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TWO

Capitalism in Reverse

AS JERRY BROWN HEADED FOR a meeting of the National Executive Board (NEB) of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in 1968, he pondered a future without the union. Accompanied by his wife, Juanita, Brown (no relation to the future California governor of the same name) had arrived in Delano in 1966 as a twenty-one-year-old graduate student in anthropology from Cornell University. Within a matter of minutes of their meeting, Cesar Chavez temporarily derailed Brown’s dream of writing a dissertation on farm worker communities. Brown recalled Chavez’s first words to him: “He said, ‘Jerry, do you know who we hate more than social workers?’” Staring intently into Brown’s eyes, Chavez answered his own question: “Social scientists.” In the next minute, Chavez made a deal with Brown to open the Delano farm worker community to him if the couple vowed to serve the movement for at least two weeks. Now, two years later, Brown was heading for Filipino Hall as the co-coordinator of the international boycott to plead his case to the NEB for a major expansion of the campaign.

In his two years of service, Brown had put his love of data analysis to good use, studying USDA consumer and marketing reports for the top forty-one cities where California grapes were sold. Brown recalled, “I found out very rapidly that … the ten major North American cities—which also included Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver —received 50 percent of the grape shipments.”¹ Although the boycott had been a part of the farm workers’ arsenal since 1965, the union had neither the resources nor the time to study the effectiveness of the tactic. Most of the union’s boycott effort was intuitive, trying to stop the grapes as they wound their way through the market. Anecdotal knowledge of their success came from the front lines, where longshoreman, Teamsters, or restaurant and bar workers agreed not to convey grapes and wine to suppliers and customers. Occasionally the media covered an impressive demonstration in front of a supermarket, but the notion of how effective such campaigns were in changing customers’ buying habits was a mystery. Now Brown’s research provided material evidence of success and, more important, the prospect of improving the boycott. According to his statistics, only four of the cities had demonstrated meaningful declines in grape sales. Brown argued that by concentrating the union’s meager resources on building effective boycott houses in the ten leading cities, the union could affect the majority of the North American market for grapes and bring the grape growers to the bargaining table in a way that neither the strikes nor the marches had been able to do thus far.

In spite of Brown’s data, Chavez showed little enthusiasm for his research and privately upheld the primacy of the strike. “It was important in Cesar’s and in many of the board members’ [views],” recalled Brown, “to keep a big strike presence going on.” Such a position ran counter to Brown’s prescription for success: “I started realizing that we were never going to win the strike in the fields. You know, it was important for the media, it was important for the press, it was important for the farm workers’ morale. Yes, you might get a few more [growers] to [capitulate to] the strike, but they could always replace the workers with workers from L.A., from Phoenix, from Mexico—using the poor against the poor. The idea started to form in my mind that unless we redeployed resources and got strong boycotts in ten of these cities, we were never going to win the boycott. And I started to argue this with Cesar more and more strongly.”²

Rather than plead his case further to an obstinate Chavez, Brown appealed to two veterans of the movement, LeRoy Chatfield and Chris Hartmire, both of whom had the capacity to persuade Chavez to take the matter to the NEB. “We talked about democracy,” Brown remembered, “but Cesar was very much in control of the union,” and such a move was thought to be both audacious and politically risky. To his surprise, Brown received an invitation to speak at the next board meeting.

As Brown spoke, members listened patiently as he explained his charts and graphs, detailing changes in grape sales where the boycott had been most consistently implemented. His confidence growing with every word, Brown boldly challenged his audience: “I ended my presentation by saying if the board did not take immediate steps to strengthen the boycott, then I couldn’t really believe that they were serious about winning. And I—Juanita and I—we’re going to leave the union.” He left the meeting with the impression that the members had finally grasped the importance of the data, though Chavez showed little sign of agreement and no intention of answering Brown’s ultimatum. Three days later, the couple packed for Miami to visit Juanita’s parents on their way to Mexico, where Brown planned to initiate research on a new dissertation topic. Just before departing, they received a call from Larry Itliong. Although Chavez would never speak with Brown of his decision, the labor leader and members of the NEB resolved to embrace Brown’s ideas to redirect union resources toward an expansion of the boycott. Instead of heading to Mexico to jump-start his academic career, Brown traveled to Santa Barbara for a general meeting of the union membership, where he helped initiate a new phase of the movement.

Chavez’s reluctance to embrace the boycott is understandable given the difficulty of maintaining such a campaign well beyond the primary site of struggle. As a product of an agrarian community, Chavez remained devoted to those who occupied similar spaces. This, in part, explained his withdrawal from the Community Service Organization in San Jose and Los Angeles in favor of organizing farm workers one house at a time in the San Joaquin Valley. The CSO experience, however, had opened him up to the possibilities of cultivating support for the farm worker movement among urban consumers, if for no other reason than to occupy union organizers’ time during lulls in the harvest. A cadre of young, energetic, and intelligent college students willing to take a leadership role in this experiment made the effort all the more worthwhile. Their involvement would change the complexion and strategy of the movement and force Chavez to cede some of his control to youthful protesters in the marketplace. At the time, however, Chavez had limited options due to the grape growers’ refusal to yield to the strike and a lack of resources to keep workers on the picket lines in the fields. Born of necessity, the boycott proved to be a stroke of genius that grew out of a period in which Chavez embraced creativity and independent thinking among the movement’s many contributors.

THE NEW FRONT: BOYCOTT GRAPES!

The excitement caused by the impromptu strike by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the merger of AWOC and the National Farm Workers Association into one grand union produced an army of organized workers ready for battle. The seasonal nature of the grape harvest framed the period of conflict, concentrating the fight in the fields to the late spring and summer months, from May through August. As summer became fall, the struggle to stop the flow of scab workers onto Coachella and San Joaquin Valley grape plantations became less urgent, although the need to keep organized workers committed remained important to the survival of the movement. Gilbert Padilla recalled, “We talked about what the hell we were going to do in the winter.” Leaders of the union worried that a lack of activity after the key summer months would deplete the organization of bodies and energy vital to its momentum.

These challenges confronted union organizers as early as the fall and winter after the initial 1965 strike. According to Padilla, the idea for a boycott was not the result of a grand plan, but originated in the community organizing experience of CSO veterans. “We learned in CSO,” he recalled, “you don’t organize people unless you have something for them to do; otherwise you lose them.” In need of a task for the off-season, a core group of organizers, including Padilla, Chavez, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, and Jim Drake, brain-stormed about strategy. Now a seasoned twenty-eight-year-old, Drake had dropped his inhibitions about working with the new union and dove headlong into the fray. His commitment to social justice and Chavez’s incorporation of Catholic and Christian symbols into the movement laid the foundation for a long and important relationship that kept Drake at the center of the union for more than a decade. According to Padilla, Drake proposed the idea of a boycott of grapes as a way of occupying the newly organized volunteers for service until the primary tool, the strike, could be employed again during the 1966 season. Years later, a more modest Drake claimed that Chavez had agreed to the boycott “figuring it was an easy way to get this young kid out of his way.”³ Whether or not he initially believed in the efficacy of the boycott, Chavez embraced the new strategy, assigned Drake to be coordinator of the national campaign, and asked fellow veteran community organizers to utilize their networks in the service of creating boycott drives in key cities.

Padilla and Huerta turned to their old CSO contacts in Los Angeles to build the first of many “boycott houses,” as the location of operations in each city came to be called. Both had spent time building the CSO and developing relationships with numerous labor unions in East Los Angeles prior to organizing farm workers. Now, as members of the UFW, the two reached out to these same union leaders to kick-start the boycott. Padilla recalled, “I went to the Central Labor Council, the restaurant and hotel labor union, the auto workers union—you name the union, we went to them.” By appealing to fellow union members to boycott grapes, the United Farm Workers cultivated a beachhead. Padilla also brought in farm worker families from Delano in order to appeal to potential allies who might contribute their time to the cause. The appeals worked, as urban residents sympathetic to the farm workers left their jobs to serve the union.

FIGURE 5. Cesar Chavez at an unidentified event with Reverend Jim Drake, ca. 1970s. ALUA, UFW Collection, 3275.

Rudy Reyes, a veteran of the AWOC strike, joined Padilla and Huerta in Los Angeles, where they witnessed the evolution of the boycott from an off-season activity into an integral component of the movement. According to the twenty-three-year-old Filipino farm worker, the boycott unfolded intuitively:

When truckloads went to L.A., we followed them, and our L.A. supporters tried to prevent the unloading of the grapes. If they got them unloaded anyway, we tried stopping any big buyers from buying them. If the grapes still got into stores, we set up picket lines to ask consumers not to buy the grapes and, if possible, not to buy in this store. Then our dozens or hundreds of supporters took turns calling up those stores, telling the managers that they were long-time consumers, and they wouldn’t buy anything anymore until they promised not to buy and sell grapes from Delano anymore. After a while, we set up our boycott headquarters in L.A. to coordinate all our supporters into a cohesive army.⁴

The boycott slowly gathered strength through the winter of 1965 and spring of 1966 as the L.A. staff worked with local unions, followed the shipments, and appealed to store managers not to carry grapes.

Initially, the UFW directed its boycott indiscriminately, but the union eventually targeted two leaders in the industry: NFLU’s nemesis, the DiGiorgio Corporation, and Schenley Industries, primarily a producer and distributor of liquor. Both were anomalies among grape producers, given their corporate structure and size of production. Although DiGiorgio held several acres in the San Joaquin Valley, the Borrego Valley in the southern desert near Coachella, and cropland in Florida, Robert DiGiorgio, Joseph DiGiorgio’s son, began to diversify the company’s interests soon after he became president of the corporation in 1962. In 1964, the company dropped “fruit” from its title and increased its nonagricultural business to 87 percent, on its way to 98 percent by 1967. The younger DiGiorgio also declared in his 1964 annual report that DiGiorgio Corporation was now “a publicly held, profit oriented processor, distributor and marketer of foods,” moving further away from the production side of the business.

Schenley built a similar empire in the East. The company’s name originated from Schenley, Pennsylvania, where a Jewish businessman, Lewis Rosensteil, produced and distributed medicinal whiskey during Prohibition. In the 1940s, Schenley expanded on 4,500 acres of premium land in the San Joaquin Valley, but continued to draw most of its $250 million in annual income from the sale of such brands as Cutty Sark whiskey, Seagram’s Seven whiskey, and Roma wines. In the 1960s DiGiorgio’s main office was in San Francisco; Schenley operated out of Chicago, New York, and Delaware. Although both companies benefited immensely from the growth of agriculture in rural California after World War II, neither resembled the family-owned, immigrant-based, grape grower cliques that defined grower culture in California.

The distinctions between corporations and family-owned, immigrant growers became significant as the boycott wore on. Family-owned growers defended their turf as the ground on which they, as immigrants, had struggled to create a business and a way of life. For corporations, such as Schenley, DiGiorgio, and later InterHarvest—a New York–based company managed by Jewish mogul Eli Black—a commitment to business over culture made the corporations more inclined to settle labor disputes that crimped the flow of capital. Consequently, these corporations maintained an open mind about recognizing unions and signing labor contracts, whereas the old guard immigrant growers resisted such solutions.

Early on, boycotters did not perceive such differences; they pursued large targets such as Schenley and DiGiorgio because these companies depended on easily identified networks of unionized workers to deliver their products to market. In the case of Schenley, whose profits depended on the consumption of liquor in urban restaurants and hotels, the “jobbers,” or middlemen between the producers and the businesses that sold the product, became the keys to the execution of the boycott. Once again, Padilla turned to a friend in the hotel and restaurant workers union, Herman “Blackey” Levitt, who served as the president of the joint council for labor unions in Los Angeles. Padilla recalled, “This guy Levitt said, ‘Let me tell you how to do this.’ And he got this book with all the jobbers. So we sent letters to all these jobbers we were going to boycott.” Padilla’s appeal to the wholesalers worked. In San Francisco, the union picketed the docks against the advice of AWOC leader, Al Green, who worried about embarrassing longshoremen, whom he assumed knew little about the farm workers. Chavez stood his ground, and, to the surprise of Green and other established labor leaders, the longshoremen aided the boycott by refusing to unload grapes. By April, Schenley was experiencing steep sales declines in Los Angeles and San Francisco, two key urban markets. The success proved that the boycott was useful to the movement, making it a permanent fixture in the UFW arsenal.⁵

The boycott worked in tandem with the evolving situation on the ground as rural communities prepared for the 1966 grape harvest. Throughout the off-season, the UFW conducted marches, challenged local law enforcement to manage the strike fairly, and reached out to established unions in hopes of maintaining momentum. The tenor of union events rose to the level of a religious revival, as songs, theater, and art developed to promote la causa. The movement inspired the creation of the theater group Teatro Campesino by a twenty-five-year-old native of Delano, Luis Valdez, who had graduated from San Jose State University but returned to the valley to be a part of the action. In addition to staging productions that presented growers, scab workers, and law enforcement officials as caricatures of themselves, Valdez penned something of a manifesto in El Plan de Delano that articulated the broad goals and cultural aspects of the farm worker movement. El Plan announced the arrival of a new social movement and its close affinity with the Catholic Church, whose symbols of sacrifice and piety became a part of the iconography of the UFW. The manifesto also announced a pilgrimage or perigrinación from Delano to Sacramento in which Chavez and UFW officials would march 280 miles through farm worker villages northward through the valley in anticipation of the 1966 harvest.

Drake and Chavez sent a handful of organizers out to unfamiliar cities across the country with the phone number of a sympathetic local contact, $100, and the charge of identifying and organizing volunteers to dedicate as many hours of their day as possible toward instituting the boycott in their assigned city. Organizers endured time away from home or school, and some boycott leaders occasionally moved their entire family to a location of the union’s choosing. Unlike a march that came to many farm workers in their villages and demanded a finite amount of time from its participants, the boycott functioned like a full-time job with poor pay, usually in an unfamiliar environment. The strike demanded a similar level of commitment, although the fact that such battles took place near workers’ rural homes among a community that shared a common language and culture made it slightly easier to organize, compared to the boycott.

Hijinio Rangel was one worker who made tremendous sacrifices for the boycott. Rangel worked in the Giannini packinghouse in Dinuba, California, in the San Joaquin Valley when Chavez recruited him. Although packinghouse workers received pay superior to that of most agricultural workers and enjoyed collective bargaining rights, Rangel chafed at the abuses suffered by field workers. As the movement matured, Rangel became loyal to UFW, recruiting field workers while driving a tractor and distributing water to pickers in the vineyards. He also hosted recruitment meetings at his home, where Chavez reached out to a small group of hearty farm workers willing to fight for the union. Rangel eventually earned enough money to buy a tortilleria (tortilla store) in Orosi, California, but maintained his commitment to the UFW, using his store as a base for organizing farm workers. In 1968, Chavez appealed to Rangel to work for the movement full time under the California Migrant Ministry. Rangel remembered, “I [had] to leave my job and my business and persuade my wife (which was not so easy) to move.” That year, Rangel, his wife, and eight children committed their lives to the union, going first to Portland, Oregon, and eventually to Detroit, Michigan to oversee the boycott.⁶

College students imbued with a desire to make change also signed up in significant numbers. For some young people, such as Marshall Ganz, getting involved in the farm worker movement proved to be a homecoming. As a Jewish boy growing up in Bakersfield, California, during the 1950s, Ganz had developed a consciousness about the fight for civil rights in the South but had not yet recognized the relevance of this battle to his own backyard. “I grew up in the middle of the farm worker world,” recalled Ganz, “but of course never saw it.” Although his debate coach in high school tried to direct his attention to the farm workers, it took a trip to the Deep South while in college for him to discover the importance of civil rights activism back home. “I had to go to Mississippi and get [an] education about race and class and politics,” Ganz remembered, “so that when I came back, I could see with what we call ‘Mississippi eyes.’” Ganz acquired this new way of seeing during Freedom Summer, a Mississippi workshop in 1964 run by a coalition of northern black youths and southern black activists to train mostly white, northern college students to help in the fight to extend the franchise to African Americans in the South.⁷ Ganz made his way to Mississippi that summer from Harvard University, joining such future leaders as Mario Savio from the University of California at Berkeley, who went on to lead the free speech movement, and Heather Booth from the University of Chicago, who later founded the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. The experience changed Ganz’s life and made him more aware of the shared history of segregation and violence between African Americans in the South and people of color in rural California: “I mean, it was like seeing through a different lens, and it was like, oh, people of color, oh, no political rights, just like the South … marginal wages, just like the South. California’s own history of segregation, racial discrimination, just like the South.… And so it was much more like an extension of the movement than it was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to work for a union,’ which wouldn’t have occurred to me [before Freedom Summer].”⁸

FIGURE 6. At a United Farm Workers rally, Cesar Chavez looks over a binder with Marshall Ganz. Location unknown, 1971. ALUA, UFW Collection, 3248.

Ganz belonged to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the primary recruitment and training organizations for Freedom Summer. For SNCC, 1964 was a sobering experience, as their peaceful but persistent protests went unheeded by the national Democratic Party. At the Democratic National Convention that year, the party stalwarts, including the Party’s nominee, President Lyndon B. Johnson, refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as the representative for the state even after national media coverage brought the violence against civil rights protesters in Mississippi to public light. The murders of several civil rights workers, including three volunteers involved with Mississippi Summer—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—proved to organizers that black and white activists could be killed with impunity. As a consequence, SNCC leaders contemplated a more confrontational politics but also embraced an expansion of the movement by placing SNCC representatives with social justice organizations operating outside of the South.

Ganz’s path to the union came by way of the kind of diversity and inter-group dialogue that had lifted the farm worker movement in the early days and made the success of the boycott a possibility. Ganz, who had come back to Bakersfield at the end of 1964 in preparation for his return to Harvard in the fall of 1965, reconnected with an old friend, LeRoy Chatfield. By this time, Chatfield had abandoned the clergy to work with Chavez on the rent strike. Ganz had read about the strike while working for SNCC and accepted an invitation from Chatfield to meet Chavez. As with so many young people, Chavez persuaded Ganz to change his plans for the fall and instead appeal to SNCC leaders to make him a paid representative for the student organization within UFW. SNCC responded by approving Ganz’s proposal and sent him and an additional representative, Dickie Flowers—or Dickie Flores, as the Spanish speakers in the union referred to him—to California. Eventually, Stokely Carmichael, the new leader of SNCC, came to California to meet Chavez in the fall of 1965 and made Ganz the sole representative of SNCC within the farm workers union. SNCC paid Ganz $10 per week, five more dollars per week than what the union could afford to pay its staff. Ganz recalled, “I was sort of a labor aristocrat there.” This arrangement lasted until August 1966, when SNCC embraced the black power movement and chose a more unilateral, blacks-for-blacks-only approach to civil rights. According to Ganz, “I may have been the last white person on the SNCC payroll (laughter).”⁹

The early success of the boycott exceeded the expectations of Chavez and the leadership of the union. During the first two years, growers watched the “free on board” (FOB) price of a lug (box) of their grapes plummet from a high of over $6 in 1966 to approximately $5.50 in 1968, on its way down to $4.89 in 1969.¹⁰ In addition to Drake, who served as the information director for Chavez, LeRoy Chatfield and a Bay Area ally, Mike Miller, communicated with boycott organizers located in key cities around the country. Indicative of the supplemental role the boycott played in this period, some of the communication came from Delano, where Chatfield and Drake spent much of their time, and some of the communication emanated from a San Francisco office convenient to Miller’s location.¹¹ The union lacked so much in the way of infrastructure that Chavez had to rely on staff located throughout the state to carry out multiple tasks. Those involved in the boycott celebrated the moral victory of swaying the consumers in a given city or at a specific market but had little time to devise a system for charting their success. Tantamount to building a plane while flying it, Chavez and a small group of leaders constructed the union by stringing together public relations victories that gathered endorsements from a diverse set of supporters.

Securing well-positioned allies had been one of the early keys to Chavez’s success. For example, when the AFL-CIO convened its annual meeting in San Francisco in 1965, the grape strike and boycott had piqued the interest of fellow unionists, but no one in organized labor formally endorsed the farm workers until UAW president, Walter Reuther, stepped out in support of the union. In the spring of 1967, Senator Robert F. Kennedy drew media attention to the struggle in a series of hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. Although the subcommittee chair, Senator George Murphy (R-California), staunchly supported agribusiness and hoped to sway public opinion against the farm workers, Kennedy’s aggressive questioning of the Kern County sheriff, LeRoy Gallyen, on charges of false arrests of picketers exposed law enforcement officials’ abuse of activists’ civil rights and ignorance of the law. After the last hearing, Kennedy paid an unexpected visit to Filipino Hall, where he declared his support for the grape strike. Kennedy later joined a UFW picket line at DiGiorgio’s ranch and was a close ally of the movement for the remainder of his life.¹²

The success of the boycott and the political events surrounding the Delano-to-Sacramento march placed Schenley and DiGiorgio on the wrong side of public opinion. Although grape growers dug their collective heels in against the union, Schenley’s chief executive officer, Lewis Rosensteil, recognized the UFW campaign as a liability to the many products marketed by his company. Blackey Levitt’s ability to deliver support from the bartenders union and the cooperation of the Teamsters in San Francisco not to load Schenley products worried the company brass, as Schenley’s vice president James Woolsey later testified to the California Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture: “These reprisals and the publicity presented a threat of serious damage to our business on a nationwide scale. Our sales department felt that even more damaging than any decline in our sales was the adverse publicity that accompanied the boycott and the NFWA organizing activities.”¹³ Schenley was one of the four largest liquor distributors in the country, and its primary ownership of Central Valley grape vineyards had to do with wine production, not table grapes. Moreover, whereas the table grape growers had a tradition of not negotiating with unions, Schenley settled a strike by Galarza’s National Farm Labor Union in 1952 by increasing wages, establishing a grievance procedure, and rehiring workers who had been locked out during the initial conflict. For a shrewd businessman like Rosensteil, anything that sullied the national reputation of his products had to be eliminated.¹⁴

Rosensteil broke ranks with other owners and called on attorney Sidney Korchak to broker a deal with Chavez. A mercurial man with assumed connections to the Chicago mob and a reputation for “fixing” labor problems in the liquor and film industry, Korchak summoned Chavez, Levitt, Teamster representatives, and AFL-CIO representative, Bill Kircher, to his Beverly Hills mansion on April 3, 1966. The meeting preceded the merger of the NFWA and AWOC in August; however, Kircher’s presence provided representation for AWOC. According to Marshall Ganz, everyone at the meeting had an agenda, but Korchak recognized that “it was the NFWA that controlled the boycott.” As a consequence, Korchak recognized the NFWA as the union to represent Schenley workers and agreed to an immediate 35 cents per hour increase in wages to $1.75, the creation of a union-run hiring hall, and the option for workers to join the NFWA credit union upon their affiliation. He also promised full contract negotiations to replace the temporary agreement in exchange for an end to the boycott against Schenley.¹⁵

News of the breakthrough reached the marchers in Lodi, California, on April 6, just four days prior to Easter Sunday and the culmination of the perigrinación in Sacramento. The next day DiGiorgio, the other corporate giant in the fields, announced its willingness to recognize a union, but without fully endorsing the NFWA. Rather, it expressed its support for a secret ballot election, with the NFWA, AWOC, and a company union, Tulare-Kern Independent Farm Workers, as options. When the press exposed the company’s ties to TKIFW, DiGiorgio shifted tactics and appealed to the Teamsters to organize farm workers. Initially, DiGiorgio attempted to run an election at its Borrego Springs Ranch in San Diego County without agreeing to terms with either the NFWA or AWOC. When the NFWA appealed to workers to boycott the election and AWOC agreed, nearly half the 732 workers refused to participate, invalidating the results.¹⁶

To DiGiorgio’s surprise, its attempt to divide the NFWA and AWOC had the reverse effect, driving the two unions closer and making it possible for Kircher to engineer their merger into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.¹⁷ Fred Ross, who came to Delano to help with the DiGiorgio campaign, recalled, “Cesar learned as he went along; he knew he had to have money, and he had to have more strength.” According to Ross, “He had to do it,” but the decision to merge with AWOC did not sit well with many of the organizers who had hoped to maintain their independence. Chavez sympathized with these concerns, explaining, “I was worried that it would curb our style.” Among his chief concerns, AWOC’s tacit recognition of the government’s restriction against “secondary boycotts” compelled him to push for terms that would allow for a continuation of its use. “I told them I didn’t mind joining,” Chavez told the reporter Ron Taylor, “as long as we got a good deal, but we had to have the right to boycott.”¹⁸ Ultimately, the two sides got what they were looking for: AWOC wanted a union supported by the Mexican workers who constituted the majority of the NFWA’s rank and file, and the NFWA wanted the approval from the AFL-CIO that had been backing AWOC.

The formation of the UFW did not please everyone, and some from each organization defected to the Teamsters or left labor organizing completely. For most, however, Chavez adroitly navigated around conflict by honoring many of the Filipino organizers who initiated the 1965 AWOC grape strike. Larry Itliong became second in command of UFW, and Andy Imutan and Phillip Vera Cruz were named vice presidents. Veterans of the NFWA Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and Tony Orendain also became vice presidents, while LeRoy Chatfield continued as an important manager of the new union’s affairs from its base in Delano. Meanwhile, Chris Hartmire and Jim Drake continued to steer urban support and dollars toward the movement through Migrant Ministry.¹⁹

DiGiorgio attempted to protect the reputation of its national products, S & W Fine Foods and Treesweet fruit juices, just as Schenley had, by separating itself from the San Joaquin Valley growers’ clique and pursuing peace with the union. Another company, Perelli-Minetti, a producer of quality wines and vermouth, pursued a similar solution when the newly formed UFW initiated a nationwide boycott of its products. Like DiGiorgio, Perelli-Minetti initially sought to have the Teamsters represent its workers rather than resist any union. The effectiveness of the boycott, however, compelled Perelli-Minetti to back away from the Teamsters and accept the UFW as the bargaining agent for its employees. On July 21, 1967, the Teamsters reached an agreement to turn over all its contracts for field workers to the UFW in exchange for Chavez’s recognition of the Teamsters’ right to represent all employees working in canneries, packinghouses, and freezers. The next day, many of California’s large wineries, including Gallo Wines and Paul Masson, followed Perelli-Minetti by agreeing to hold elections for their workers.²⁰ The wineries saw the virtue of this strategy because, like Schenley and DiGiorgio, they had made their money based on the quality associated with their brand names.

The solution of union recognition stood in stark contrast to the thinking of local table grape growers, who fought to maintain exclusive control over the hiring and labor processes. When Schenley caved to the pressure of the march and the boycott, for example, the California Council of Growers, a nonprofit public relations firm representing the majority of owners, issued the following statement: “While the NFWA and its religious cohorts were righteously preaching democratic processes and marching on Sacramento, the leaders were closeted elsewhere, working out a deal that denies workers any voice in the proceedings.… Schenley Industries, whose farm operations are incidental to their basic whiskey-making business, is not representative of California agriculture, where growers steadfastly refuse to sell out their employees and force them into a union which does not represent them.”²¹

Unwittingly, the movement exposed the class cleavages among farm owners, prompting the local table grape growers to articulate differences between them and their corporate peers. The diversity of brands used by Schenley, DiGiorgio, and Perelli-Minetti made them more susceptible to the boycott and more inclined to settle the conflict quickly. In addition, the union learned that by toppling a leader in a particular industry, other companies quickly followed. This was the lesson of the Perelli-Minetti boycott, in which Gallo and Masson sued for peace immediately after Perelli-Minetti capitulated.

Table grape growers undermined the assumption that such a strategy worked in all circumstances. Rather than dividing and conquering all grape producers, the boycott had the unintended consequence of moving a diverse group of ethnic and family-based table grape growers toward greater cooperation. Forged in the crucible of class conflict, the South Central Farmers Committee (SCFC) became the leading self-help organization for growers.

The SCFC grew out of early affinities among Slavic pioneers, such as Jack Pandol and Martin Zaninovich, but it also included a handful of non-Slavic growers from the Delano area. By the 1960s, European ethnic growers had fully embraced Armenians as equals, but Japanese American small farmers remained conspicuously absent from the membership. According to the SCFC’s first president, Martin Zaninovich, the organization incorporated on August 26, 1960, in anticipation of union organizing. When the union did come, the SCFC became more organized and leased an office in downtown Delano in early 1966. According to Zaninovich, “The primary function of the committee at that time was to serve as the public relations arm of the agriculture in the area.”²² Members also met routinely to plot strategy and strengthen their common bonds, if necessary through threats. In one case, a beleaguered grower confessed to having grown weary of constantly searching for workers and battling the union. “The next time you come, bring your pink slip,” a peer responded, suggesting that he would buy him out rather than see his farm end production because of the unions. “Unionizing of farms was simply not accepted,” Zaninovich remembered.²³

Early on, the SCFC responded to the strike by denying its existence. The arrival of the boycott, however, generated bad publicity at the point of sale, hurting the grape growers’ reputation with customers and forcing them to abandon their bunker mentality. In January 1966, the SCFC formed a speakers’ bureau to circulate growers who were willing to make their case to urban consumers. It also reversed its position of refusing to communicate with the media and initiated a campaign through the Council of California Growers to win back the public. The Council channeled all inquiries through the SCFC office in Delano and hired a young ex-navy pilot, Bruce Obbink, to serve as the full-time director of education. Obbink had originally come to the Council in 1962 to help fight against the termination of the bracero program. With that battle lost, Obbink and the Council focused on the new challenge of defeating the United Farm Workers. He received a budget to hire an office manager for the SCFC, Eleanor Schulte, who coordinated communication among the Council, the growers, and the public.²⁴

In spite of these efforts, the growers continued to lose the public relations war. Most of the growers attributed their losses to biased journalists who came to Delano with preconceived notions. “A lot of people who come here think they are experts on farm labor,” Schulte observed. “They come armed with what they consider to be the facts, and this puts us in a defensive position right off the bat.”²⁵ Rather than admitting the well-documented problems in farm labor housing and wages, the SCFC aggressively denied any discontent among workers. On behalf of grape growers, SCFC president, Martin Zaninovich, reported to a packed audience of journalists in San Francisco, “Over the years, we have developed and maintained a keen personal interest in each and every one of our employees.… Many growers provide superior housing free of charge.” This flew in the face of popular accounts of the lives of farm workers depicted in programs like Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, broadcast in 1960, and the attention drawn to the problem by the union. Although some growers supplied better housing than others, the trend toward day-haul workers rather than the type of worker settlements described by Zaninovich undermined his paternalistic stance toward employees. The work of photo-journalists and documentary filmmakers transported images of unrest from the fields to urban consumers that served as visual rebuttals to Zaninovich’s constant protestation that worker deprivation and discontent were a “myth.”²⁶

Unlike their corporate peers, the local ethnic and family-oriented growers refused to see the strike or the boycott as a business matter to be dealt with through negotiations. Of the corporate growers Ganz observed, “A lot of them had union contracts [in] other places; they weren’t invested in their standing in the grower community; they weren’t a part of that local scene; they didn’t go to the Slav club and the Elks club and the same church.”²⁷ Members of the SCFC, on the other hand, saw the union’s campaign as a personal affront to their integrity that had to be resisted at all costs. For them, the struggle against the UFW was more than a business matter; it embodied a wider cultural struggle that threatened a way of life. Zaninovich, in particular, harbored deep resentment toward student volunteers, whom he characterized as “far left of left” and “very young, probably naïve, and obviously idealistic,” who did not recognize that “they were being manipulated by a few unobtrusive but effective leaders.” His dismissal of both these volunteers and Chavez placed him and his fellow growers on the other side of a new generation that now began to question the war, the treatment of racial minorities, and the responsibility of the educated class to society.

Buoyed by their defeat of the corporate growers, in 1968 Chavez and UFW leaders agreed to take the fight to table grape producers rather than consolidate their gains in the wine industry.²⁸ As in the battle with wine grape producers, union leaders decided to start with a campaign against the biggest producer. Giumarra Vineyards Corporation was the undisputed leader in table grape production, with $12 million dollars in annual sales from production on 12,170 acres of premium farmland.²⁹ This time, however, the leading company did not concede defeat, nor did its peers show signs of weakening in the face of pressure from the boycott. Unlike the corporate growers who cared about labels, table grape growers rarely marketed their products by brand names that were conspicuous to customers in supermarkets, thus making the boycott difficult to enforce at the point of sale. Table grape growers frequently used multiple brands to market a variety of grapes at different points in the season. When the union finally succeeded in distinguishing Giumarra’s brands from those of other producers, fellow grape growers loaned Giumarra their labels to frustrate boycott organizers. As a consequence, rather than defeating the table grape growers during the 1968 season, the UFW found itself in a protracted war with the industry, no closer to winning the strikes on their farms or the boycott campaigns in the city. The union responded by declaring an industrywide boycott of all table grapes, extending the ban to include Arizona grapes, but the growers still did not budge from their position.³⁰

To be successful, the UFW had to discover new cracks in the growers’ armor. The failure to bring ethnic and family-oriented growers to the negotiation table through either the strike or the boycott signaled the long battle ahead. The union leadership discovered, however, that compared to the strike the boycott had made growers more uncomfortable about their position. “The whole strategic premise,” Ganz remembered, “was … that you didn’t have enough power in the local labor market to win.” The strike had drawn attention to the problem of farm worker wages and living conditions, but the union had a hard time maintaining a constant presence in the fields without a substantial strike fund to pay workers to walk picket lines or prevent growers from replacing them with scab labor. When Governor Pat Brown ordered investigators from the state department of employment to confirm the existence of a labor dispute, they had to rely on testimony from only forty-nine farm workers who remained in Delano long enough to confirm their participation. This number was far below the thousands of workers Chavez asserted had participated in the strike. Most farm workers moved on to seek work elsewhere in order to feed their families, thinning the picket lines in the fields.

The anemic display in the countryside forced Chavez to invest more time, money, and hope in the boycott. For all of their publicity, union officials had done little to stop the harvesting of grapes at the point of production. The secondary boycott, however, showed no signs of weakness, drawing new recruits in ever increasing numbers as the urban civil rights and antiwar movements became more violent and fragmented at the end of the 1960s. Although the boycott decentered the movement from its traditional base of power in Delano, where Chavez had more control, it also transferred the battle away from the stronghold of the growers and into an arena that gave the union a better chance of winning. According to Ganz, “By shifting the turf [to the cities] … we could successfully fight them.”³¹

WORKING THE BOYCOTT

By 1968, as the union moved against the core group of table grape growers, the farm workers had three proven strategies in their arsenal: the strike, the march, and the boycott. Among the three, the boycott offered leaders the least control, given their dependence on other unions to block shipments and on consumers to avoid purchasing grapes. In addition, the boycott required organizers to move away from the cradle of the movement to live in far-flung cities with few connections to Delano. The union’s standard compensation of $5 per week did not go as far in metropolitan areas, where it took organizers more time to locate allies who could offset their expenses with donations of food, shelter, and transportation. In some cities, such as New York, the union spent precious dollars to rent a boycott house where volunteers slept and worked. At the time, most in the labor movement thought these expenditures were risky since the boycott had long been regarded as a tool of last resort.³² The success against Schenley, DiGiorgio, Perelli-Minetti, and Gallo, however, had encouraged union leaders to continue experimenting with the tactic.

The UFW built support for the boycott among urban consumers with the effort of a small but committed cadre of organized farm workers and youthful advocates. Drawing inspiration from Fred Ross and the CSO, Jim Drake applied the same approach to organizing volunteers for the boycott houses as he had in recruiting farm workers to the union. Drake shared the UFW philosophy: “If you try to spread yourself among all the workers … then you are going to do about 5% of organizing of maybe 20% of the workers. Forget about it, you are just never going to make it.” Instead, the organizers put 100 percent of their time into organizing between 2 and 5 percent of the total population of farm workers. From this group came the “really organized [and] committed,” argued Drake, who would “stick it out for 20 years” and “see to it that you win.” For Drake and others, the number of farm workers involved was less important than the quality and commitment of those who carried the message of social justice to the general public. “We made it look like [there were] thousands of grape pickers out on strike,” recalled Drake, “because we moved people around real fast.” Once the boycott came into play, the UFW’s central organizers applied this same tactic on a national scale. “[These workers] would think nothing of giving up their homes and everything to go to New York or Chicago for the boycott.”³³

As the boycott intensified in early 1968, Chavez asked his longtime friend and mentor, Fred Ross, to run a tutorial on organizing for fifty farm workers and volunteers in New York City, the largest and arguably most important market for grapes. Organizers ranged from teenage novices like Eliseo Medina to seasoned veterans like Gilbert Padilla and Dolores Huerta. Ross, however, treated everyone equally, employing a philosophy of “on-the-job” training, as Jerry Brown described it: “Ross never lectured about organizing. He believed that one could only learn to organize by doing it. He would point out that there was nothing romantic about organizing, and that it required mainly common sense, meticulous planning, hard work and a great deal of self discipline.”³⁴

From this group, Eliseo Medina, an eighteen-year-old native of the Coachella Valley, traveled to icy Chicago in the midst of winter with the usual $100 start-up funds, a handful of local contacts, and a bag of union buttons. Another farm worker, Marco Muñoz, established an effective house in Boston despite not speaking a word of English. In New York City, Dolores Huerta was called in to organize the boycott house on Eighty-sixth Street, while LeRoy Chatfield went to Los Angeles, and Gil Padilla started a house in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Chavez made the boycott international from the beginning by assigning Ganz to Toronto and Jessica Govea, a twenty-one-year-old farm worker’s daughter from Bakersfield, to Montreal.³⁵ The union also maintained houses in several big cities throughout the United States, including San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, Seattle, and Cleveland.

These were the boycott houses with which Jerry and Juanita Brown communicated in 1968. Chavez expected the couple to connect all spokes of the emerging network to the “pink house,” a little, three-bedroom cottage on the outskirts of Delano that served as the headquarters for the union. There, Chavez introduced the Browns to the “boycott room,” where he gave them minimal instructions. On a map of North America pinned to the wall, Chavez drew his finger down through Chicago and the Mississippi River and said, “Jerry, you take the East. Juanita, you take the West.” Even then, Jerry and Juanita split their time by walking the picket lines in the fields in the morning and working the phone lines and writing letters to boycott organizers in the afternoon. Given Juanita’s college-level Spanish skills, Chavez also had her translate depositions with immigrant farm workers acquired by the head of the UFW legal team, Jerry Cohen, to be used in cases against the growers. For an upstart union representing poor farm workers, such division of labor was necessary, although for the Browns, it also indicated that the boycott played a secondary role to the maintenance of the strike.³⁶

Out on the front lines of the boycott, organizers had to be resourceful if they were to succeed. Jerry Brown recalled, “Each boycott organizer was like a brilliant campaign strategist that figured out what the key to their particular city was.… It was really, you know, on-the-ground organizations.”³⁷ In New York, Ross’s emphasis on community organizing gave way to establishing contact with labor unions that controlled the movement of produce in and out of Manhattan. During the spring of 1968, UFW vice president and chief negotiator, Dolores Huerta, appealed to the Central Labor Council, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union, and the Seafarers Union to establish a total blockade of California grapes. The unions agreed to cooperate in time to interrupt the first grapes of the season from making their annual trip across the Hudson River by barge. As the grapes rotted in New Jersey, grape growers filed an injunction against the New York and New Jersey unions for violating federal regulations against secondary boycotts and demanded $25 million in compensation for lost sales. Although the Taft-Hartley Act did not apply to farm workers, it did restrict the Seafarers Union from participating in such actions. It eventually released the grapes, but the pause in shipments had reduced the overall number of car lots for 1968 to a record low of 91, down from the industry norm of 418.³⁸

In mid-July Huerta and the extremely efficient New York City house shifted to a consumer boycott, picketing stores throughout the city. Huerta pursued the same logic in organizing against supermarkets that the union had used in the campaigns against the corporate producers: the larger the organization, the greater its vulnerability. In the New York area, the A&P chain dominated the market, which made it the first target. Huerta described her strategy in a letter to Delano headquarters: “In each of the five boroughs, we organized neighborhood coalitions of church, labor, liberal and student groups. Then we began picketing A&P, the biggest chain in the city. For several months we had picket lines on about 25 to 30 stores and turned thousands of shoppers away. A lot of the managers had come up through the unions and were very sympathetic to us. In response to consumer pressure, the store managers began to complain to their division heads, and soon they took the grapes out of all of their stores, 430 of them.”³⁹ By knocking off A&P, the richest market chain in the United States, the boycotters softened up its competitors—Bohack, Walbaum’s, Hills, and Finast—for the kill. One by one, the stores became the exclusive target of the New York boycott house until all except one—Gristedes, an expensive delivery service market for wealthy clients—stopped selling grapes in the city.

Although Huerta’s tactic became part of a larger strategy used in the boycott, it did not always work elsewhere. In Los Angeles, for example, LeRoy Chatfield and a former farm labor contractor, Joe Serda, led the boycott against the second largest supermarket chain in the country, Safeway. Chatfield and Serda’s initial approach mirrored that of Huerta’s campaign: topple the largest chain, and the others will follow. To their chagrin, however, the large, boisterous demonstrations they staged in front of markets just upset a conservative clientele. Serda could not believe the response: “I was shocked. Most of the people would roll up their car windows and gun their motors right by us.” These responses differed from those in New York City, where many working-class consumers belonged to unions and declared their allegiance to the UFW. In his report from Los Angeles, Serda told Brown, “Even many of the union members here are conservative and racist.” In front of some stores, customers occasionally spit at picketers and yelled at Mexicans on the picket line “to go back to Mexico.”⁴⁰

Safeway’s own business practices contributed to the sentiments of its customers. The company—referred to derisively by some employees as “Slave-way” for its treatment of workers and union-busting politics—fought the boycott vigorously and took out full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times challenging the legitimacy of boycotters to speak for workers in the fields.⁴¹ In the summer of 1968, during the key months of the table grape harvest, Chatfield, Serda, and volunteers at the Los Angeles boycott house shared little of the momentum enjoyed by Huerta in New York.⁴²

Farther up the coast, in Portland, Oregon, the boycott team used Huerta’s approach against the supermarket chain Fred Meyer, but also discovered new strategies. Lead by a former Giumarra picker and Migrant Ministry member, Nick Jones, a small number of volunteers “introduced the highways [or] human billboard idea.” The idea involved placing several volunteers on highway bridges adorned with body-length signs promoting the boycott. Jones admitted to balking at the tactic initially, although he encouraged those who wanted to experiment to try. “It’s one of those times … that I really blew it. I [said], ‘it’s bullshit. Nobody’s going to respond to that, it’s just a waste of time.’” Within five minutes of taking to the freeways, however, Jones discovered how wrong he was. “People were letting loose of their car wheels and looking up at us and giving us the fist and the ‘V’ and the finger. I mean we were getting a real definite response out of everybody … to the point where they were looking and they had to hit their brakes to keep from hitting the car in front of them.” In time, the human billboard strategy traveled across the country, where volunteers in Boston used it to great effect.⁴³

In Toronto, Marshall Ganz adopted a slightly different approach, a combined strategy of appealing to unions for cooperation, picketing, diplomacy, and, when necessary, acts of civil disobedience. He began by making overtures to the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union for support, but the union could promise only to make the boycott an issue in future negotiations with Canadian markets. Union organizers experienced far greater success appealing to Toronto consumers, who showed much sympathy for the farm workers’ struggle and responded favorably to Toronto media coverage of the boycott. Consumers tended to show greater support for the boycott in locations where chain stores rather than independents dominated the grocery market landscape. Toronto was one such place, with more than 85 percent of food sales concentrated in four stores: A&P, Loblaw’s, Dominion, and Steinberg’s. Unfortunately for Ganz and the boycotters, Canada also maintained laws against picketing in store parking lots, a lesson they learned when police arrested the president of the Canadian Labor Council for trespassing when he attended a public rally for the UFW in front of one of the chains. The law forced Ganz to make a decision: either engage in civil disobedience in an attempt to change the law, as he had done in Mississippi several times, or pursue a different approach. Based on his experience in the civil rights movement, Ganz understood that the former often took many years to achieve results. Changing the law was not the primary goal; applying economic pressure in the service of the farm workers and achieving victory in the fields of California were. Consequently, Ganz had to devise an approach that did not squander the goodwill of the public while avoiding becoming embroiled in a legal battle on foreign soil.

Ganz adapted to local conditions through a combination of diplomacy and creative protests that played on public sympathies. Rather than approach the most obstinate storeowner first, he made a private appeal to Sam Steinberg, an owner who had a reputation for being fair with his employees and had already stated his support for the grape strike. Ganz reminded Steinberg of upcoming contract negotiations with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union, whose president had expressed his displeasure at handling scab grapes from California. Deciding to observe the boycott, Ganz argued, would give Steinberg an advantage in dealing with the union representing his workers and competing with other markets that showed no signs of complying with the boycott. To convince Steinberg of public opinion in support of the UFW, the local boycott committee directed Ontario residents to send letters or visit the market personally to express their intentions not to shop at his store as long as he continued to sell grapes.

Unlike his competitors, Steinberg and his legal advisor, Irving Levine, showed respect for the union. During the negotiations, Steinberg turned to Levine for guidance. Levine had recently returned from a trip to California to inspect the fields for himself and reported, “Conditions are feudal.” According to Brown, this information moved Steinberg: “He [told] us, ‘We are not going to handle grapes anymore. In fact, we’re going to put color signs of the fields up at our empty grape bins to explain to our customers why we’re supporting the grape boycott.’”⁴⁴

Other stores, however, resisted such appeals. Dominion, the largest of the Canadian chains, openly flaunted its disdain for the boycott by refusing to meet with Ganz while defending customers’ “freedom to choose” whether to buy grapes. In response, the boycott committee bypassed the parking lots for the interior of the stores. Once inside, boycotters engaged in “creative nonviolence” by filling their basket, wheeling it to the front of the store, then leaving without making a purchase. The stunt upset store managers who had to assign workers to reshelve merchandise.

In another action reminiscent of the theatrical protests by the emerging Youth International Party, or Yippies, boycotters carried helium-filled balloons into the store with the message “Don’t Eat Grapes” written on them, and distributed them to children while letting others float to the ceiling. When managers ordered employees to pop the balloons, confetti carrying pro-UFW messages rained down upon the store, causing another mess and infuriating store managers. In response to the protests, Dominion executives questioned the legality of such actions and publicly labeled Ganz and his merry group of pranksters “union goons.” The press, which had been called in anticipation of the theatrics, covered the balloon incident in a sympathetic tone that swayed public opinion toward the union. On one Toronto radio broadcast, a local deejay composed and delivered the following poem:

If all the goons popped toy balloons

And sprayed us with confetti

Then cops and crooks would use dirty looks

And guns that shoot spaghetti.⁴⁵

Soon after that broadcast, Dominion retracted its denunciation of the boycotters and agreed to suspend the sale of California grapes indefinitely.

Volunteers celebrated such victories but also valued the day-to-day excitement of building a movement within a given city. Nick Jones, for example, recalled the difficulty of adapting to the cold and rainy Northwest but found it manageable because of the relationships he developed in Portland. “We conceived it as one big committee and we took probably about 25 or 30, maybe as many as 50 people and really worked with them for months, bringing them into committee meetings and movies … working with them to get the boycott work done.” Picket line volunteers eschewed intimidation and assumed most consumers possessed a moral responsibility critical to the success of any consumer activism. This approach earned the respect of their adopted community and drew in many new recruits to the campaign. “We got together regularly and did pot lucks,” recalled Jones. “We became a pretty tight community.” The cramped quarters of many houses meant that people often slept on floors and clashed with one another, although the spirit of camaraderie in the early days of the boycott shaped the culture of most boycott houses. Service on the front lines of the boycott best represented what many in the union called “missionary work,” seemingly impossible tasks that, when accomplished, drew people closer to one another.⁴⁶

The work of boycott volunteers in cities also paid dividends in shoring up political support for the Migrant Ministry among Protestants at a time when it drew fire for supporting the UFW. Although Chavez drew on Catholic symbols and rituals to appeal to a mostly Catholic workforce, it was Hartmire and Drake, Protestant ministers, who were the first religious leaders to get behind the movement. When members of the rural denominations discovered that their donations had been funding the Migrant Ministry’s activism, many of them passed a resolution demanding that the Ecumenical Ministry of the Protestant Churches terminate Hartmire’s budget. The conflict initiated a “two-year war” among Protestant churches in California as to the fate of the organization. “The rural churches wanted us gone, out, or dead,” Hartmire remembered. “Fortunately for us, the urban churches’ membership outnumbered the rural membership.” The boycott played a significant role in educating urban Protestants about the stakes of the farm workers’ struggle and convinced many urban congregants to encourage their ministers to fight for the preservation of the Migrant Ministry. The moral dimensions of the battle also persuaded many urban Protestants to contribute time and money to the boycott.⁴⁷

As the examples of New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, and Toronto illustrate, boycott strategies varied from city to city, but overall the boycott seemed to be working. By mid-1968, under the auspices of Jerry and Juanita Brown, the UFW began to chart the progress of boycott houses by the changes in the quantity of car lot shipments to major North American cities. In New York City, for example, shippers delivered 801 fewer car lots than they had in 1967; in Chicago and Boston, the totals were down by 360 and 327, respectively. Although these numbers signaled success and overall shipments declined by 2,254 car lots in North America, the Browns also noticed increases in nontraditional cities: Miami was up 57 car lots; Atlanta up 16; Houston 36; Denver 12, Kansas City 11; Fort Worth 7. These numbers revealed the growers’ strategy of circumventing the boycott by marketing their table grapes to new markets, particularly in the South, West, and Midwest. In addition, although the UFW had established a presence in Canada, 1968 market reports suggested that shippers had redirected a number of car lots north of the border: Montreal was up 57 car lots, whereas Toronto climbed by 44.⁴⁸ These were the trends that compelled Brown to challenge the union leadership to make a decision: either continue to treat the boycott as a supplement to the strike or place greater emphasis on it by embracing an approach that gave them a greater chance for victory.

COMMITMENT DAY

By midsummer of 1968, the struggle had turned nasty, with threats against Chavez’s life and palpable anxiety among civil rights activists everywhere. In April, Martin Luther King Jr., an important ally of the movement, had been assassinated in Memphis, precipitating a rash of violent reactions in urban centers throughout the United States. Growing tension in the country mirrored that of the city, as picketers on the front lines of the grape strike experienced physical attacks, first by Teamster affiliates and then by law enforcement officials, who employed rough tactics in dispersing union demonstrations. Chavez, who had observed the effectiveness of King’s peaceful protests and read Gandhi’s philosophy on nonviolence, suppressed movement advocates’ appetite for retaliation by practicing long fasts that took a toll on his mind and body. The physical challenge of the fasts further weakened his aching back, making travel of any sort painful. Jerry and Juanita Brown, who owned a Westphalia Volkswagen van with a fold-down bed, provided Chavez with a vehicle ideal for traveling up and down California. Accompanied by Chavez’s two German shepherds, Huelga and Boycott, he, Jerry, and Juanita made the trek up California Highway 1, followed by an entourage of farm workers trained to provide security. “There’d be security cars in front of us, and one in back of us,” recalled Jerry Brown, “all connected by walkie-talkies.”

FIGURE 7. Jerry Brown (front right) on a grape strike picket line, Delano, California, ca. 1968.

As they entered Santa Barbara, Chavez ordered a quick diversion to the California mission to reflect on the battles ahead and pray for the success of the retreat. From the beginning, Chavez regarded the Catholic Church as an important influence on the movement and derived great personal inspiration from the example of Christ and His sacrifice. During the Giumarra campaign, the association grew stronger as the U.S. Council of Bishops moved from a position of neutrality to being an advocate for the farm workers. Although some local priests in the San Joaquin and Coachella Valleys remained partial to the growers, a number of Catholic and Protestant clergy willingly sacrificed time and occasionally their bodies for the movement.⁴⁹ Chavez’s hour-long visit to the mission refreshed the embattled leader and gave him time to think about the message he would deliver to movement participants later that day.

Jerry Brown chose a much more secular form of preparation for the retreat. Brown believed Chavez’s initial apathy for the data he had collected was a consequence of his poor style of presentation. Brown recalled, “I was very intense, very fast-talking, [and] very impatient.… I did the most horrible job one could imagine.” Brown turned to the experienced LeRoy Chatfield for guidance. Chatfield understood what inspired the rank and file, and he embodied the calm but deliberate approach Chavez valued. Together, the two men shared their vision of the boycott’s future with the entire membership, while Chavez watched intently at the back of the room.

Brown and Chatfield argued for a much more systematic approach to the campaign, taking into consideration the data collected by Brown and drawing on the experience of leaders in some of the most effective boycott cities to date. First, the two argued for an approach that concentrated on building strong boycott houses in ten of the top forty-one cities where more than 50 percent of California table grapes were sold. Those cities were New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Montreal, and Cleveland. They replaced the anecdotal reports for judging the success of the boycott with a clear and measurable goal of reducing shipments in every city by 10 percent or more over 1966 totals.⁵⁰ Although growers had begun to show signs of redirecting shipments elsewhere to soften the blow of the boycott, Brown and Chatfield calculated that such a shift could not make up for the substantial losses in growers’ traditional markets. As growers sent grapes to other ports, Jerry and Juanita would respond by working with volunteers in those cities to open up new boycott houses.

Second, Brown and Chatfield provided an analysis of Huerta’s successful campaign in New York City and proposed that every leader strive to implement a similar strategy in his or her city. The brilliance of Huerta’s strategy, Brown concluded, was her insistence on changing the marketing habits of the entire A&P chain rather than settling for victory at individual A&P stores, one at a time. According to Brown, Huerta had built strong boycott committees in neighborhoods where union membership was high and volunteers were plentiful, enthusiastic, and committed to stopping the sale of grapes in their neighborhood. “Once [these individual A&P markets] started to capitulate,” Brown told the retreat participants, “[Huerta] wouldn’t call off the picket lines until they agreed to take [grapes] off the entire division [of A&P markets].” Brown explained the logic of what he called the “tactic of the hostage stores” by way of his own research on supermarket chains across North America:

[I had acquired] one of these wonderful documents that showed every supermarket in the country, every chain; what its divisions were; what cities, counties, and areas were under each division; who the management was of that division. So I was able to say, you know, you’ve got this many stores in that division. And, you know, we recognized [that] the whole chain in the whole country wasn’t going to take it off, but that the profit and loss for that division, that manager [would]. And as you know, food stores, chain stores, operate on high volume, very thin profit margins. So if you start turning away two, three, five percent of their customers, you’re going to send that store negative.⁵¹

According to Brown’s research, supermarket sales in chain stores were $22.7 billion out of the total $68.3 billion spent on groceries in North America, an amount that constituted 33 percent of all grocery sales. In the eight of the top selling cities for table grapes, chain stores controlled over 50 percent of grocery sales. Brown and Chatfield argued that by taking a few key stores in the largest chains in the United States and Canada hostage, they could influence sales more quickly than if they targeted independents. Given that the boycott had already moved into the peak harvest months of July through November, when 71 percent of all table grapes entered the market, use of the “hostage stores” tactic became crucial to salvaging an effective effort for 1968. Huerta had pursued this strategy intuitively; the boycott coordinators now had worked up a rationale for its success and a justification for its use elsewhere.

When the duo finished, Chavez walked to the front of the room, convinced of the boycott’s importance to achieving overall victory. Offering his own interpretation of the strategy, he referred to the idea of targeting chain stores as “capitalism in reverse.” “We will picket the stores,” Chavez announced, “until we turn enough customers away to make the management realize that it is more profitable to stop selling grapes than to sell them.”⁵² On the question of how to do this, neither Chavez nor Brown nor any of the veterans of the boycott had a definitive answer, but examples abounded around the room. Marshall Ganz, who had flown back from Toronto for the meeting, shared both his diplomatic approach with cooperative owners as well as his acts of “creative nonviolence” against those who remained stubborn. Marco Muñoz, back from Boston, generated a laugh from the room when he reported on how his house held a “Boston Grape Party,” in which they dumped cartons of grapes into Massachusetts Bay in order “to liberate the farm workers from the tyranny of the growers.”⁵³ Chatfield and Serda shared their experiences in Los Angeles as a way to learn from mistakes made in cities where a more hostile climate prevailed. Through it all, the group developed a sense of camaraderie, forming a bond that would inure them to the difficulties that awaited them as they moved forward, now with a clearer sense of their mission.

Chavez announced a redeployment of boycott workers to the cities, sending his best organizers to the front lines and accepting volunteers to lead boycott houses. Jerry Brown, who had remained in Delano in hopes of eventually launching his Ph.D. research, now set aside the dissertation indefinitely for an assignment to coordinate the boycott from Toronto. “They had given a lot to us,” he remembered. “They were accepting [our challenge to] really put in place a strategy to win.” Within the month, Jerry and Juanita moved into a four-story brownstone in Toronto with Chavez’s compadre, Manuel Rivera, and began orchestrating the new, improved boycott network from there.

Before adjourning the meeting, Chavez asked everyone to answer a straightforward, yet until now deceptively difficult question: “What is the key to the boycott?” Going around the room, participants offered a variety of answers: effective picket lines, raising money, countering the propaganda of the Teamsters and the growers, and getting the churches involved. “All of these answers have some truth in them,” Chavez responded, “but the key to the boycott is people.” In a tone that instilled confidence in every volunteer sitting in the room, he elaborated: “You’re building an army of supporters, and you need to find a way to get the people on your side. An organizer will find a way to do the boycott. You can tell me the boycott’s difficult. You can tell me they’re spitting on you in L.A.; that they’re telling you to go back to Mexico, that they’re calling you a Communist. You can tell me it’s cold in Toronto. I understand that. But don’t tell me it can’t be done. ‘Si se puede!’ Your job as an organizer is to find the key.”⁵⁴ Chavez’s endorsement of the boycott signaled an important turn of events, even if he had not indicated as much prior to the meeting. More than the convincing argument put forth by Brown and Chatfield, the results of the boycott spoke for themselves, demonstrating that the tactic could instill fear in the growers in ways that the strike had not. Whether it could actually bring the most stubborn of them to the bargaining table remained to be seen, although Chavez’s support gave volunteers the confidence to try. His encouragement of a free exchange of ideas also contributed to their collective knowledge, making the group a more effective team. As they embarked on their new assignments, each volunteer carried the belief that he or she was about to make history.