injunction that banned any disturbance of the peace on the picket lines to mean that strikers could neither use the word huelga—strike—nor shout at scabs over a megaphone. There was no need to shout at the strikebreakers, he explained, because they had heard it all already, and, anyway, huelga was not an American word.³ Such tactics had worked before. In the 1930s, several rural judges had made the use of Spanish on picket lines illegal. But what had worked in the 1930s simply set up the police and growers for a jujitsu move in the 1960s. The day after the sheriff ’s announcement of the new policy, Reverend David Havens of the Migrant Ministry tested the lawman’s willingness to enforce the order by standing in the back of Epifanio Camacho’s pickup truck and reading Jack London’s description of a scab: “a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone of jelly and glue.”^* Havens, dressed in a coat and tie, was arrested. An excited group of picketers returned to the NFWA headquarters. The sheriffs were nibbling at the baited hook; maybe they would swallow it whole.

Chavez chaired an open strategy meeting that night at the crowded NFWA hall on Albany Street. Animated speakers assessed the situation. What about free speech? What about the Constitution? Didn’t it cover us, too? As a consensus emerged to challenge the sheriff ’s order, Cesar asked how many would be willing to go to jail for the right to say “huelga” on the picket line. All hands shot up amidst a tumultuous chant of the forbidden word. People were ready to act; now it was a matter of doing it right. Chavez had already asked Wendy Goepel to schedule a Bay Area campus tour to Berkeley, Mills College, San Francisco State, and Stanford University. Why not synchronize Cesar’s tour with civil rights–style civil disobedience in Delano?⁴

Chris Hartmire was assigned to recruit ministers who would also be willing to get arrested. He organized a Day of Christian Concern. On October 19, the NFWA called the Kern County sheriff ’s office to say that farm workers intended to defy the gag order that very morning and were about to leave from their office in search of strikebreakers. Lawmen in sheriffs’ cars and a paddy wagon rushed to the NFWA office to discover that reporters from most of the large California dailies and several TV crews were waiting for them. Undeterred, the sheriffs went to the end of “one of the strangest farm labor strike caravans of all time,” as the Fresno Bee’s Ronald Taylor put it. Rather than racing over back roads, trying to find the scabs and elude the police, as strike caravans had been doing since farm workers started driving cars, this line of vehicles moved slowly, with the picketers making sure that the big city reporters, patrol cars, and paddy wagon did not get left behind. After an hour’s search the NFWA drivers finally found a working crew, stopped, waited for reporters and sheriffs to take their places, and started to shout “huelga.” Forty-four were arrested: thirteen farm workers and thirty-one volunteers, including nine ministers.⁵

Chavez and Goepel, waiting in the Bay Area, received the news as soon as Jim Drake could get to a phone. It had all gone according to plan. Chavez knew about the arrests before his first speech, scheduled for the epicenter of the West Coast student movement, the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley. There, at noon, 500 students gathered to hear a strike report. As Cesar, in his quiet fashion, gave his straightforward account, Goepel dramatically interrupted him and handed him a piece of paper. Chavez read it to himself, and then to the crowd: forty-four people, including his wife, had just been arrested in Delano for shouting “huelga.” The response was immediate. “Huelga! Huelga! Huelga! ” the excited crowd shouted back at the farm worker leader. Later, at the other colleges, the smaller crowds had also taken up the chant, making the strike their own. As Goepel drove the VW bug back to Delano, Cesar counted the contributions: $6,700.⁶

But the money was not as important as the publicity. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Kansas City Star ran their very first stories about the strike.⁷ The arrests were featured on TV news programs throughout California. The NFWA finally made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Los Angeles Times ran a two-column picture on page three. The growers barely knew what had hit them, but the sheriffs got the drift. They never again tried to enforce the gag order. Eventually, the injunction was declared unconstitutional, and all charges were dropped. Too late. The strike had broken out of the Central Valley. Moral jujitsu had won its first victory. But the question remained: What was the best way to leverage the growing outside support to force the growers to sign a contract?

October slid into November, and rain came down hard in Delano. The strikers were relieved. The harvest was officially over. No need for picket lines now. Significant numbers of people wouldn’t be required in the fields until mid-January. The growers had held on to enough veteran workers and brought in enough new ones to collect a large harvest. For the next several months, the primary work of the industry would be to distribute its bounty. As far as AWOC director, Al Green, was concerned, the rains meant the strike was over. He cut off strike benefits and, in tune with standard farm worker practice, shifted his attention to the next stop on the farm worker circuit, the citrus harvest in Porterville.

It was the NFWA that broke farm worker custom. It refused to call off the strike, although no one—not even the top leadership—could say for sure what it meant to be on strike after the harvest was over. The strike was now like the word huelga. It had come to mean more than just collectively withdrawing labor power; rather, it was a general call to arms, whose very utterance, thanks to the Kern County sheriff ’s department, was a symbolic act of defiance. Huelga didn’t mean that to everyone yet, only to the strikers and their few thousand supporters in the student movement, labor unions, and the church. But it would soon come to mean that to millions of people. And it is one measure of the impact of Cesar Chavez and the farm worker movement that those millions came to recognize huelga before most of them knew what an enchilada was.

The baby steps that would lead to the grape boycott were taken by a few people, newly liberated from the picket lines, who attempted, on the fly, to make a crude map of the grape distribution system and to develop a strategy for disrupting it. They followed the grapes out of town, trying to figure out exactly where they went, and how they got to the supermarkets. Trains carried the grapes from Delano to the Roseville yard, outside Sacramento, and then traveled east. Most of the trucks leaving the warehouses went to the big wholesale produce markets, where the grapes were unloaded, and then distributed to retail stores, primarily big chains. Some of the trucks went to the docks in San Francisco, Oakland, San Pedro, Stockton, and Long Beach, where they were unloaded and then loaded onto ships for distribution around the world. What were the possibilities? The Roseville yard was a logistical disaster, eight miles long and fifty tracks wide. As the railroad cars were switched from engine to engine the farm workers couldn’t identify the trains that carried the grapes. Furthermore, federal laws against interfering with train travel were strong, and the several unions with jurisdiction in the yards almost always obeyed them. The big-city produce terminals looked more promising. The strikers could easily follow the trucks, and the Teamsters who loaded and unloaded the grapes had a lot of control over what actually happened at the terminals. Thus, the downtown LA terminal, a two-hour drive from Delano, became an early focus for activists.

But the first intimations of the future strategy came on the San Francisco Bay Area docks. Work there was entirely in the hands of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the large left-wing union that was born in the victorious 1934 San Francisco general strike. The ILWU had a unique historical commitment to organizing farm workers and cannery workers, starting with the 1937 “march inland,” which was intended to protect the gains of longshoremen by extending some measure of the 1934 victory to “inland workers.” That organizing drive had been substantially defeated by the Western Conference of Teamsters, which offered the bosses the carrot of a more friendly, business-oriented union. Nonetheless, as a few striking farm workers arrived on the San Francisco docks in early December 1965, top ILWU officials were still interested in bringing farm workers under their wing, and the rank and file was still vigorous and proud of its power and traditions.⁸

Two days after the first hard rain, Gilbert Padilla, a young striker named Tony Mendez, his wife, Socorro, and Sergio Tovar of the AWOC got into a car and drove to San Francisco. Gilbert can’t remember whose car they took, but it wasn’t his. He had lent his to Dolores the first week of the strike and never saw it again. Cars came and went in those days. This time, his car full of spirited young people was following a truck carrying 1,250 cases of scab grapes from the Pagliarulo warehouse in Delano. The pursuit ended at Pier 50, after dark; the truck got into a long line, apparently not to be unloaded until the next day. Despite the light rain, the four from Delano, armed with homemade signs that said “Don’t Eat Grapes,” started to march up and down in front of the pier. Almost immediately, longshoremen on night shift and truck drivers waiting to load and unload came over and asked them what they were doing. Many dockworkers encouraged them to remain, and one even brought them a couple of raincoats. Soon, Jimmy Herman, head of the clerks’ division and one of the most powerful officials in the ILWU, rushed to the dock. He took the four wet, enthusiastic people back to his office and gave them coffee. Padilla was surprised by how much Herman already knew about the strike. Then Herman got down on his knees and made up some new signs that said “Farm Workers On Strike.” He told them to return just before dawn and stand in front of the dock with those signs. Herman said that the bosses would throw an injunction at them, but it would be too late; they could stop the grapes from being unloaded first. “Don’t tell nobody about who gave you these,” he said, gesturing to the signs. “You just stand there. Don’t say a god-damn thing.”⁹

Padilla later declared that the next day’s surprise was “the most fascinating thing that ever happened to me.” Gilbert tends to dramatic speech, but that is still quite an assessment by a child of the labor camps, war veteran, father of eight children, and close compatriot of Cesar Chavez for twenty-six years before Chavez forced him out of the union in 1980. But in some respects, Padilla has it right. On that rainy morning and afternoon, clerks, longshoremen, and a few truck drivers took a first step in reversing the historical separation between California’s rural and urban workers. It was a major reversal: at the very dawn of California labor history, in the late nineteenth century, San Francisco’s Irish union workers had fought the bosses and Chinese farm workers, mistakenly believing that by taking the big growers’ side against the Chinese, they could get concessions from the bosses in other areas and eliminate the competition from low-wage Chinese laborers. Those Irish anti-Chinese riots set the tone for California union history. The California branch of the American Federation of Labor acted completely within the spirit and logic of those riots when it refused to give charters to nonwhite farm-worker unions, right up until World War II. As did the vast majority of unionized city workers, who from the 1920s to the 1950s, rebuffed most appeals for solidarity from farm worker representatives. But on November 17, 1965, ILWU clerks and longshoremen on the San Francisco docks, encouraged by their own officers, gave the first indication that solidarity could, and would, be extended to farm workers.

At first Gilbert was just shocked. As soon as he and his friends arrived, the clerks started leaving the docks. Without the clerks, no work could get done. Then the longshoremen walked away. Some of them came by and gave the four bewildered picketers money. One guy gave them his lunch. Others joined the picket line; at one time fifty longshoremen were picketing in the rain. The line of idled trucks seemed to stretch back for miles. Some of the truckers were mad and started to honk their horns. That stopped quickly, though, as a group of longshoremen broke the windshields of a few of the complaining drivers. Even the lunch trucks were shooed away. One little lunch wagon whose owner refused to move had all its tires punctured. The whole dock came to a halt. “I felt like I was ten feet tall,” Padilla remembered. “Everybody walked out. . . . It was something that I had never seen before—the solidarity.”¹⁰

By 1965, this kind of elementary worker solidarity, termed “secondary boycotts,” had long been illegal in the United States—several times over. Late-nineteenth-century courts had been overwhelmingly hostile to unions and often ruled that ordinary strikes were unacceptable acts of coercion. Judges considered most sympathy strikes even worse, and universally declared them illegal. In 1911, the Supreme Court, in Gompers v. Bucks Stove and Range Co., ruled that even the AFL’s “We Don’t Patronize” list was an illegal attack by outsiders against an employer. This legal tradition was reversed by the 1936 National Labor Relations Act, which not only gave unions legitimate legal status but was silent on the issue of boycotts. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, however, again made secondary boycotts of “neutral parties” illegal. But the ban was difficult to interpret and enforce. Workers continued to refuse to handle scab products. Teamster truckers argued that they were not boycotting a neutral party but rather an individual commodity. Similarly, some factory workers refused to work on what they called “hot cargo.” The legal web tightened significantly with the 1957 Landrum Griffin Act, which added hot cargo campaigns to the prohibition against secondary boycotts, and provided for extensive fines for unions that violated the typical “no strike, no secondary boycott, no hot cargo campaigns, and no slow down” clauses that had become prevalent in union contracts. Some of the legal language was obscure, but its meaning was not: effective, open worker solidarity was against the law.

Some boxes of Pagliarulo grapes had been loaded onto the SS President Wilson, whose main cargo was 400 passengers, bound for Hawaii and Tokyo. But the longshoremen refused to load the rest. After a day’s wait, and with no guarantee that the rest of the grapes would be loaded anytime soon, the ship’s owners decided to leave the fruit behind. Gleeful workers took the boxes off the ship, and the enraged truck driver took off for San Pedro to see if the grapes could be loaded there. No luck; the alerted longshoremen refused to touch them, so the grapes had to be taken back to Delano and deposited in cold storage. The El Malcriado staff found a picture of an ocean liner and put it on the front page with the headline, “The grapes are rotting on the docks.” They quoted Tony Mendez: “When the unions and working people help each other, we can beat even the richest growers.” A triumphant editorial closed: “The huelga is a huge social movement involving the respect of a whole race of people. When outsiders—thousands of them—decide to help the farm workers in their fight for a better life, the ranchers say it is none of their business. The huelga has become everybody’s business. That is why it is winning.”¹¹

The strikers’ surprising victory was a potentially disastrous defeat for the growers. If the ILWU, which controlled the West Coast docks, refused to handle scab grapes, the bosses would lose a lot of money and might be forced to settle with the workers despite having beaten them in the strike. The DiGiorgio Corporation, rich in antiunion experience, was sure that these activities were illegal. It got a restraining order forbidding the NFWA, AWOC, and 100 John Does from engaging in a secondary boycott and interfering with six upcoming shipments of grapes, naming the ships and the ports they would be sailing from. The strikers couldn’t believe their luck. They wouldn’t have to follow the grapes from Delano to figure out where they were bound. They could just meet the trucks at the docks and alert all their Bay Area support networks in advance. Large spirited picket lines easily turned back the friendly longshoremen. A few of the arrested picketers were brought before the judge for violating the injunction, but he dismissed the charges. Taft-Hartley and Landrum Griffin were amendments to the original National Labor Relations Act, but farm workers had been written out of the NLRA. They were not covered by its provisions and therefore could not be enjoined from breaking its rules. It was perfectly legal for the NFWA to engage in a secondary boycott and urge workers not to handle scab grapes. It was a sweet little irony: left out of the benefits of being covered by labor law, farm workers were also free of its restrictions.¹²

But the ILWU was not. Farm workers were free to ask for solidarity from fellow workers, but those workers were not free to give it. DiGiorgio, Pagliarulo, and other offended growers immediately got a judgment that allowed them to collect financial damages equal to the value of their grapes from any union that honored an NFWA picket line. The ILWU had very little wiggle room. All it could argue was that longshoremen had a right to refuse to cross picket lines if they felt that their health and safety were endangered by doing so. In all but one case brought before the courts, the grape growers won. Individual longshoremen, acting on their own, could refuse to work on scab grapes and maybe get away with it. But the union as a whole would have to repudiate such actions and would be liable for any losses. Finally, Padilla understood why Jimmy Herman was so adamant that those first four pickets not mention his name.

The law was not the only problem. In Los Angeles, which in its anti-union tradition was more like the rest of the West than like San Francisco, the NFWA learned that worker-to-worker solidarity was not only illegal but usually hard to put into practice. At the downtown produce market, some swampers, who unloaded the trucks, immediately agreed not to touch the scab product, others simply weren’t interested, and a few were openly hostile. Debates raged in the dark hours just before dawn, as the swampers and picketers, warming themselves by fires the workers had built in fifty-five-gallon drums, waited for the first trucks to arrive. Stopping those grapes would be a tough task, the picketers reported back to Chavez, so he assigned the job to a group of strike militants, including some young Filipinos who had already proved quite adept at sabotaging packing sheds, irrigation pumps, and other grower property.¹³ Among the strikers they were known as “special agents,” and their work was much admired. Rudy Reyes was one of them, as was his friend Ernie Delarmente, who had made a name for himself by holding his own in a short picket-line fistfight with the grower Bruno Dispoto, who was a head and a half taller and 125 pounds heavier than Delarmente. Chavez chose Dolores Huerta to head up this group, as she was, in her own way, just as fearless as the special agents.¹⁴

The LA swampers were members of Teamsters Local 630, whose contract allowed the membership to refuse to cross “a legitimate and bona fide picket line.” On December 3 the Los Angeles Teamsters Joint Council had ruled that the NFWA-AWOC pickets were, in fact, legitimate and bona fide, and members of Local 630 had received letters saying, “Your employer will be in violation of the contract if he discharges or otherwise punishes you for exercising your right to refuse to cross these picket lines to unload the Delano grapes.”¹⁵ But the letter also left the decision whether to unload the grapes up to the individual swampers.¹⁶ Some friendly swampers consistently refused to unload the grapes, and at first even the hostile ones would occasionally ignore a load, as long as the picketers stayed around. But a few swampers began to specialize in unloading the scab grapes, either sheepishly explaining that they needed the $80 to $100 they could make per truckload or openly defying and confronting the small band of picketers.

Rudy Reyes and company, spurred on by the majority of the men on the docks who were sympathetic to the cause, did what they could to interfere with the loading. The grapes came from Delano on pallets and were unloaded with pallet jacks, hand-operated, heavy metal forks on wheels. Rudy and a few others, picket signs in hand, would get on the docks and do what they could to get in the way of the jacks and prevent the grapes from being unloaded. The swampers were furious and tried to hit the picketers’ ankles with the forks of the jacks. One time Gilbert Padilla was knocked off the loading dock, badly twisted his ankle, and spent a couple of weeks on crutches. Only the support of the other dockworkers for the pickets prevented an all-out bloody battle. Dock supervisors started to call in the police, but by the time they arrived the folks from Delano were just peacefully parading back and forth. Nevertheless, some of the picketers were arrested, and the relations with the police deteriorated. Reyes began to dread the early-morning confrontations:

One of those forks could do some damage. One time when I was trying to get out of the way, I accidentally-on-purpose leaned into the grape boxes and made the swamper spill his load. He was really mad, and tried to corner me for a fight. I was about half his size, nimble and quick, and got away. That night when we got back to the apartment we really laughed about it. But I was laughing because I was so nervous and scared. I remember my back hurt, and I thought, well, that must be why they say you have a streak of yellow down your back, it was my yellow streak that was hurting. I could even feel it. And, as usual, the cops just made things worse. They came and tried to shove us off the docks. And they arrested us, too. Usually we got bailed out pretty quick because there were so many friendly lawyers in LA. Sometimes we had to stay in jail overnight. It was not too bad to be in jail for a while. It was not as bad as having those pallet jacks come at you. I had nightmares about those metal forks.¹⁷

Eventually, the drama on the docks seemed not only too dangerous but a silly waste of time. It had degenerated into a kind of turf war. One morning Rudy was sitting with a few others at a table in the coffee shop across from the terminal where the pickets and the produce workers sometimes waited for the trucks to arrive. Beside him was a college student who had come to Delano during the first days of the strike and stayed. She was an attractive young woman, and she had had to endure a string of vulgar insults from the strikers’ opponents on the docks. A Los Angeles policeman had called her a whore. On this particular morning one of the enemy swampers had come by the table, put his hand on her shoulder, and suggested she come service him. Rudy Reyes couldn’t let that pass. He picked up one of those old fashioned sugar bowls with a heavy bottom and delivered several quick, sharp blows to the offender’s head. Blood and sugar were flying everywhere. The man slunk away, and some of the other swampers came by and told Rudy he had done the right thing. Maybe so, but the attempt to stop the grapes on the docks was now clearly the wrong thing. The NFWA would have to come up with some other tactics.

After the unexpected, dramatic success on the San Francisco docks, Chavez authorized Jim Drake to try to organize some kind of formal grape boycott. Drake had no budget, no phone of his own, no office. Cesar regularly talked to him about various boycott plans, but made no great commitment to the project—he was more concerned with other matters: figuring out how to force the governor to put pressure on the growers to negotiate; maintaining the morale of the members and volunteers; trying to set up organizing projects in different farm worker areas. Drake was on his own. To concentrate on his task, he had to find a separate place to work. During the strike, the NFWA had rented an abandoned labor camp a few miles outside of Delano. In serious disrepair, mosquito-infested, the camp seemed to sink deeper into the mud after every winter rain. But this didn’t dampen the energy of some volunteers, whose hopes remained high. On the wall near the entrance someone had painted three names in large letters: Zapata, Villa, Chavez. Two old toilets with indoor plumbing stood on the grounds but separated from the rest of the buildings. Chavez designated the women’s toilet as the first boycott office; the men’s toilet would henceforth be genderless.

Drake had found his office space. He was delighted to be set loose on his pet project, and in good humor he hung Air Wicks in his new windowless outpost. It still stank. Drake got Richard Chavez to bolt a board on top of the old toilet bowl, and to build a regular desk next to it. He had a phone line installed. From Hartmire he got a list of progressive Protestants as potential supporters of a boycott. A new NFWA volunteer, Brother Gilbert, helped him put together a list of possible Catholic supporters. He called Mike Miller of Bay Area Friends of SNCC and got the names and numbers of student and civil rights activists. The last group was the most promising. In San Francisco in early October, SNCC, CORE, and Citizens for Farm Labor had started acting on their own even before the longshoremen had refused to touch the grapes, and 100 people had picketed the San Francisco office of the Schenley Corporation, demanding that it settle with its striking grape workers. When the office workers first saw the picket line outside, they figured the people were demanding the hiring of black office workers. The picketers returned every Friday afternoon. If such picket lines could be maintained in other areas, wouldn’t that be the beginning of a national boycott?¹⁸

Drake asked Miller to be cochair of whatever they all decided the boycott effort might turn out to be. At twenty-seven, Mike Miller was already a political veteran. As a Berkeley undergraduate in the late 1950s, he had founded Slate, a precursor of the later New Left campus organizations. In 1960 he met Saul Alinsky, and through Alinsky he met Fred Ross, who sparked his interest in the Central Valley, kept him informed of the progress of the CSO, and introduced him to Cesar Chavez. In 1961, deeply inspired by the first southern sit-ins, Miller started working with SNCC, quickly joined the staff, and helped build the Bay Area Friends of SNCC, an organization designed to raise money for SNCC’s southern voter registration campaigns. Eager to get closer to the battlefield, he went to work with Bob Moses in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1963, and returned home only after a serious late-night automobile accident on a deserted Mississippi road. He remained a SNCC field secretary working in the Bay Area and helped select the West Coast students who participated in Mississippi Summer. He envisioned SNCC as a group of full-time professional organizers who would work in various communities throughout the country, not just with African Americans in the South. In 1964 he helped start an organizing project to fight urban renewal in the Fillmore District, one of San Francisco’s main black neighborhoods, and the initial success of that project plus his longtime honorable service in SNCC made him one of the most influential young white activists in the country. It was that influence that Drake and Chavez needed. Several other SNCC field secretaries were already active in California, and Miller, with his quiet, unassuming, but authoritative voice, offered direction and advice to all of them. Now the NFWA was asking SNCC to cosponsor a national table grape boycott and offering Mike Miller the position of co-chairman. He did not hesitate to accept.¹⁹

Drake, Miller, and Chavez quickly agreed on a few essentials. They would focus on Schenley and DiGiorgio. Those were the two big Delano-area corporations that produced not only table grapes but also various other brand-name products that would be easy to identify and boycott. Since the Christmas season was near, initially they would go after Schenley, as the company produced or marketed several popular wines and liquors, including Cutty Sark, Ancient Age, and I.W. Harper. They agreed that the boycott could be put into motion quickly in the nation’s major cities by various Friends of SNCC groups, CORE chapters, and the rapidly multiplying New Left student organizations. Those folks had already been doing support work for black civil rights initiatives and could easily transfer some of their energy and experience into support for Mexican American farm workers. As an extra bonus, the boycott cities would be an excellent place to send many of the white volunteers who had staffed the farm worker picket lines but were now just hanging around Delano without much to do.

Many questions remained. Drake and Miller, both deeply interested in organizational matters, talked over the possibilities. In the long run, what would the various boycott organizations look like? Would they continue to be run by the already established left and civil rights groups? Would they be new coalitions put together by those groups? Who would be part of that coalition? Religious organizations certainly, but labor unions, too? What formal relationship would the boycott organizations have to the NFWA and SNCC? What about duplicating the experience in Los Angeles, where NFWA leaders—first Dolores Huerta and then Gilbert Padilla—had built an effective boycott committee? All of that was left up in the air, as priority was given to the question of what exactly the first boycott activities should be. They were confident of their legal right to call for a direct consumer boycott of Schenley products, but beyond that they were not sure. What about a secondary boycott, asking consumers not to buy in stores that handled the boycotted liquor? Drake and Miller decided to play it safe. The first formal instructions to boycotters, signed by SNCC and the NFWA, called the proposed campaign “a consumer information boycott” and told activists that “we are forbidden by law to boycott stores merely because they handle Schenley products.”²⁰

Drake and Miller had it wrong—the secondary boycott was legal because farm workers were not covered by the national labor law—but it didn’t matter because the actual boycotters simply ignored the instructions (if they even saw them) and began to apply pressure directly against liquor stores. CORE picketers swept through Harlem and reported back to the NFWA that all of the forty-nine liquor stores they had visited had agreed to stop handling Schenley products. In one store the thirty pickets had to “visit” for quite some time, milling around inside without making any purchases, before the owner agreed that justice was on the farm workers’ side. Similar militant black and white picket lines forced the removal of Schenley liquor and wine from stores in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, where fourteen of fifteen Mission District liquor stores got rid of Schenley products in one afternoon. Many store owners refused to comply, hoping to wait out the storm, but the new wind was just beginning to blow. Picket lines became more enthusiastic and more diverse. Trade unionists arrived; church activists joined. A new coalition was beginning to form.²¹

Back in Delano, Drake could hardly keep up with the new developments. Often he didn’t go back to his home in Porterville at night but instead slept on the floor of his office. One night it rained especially hard, and as water seeped onto the floor, he moved to the top of his desk. But it wasn’t big enough for his six-foot-one-inch frame and the only way he could keep his feet out of the water was by resting them on the board over the commode. It didn’t bother him one bit. Rain was pouring in, but so were the stories. His favorite one involved a teenage boy and girl who had arrived in Delano early in the strike, holding hands. As soon as the boycott started, Drake asked them to go to New York. They didn’t hesitate. They simply picked up their sleeping bags and hitchhiked east—in the middle of December. In a snowstorm outside of Denver, they were picked up by the police and arrested for vagrancy. The cops threw them in jail, where the couple told the story of the strike and the boycott to the inmates and guards. The next morning, the police took up a collection, gave them some money, and put them on the highway outside of town to resume their journey. Drake told the story around the NFWA compound, punctuating it with “Viva la huelga! ”²²

But the boycott was just one of many NFWA activities. Hartmire was busy arranging for religious delegations to visit Delano and “inspect” farm-worker conditions. Chavez was particularly effective with the visiting priests, nuns, ministers, and rabbis, and he was also talking to people in the Democratic Party about how to take advantage of Governor Pat Brown’s upcoming campaign for reelection. The NFWA renewed some small organizing projects in Fresno, Salinas, and Bakersfield. Drake and the boycott remained headquartered in the women’s toilet.

* Who was white and who was not has been an issue of much confusion and some contention in California farm worker history. Sometimes Mexicans have been considered white, other times, not. Armenians had to win a lawsuit to be included in the “white race.”

* “Scab,” the traditional union term for strikebreakers, is a strange choice for a derogatory epithet. A scab, after all, is a good thing. It helps a wound heal. The word for “strikebreaker” in Mexican Spanish is esquirol, which means squirrel, and was the most common insult yelled at those working on the other side of the picket line.