started. For Chavez, Drake’s arrival provided a set of wheels and the ministry’s gasoline money to take him around the valley and make local connections that would contribute to the formation of a new farm workers union. Drake benefited too, learning the lay of the land and meeting Gilbert Padilla in the process. Padilla was generous with information and gave Drake a history lesson on organizing.47
Padilla recommended Porterville, a small town thirty miles from Delano in the heart of grape country, where a county-owned labor camp known as Woodville housed three hundred families. Drake and another ministry representative, David Havens, followed Padilla’s advice and used a small amount of money raised by Hartmire to rent an office behind the local barbershop for the Farm Workers Organization. Drake got the attention of residents by purchasing a large tank, filling it with gasoline, and inviting farm workers to pay a $2 annual fee for the privilege of purchasing fuel for $.20 per gallon—far below the going rate. Given workers’ dependence on automobiles for transportation to local jobs, the plan worked, and the office flourished. News of their organization spread to the neighboring town of Farmerville near Visalia and attracted residents of another labor camp, Linnell, to participate in the program. The fueling station provided Drake and Havens an important base of operation, and the two began to run CSO-style house meetings with local farm workers to explore their needs.
Meanwhile, Padilla worked on behalf of the NFWA, using the last months of his grant to conduct a survey of farm workers’ complaints. He began by recruiting members of Central Valley CSO chapters in Corcoran, Huron, and Selma who vowed to stay in the organization until Chavez set up his new union. “I had those guys organized doing the survey,” Padilla recalled.48 When the money ran out, he stayed on as a field laborer but soon picked up another grant through Ross to run a women’s educational project in Hanford that included attention to reproductive rights and child care.49 Drake and Havens shared an interest in making contraceptives available to women farm workers. According to Padilla, Havens harbored the misconception that because most women farm workers belonged to the Catholic Church, they would be resistant to their message. “They go [to church] to look for their soul[s],” Padilla told Havens, “They don’t pay attention to the priest!” To prove his point, Padilla accompanied Havens to the Woodville camp, where they quickly distributed a box of free contraceptives to four or five women who became their primary distributors to the rest of the residents.
The trips into the camp revealed the extent of the housing crisis among farm workers. “The labor camp was a very disgusting site,” Padilla recalled. The houses amounted to windowless, two-bedroom tin shacks built in 1937 for dust bowl migrants that had been handed down several generations to the current residents. During the hot summer months, residents would place on the roof wet rugs recovered from the local dump in a futile attempt to get some relief from the heat. Padilla found that women resented having to share communal toilets and showers, where they encountered many single men who sat outside the facilities in an attempt to catch a glimpse of them naked. The conditions appalled Padilla, who encouraged Drake to join him in an effort to close down or reform the camp. Drake expressed some trepidation but agreed to look into the history of the facility, and Padilla agreed to do outreach among the residents.
In his research, Drake discovered that the federal government had designed the homes to last no more than ten years. After World War II, growers had taken over the camps and continued to use them for their workers throughout the 1950s, until they began to divest from housing projects in favor of working with labor contractors to acquire day-haul laborers. By the 1960s, the Tulare County Housing Authority had taken over the camps, but it did nothing to improve the conditions. Drake conferred about the tenants’ rights with James Herndon, an African American attorney working on behalf of the poor in San Francisco. Herndon inspected the dilapidated facilities and informed Drake that the county was in violation of a 1947 law that restricted owners from raising rents on condemned dwellings. He recommended that they pursue legal action.50
Ever the organizer, Padilla encouraged Drake to take the bolder step of setting up a fund and asking tenants to pay their rent to them instead of the county. In return, Padilla and Drake promised to protect the tenants if the county attempted to evict them from the camp. Although not everyone participated, enough did, and county officials began to send eviction notices. They also sent the sheriff to intimidate the residents, although Padilla reassured them that the county had no legal standing to force them to pay. “I said, ‘[The] County doesn’t know … who’s paying … so when they come to you to tell you to pay [your rent], screw ’em.” According to Padilla, several residents followed his directions and lived in the camp for months, rent-free. They paid whatever they could to the fund set up by Padilla and Drake, which was deposited in the bank in case they needed it to take legal action against the county. Padilla also raised awareness of the problems in the camp by inviting the secretary of labor to visit; he also attracted the attention of the local press.51
The standoff between the residents and the county eventually erupted when the local housing authority chose to raise the rents to cover its losses. The action angered the newly empowered residents, who took to demonstrating against the county. Drake recalled the scene: “One day the Tulare County Housing Authority arbitrarily raised the rent on the condemned, tin shacks from $19 to $22 per month! I drove down to the camp not knowing this, and there was Gil under the water tank, standing and shouting on top of a car. By the time he got down, he had started a rent strike—300 families joined!”52 Padilla, Drake, Havens, and a young college student, Doug Adair, counseled the Woodville families to join with residents of the nearby Linnell camp in Farmville to create one big march to the Tulare government office building. The protesters overwhelmed housing authority officials, who took cover in their offices until the marchers moved on to a local park for a celebration. In the months that followed, Drake and Padilla took the county to court, where they won a settlement that restored the original rent and forced the housing authority to build a new facility on the same property.53
The Tulare rent strike inspired many farm workers and a number of local organizers to join the NFWA. Among them was Brother Gilbert, a priest who had left his post as principal of the Catholic Garces High School in Bakersfield to help lead the march. “I wore my official Christian Brothers black suit, black silk vest, and a white starched collar somewhat similar to the clerical collar worn by the Catholic clergy.” Brother Gilbert, later known by his birth name, LeRoy Chatfield, eventually left the priesthood to become a critical member of Chavez’s team. During the rent strike, he carried a placard with a quote by the famous union organizer, Joe Hill: “Don’t Mourn—Organize!” Chatfield got the idea from a Catholic anarchist friend, Ammon Hennacy, who ran a Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City. “Even though I had never participated in a farm worker ‘rent strike’ march before,” recalled Chatfield, “I thought Joe Hill’s quotation was appropriate for the occasion.”54 Chatfield was not alone in his lack of experience. Many considered the rent strike an important opening salvo in a new movement to improve the lives of farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley.
A STRIKE IS NOT ENOUGH
While the National Farm Workers Association built its organization, Al Green and AWOC continued to work on a parallel track in the southern deserts and elsewhere in the San Joaquin Valley. Although disappointed by the failure to halt the use of Mexican nationals as scab labor in the Imperial Valley, AWOC kept the pressure on, believing that the national mood toward the bracero program had shifted in its favor. AWOC’s national sponsor, the AFL-CIO, wanted to be organized and ready in the fields when the bracero program ended. To prepare for this moment, national representatives channeled funds to Green and Clive Knowles, who searched for the most likely workers to organize. The national office also pursued legal action against the U.S. Department of Labor to enforce ceilings on the employment of Mexican nationals who remained in the labor market. This move guarded against the replacement of domestic workers who, they believed, constituted AWOC’s future.55
Green and Knowles reached out to many workers, including those within Chavez’s fold. Padilla recalled that when he left the CSO, Green
