Padilla said, “because they were organizing labor contractors.”56 This strategy circumvented organizing in the fields in favor of appealing to middlemen who maintained communication with several workers at a time. This was particularly true among Filipino labor contractors who stayed in contact with Filipino migrants as they spanned the entire West Coast, working in canneries, on boats, and on farms from Alaska to Arizona. As the Fresno State College study showed, however, these same men could be as exploitative as the growers for whom they worked, often retaining the greatest share of the money set aside for hiring field hands. The decision to organize contractors rather than the rank-and-file workers betrayed the organizing philosophy that Chavez, Padilla, and other CSO veterans had learned from Fred Ross. Chavez articulated the philosophy years later: “Fred used to say that ‘you can’t take shortcuts, because you’ll pay for it later.’ He believed society would be transformed from within by mobilizing individuals and communities. But you have to convert one person at a time, time after time.”57 Padilla and Chavez regarded AWOC’s approach as the kind of shortcut Ross had advised them to avoid.
Chavez stayed true to his training even when workers themselves called on him to take stronger action. In March 1965, for example, a worker on a local rosebush farm, Epifanio Camacho, appealed to Chavez to organize a strike against the grower for repeatedly breaking promises of better pay. Chavez resisted, advising Camacho to have patience. By 1965, NFWA leaders had expanded its membership to approximately 1,200 through such painstaking methods that they believed would pay dividends later.58
In contrast, AWOC’s approach garnered some immediate success, especially among Filipino workers. Larry Itliong, a veteran of the Pacific migration and a former labor contractor, epitomized the AWOC organizer. Born in San Nicolas, Pangasina, the Philippines, Itliong arrived on the West Coast in 1929 and worked in various crops throughout California and Washington, including a lettuce farm where he lost two fingers in a harvesting accident. He also canned salmon in Alaska and met many labor organizers along the way, some of them affiliated with the Communist Party. By the early 1950s, he had risen to the position of labor contractor in Kern-Tulare County while maintaining radical political views that made him an appealing candidate for membership in AWOC. In 1956 he joined the labor union organizing committee and began to assist Green, Knowles, and another organizer, Norman Smith, in attracting other Filipinos to the organization, including a young Peter Velasco and Andy Imutan. Along with Itliong, two other veterans of the fields, Philip Veracruz and Ben Gines, joined AWOC’s organizing efforts and became key figures in AWOC’s attempt to establish a foothold in the San Joaquin Valley.59
In spite of differences in their approach, AWOC and NFWA members had mutual respect and stayed in contact. Itliong was present and organizing among Filipino workers at the time of the Tulare rent strike, whereas Padilla maintained a positive but distant relationship with the Filipino organizers he encountered. Although exceptions existed, NFWA confined much of its organizing effort to Mexican field workers, a decision that mirrored the heavy Mexican influence in the CSO. AWOC had greater success among Filipinos, likely a reflection of its emphasis on organizing contractors, in which Filipinos played an important role.
In the summer of 1965 the tracks of these two upstart unions converged in the grape harvest. AWOC took on a more aggressive posture that season in anticipation of the end of the bracero program. When Lyndon Johnson reneged on the government’s plan and revived the program to allow a limited number of Mexican nationals to work in the Coachella Valley grape harvest, AWOC pounced. It pointed out that domestic workers—many of them Filipino immigrants—earned 15 cents less than the braceros and instructed all AWOC pickers to vacate the field. Coachella Valley growers quickly resolved the matter by agreeing to a pay increase in an attempt to avoid a contract and the possibility of an extended battle.60 AWOC’s success on the wage increase, however, encouraged union officials to explore new opportunities as the harvest moved northward into the San Joaquin Valley, where the season lasted much longer and workers had an opportunity to take a much stronger stand. Larry Itliong moved to Delano and began organizing among the many manongs (fellow country people from the Illocano-speaking region of the Philippines) who participated in the local harvest. Throughout this period, he also maintained communication with Dolores Huerta, whose rapport with Filipino farm workers from her days working in her mother’s restaurant and hotel made her the ideal liaison for NFWA in its communication with AWOC. Although the organizations maintained friendly relations, the question of which union would take the lead in the new union movement among field workers created a bit of a rivalry. In addition, AWOC had support from the AFL-CIO, while Chavez had been cultivating his own relations with Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers (UAW). The nominal investment in the race to organize farm workers by two national unions raised the stakes enough for each organization to keep an eye on the other.
The NFWA’s organizing model and attention to Mexican workers gave it a stronger influence in the San Joaquin Valley, where ethnic Mexicans dominated in the labor market. In addition, the rent strike served as an important training experience for new organizers. One of the camp residents, Paul Espinosa, went on to organize Radio Bilingue, a radio program in Spanish and English that fed the local populations important information regarding the union. Another resident, Ernesto Laredo, continued to organize tenants, along with a sixteen-year-old girl, Yolanda Barrera, who served as a translator and who eventually became a federal prosecutor. According to Padilla, Espinosa urged him to branch out into organizing on the local grape ranch, J. D. Martin’s Rancho Blanco, where many of the tenants worked. There, a foreman had agitated male workers by separating them from their wives. When the women relieved themselves in the fields, the foreman would follow to sneak a peek at them. Espinosa believed they could organize the workers to get the foreman fired or to arrange for adequate bathroom facilities on the job.
A lack of agreement on the next step and Chavez’s health, however, initially delayed further organizing. The demanding schedule of house meetings and travel landed Chavez in a Bakersfield hospital with pneumonia that August. This setback and a preference for building the union one member at a time prevented him from moving aggressively. In addition, NFWA organizers wanted to respect the wishes of their allies. Unlike AWOC, which had been organized by union men and supported by the AFL-CIO, NFWA had started as a coalition of community organizers, religious leaders, and college students who did not always have a common vision for what the organization would become. Padilla, for example, recalled the moment Espinosa came into the Porterville office to ask him to organize at Rancho Blanco. “Jim Drake happened to walk in when I was talking to [Espinosa] and he [said], ‘Don’t go strike, you can’t strike.’” According to Padilla, Drake worried about conservative funders from the Church who might withdraw their support if they learned that they were organizing a union. Padilla appeased Drake by promising to evaluate the situation on the ranch and not get involved in labor matters.61
Padilla’s encounters at Rancho Blanco compelled him to take action. He witnessed several instances of abuse of workers on the job and heard from a number of employees who were ready to protest. He knew many of the workers from the rent strike and discovered that at least half the workers lived in Earlimart, a small town near Delano that had been fertile ground for recruiting new NFWA members. “So, one day,” Padilla recalled, “I got up and I said, ‘Ah, I’m going to pull them out.’” While Chavez lay in the hospital, Padilla directed the first labor strike of the decade in the San Joaquin Valley. When Chavez heard of the action, he called Padilla from his hospital bed, ribbing him for waiting to make the move until he, Chavez, was sick. Upon Chavez’s release by the doctor, the two immediately hit the fields with picket signs and called all NFWA members to participate in the labor action. When Chavez called the owner of the ranch to reach a settlement, the owner refused to meet. Padilla recalled the grower’s response: “Let [Chavez] rot; I don’t care.” The unwillingness of J. D. Martin to settle the dispute signaled an important difference between growers in the San Joaquin Valley and those in Coachella. The longer seasons and a thriving day-hauler labor market gave San Joaquin Valley growers confidence that they could weather the storm.62
Chavez and Padilla viewed the strike as an impromptu action initiated by
