toward the end of the season and over issues not related to wages or a contract. In fact, as Padilla recalls, they did not even refer to NFWA as a union. In this regard, for Chavez the strike symbolized a flexing of NFWA’s muscles and put the growers on notice that they could no longer mistreat their employees. For Larry Itliong, however, the strike represented a potential threat to usurp a union movement that he and AWOC members had been planning to take over. Padilla recalled his response: “Dolores told him that I was striking and I’m moving in, so he got scared.” On September 8, 1965, Itliong pulled Filipino workers out of nine vineyards in Delano, initiating the grape strike.63
The AWOC action caught Chavez by surprise and forced upon him a decision about striking that he was not prepared to make. Padilla recalled his concern immediately following the news that Filipinos had walked off the job: “You better come; the world’s coming to an end! There’s 5,000 Filipinos on the street, [on] strike.” When the two met, Chavez asked Padilla to attend an AWOC meeting in Delano at a community building known locally as Filipino Hall. He also instructed Bill Asher, a staff member on the newspaper El Malcriado, affiliated with NFWA, to join Padilla to document the historic meeting. Padilla and Asher sat in the front row in the mostly Filipino audience. For Padilla, the meeting revealed a diversity among Filipinos he had never known. “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” he remembered, because they were “speaking all their different languages.” The meeting required several translators for the Filipinos alone to communicate among themselves, because members spoke at least three languages: Tagalog, Illocano, and Pangasinan. In spite of the language barriers, Padilla interpreted the sincerity of AWOC’s commitment and received an appeal from Itliong for NFWA to join them. When Padilla returned with the news, Chavez arranged with the local priest to hold a meeting of NFWA members at the local church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Delano. He called on allies in the civil rights organizations, CORE and SNCC, to use their connections to draw in activists interested in supporting farm worker justice and told Asher to get the word out to the community of farm workers via El Malcriado. Meanwhile, Padilla took a sleeping bag down to Filipino Hall to live among AWOC members and discuss mutual interests.
Strategically called on September 16, Mexican Independence Day, the meeting of NFWA drew a capacity crowd that overwhelmed the small church built with money donated by many of the Catholic Slavic growers in the valley. Padilla conducted the meeting, which led many in attendance to confuse him with Chavez. He invited AWOC members to address the crowd to explain the reasons for their strike. Chavez, who waited patiently off to the side, had yet to decide whether he would ask NFWA members to join in the labor walkout. “Cesar was afraid to call a strike,” Padilla remembered. When he finally spoke, however, he discovered a readiness for action among the people. He resisted shouts of “Come on, say it!” from people in the audience who wanted him to initiate the strike there and then, largely out of respect for the priest, who had asked Padilla and him not to call a strike that evening. Instead, he called a meeting for the following week at the American Legion hall. “That’s where we called the strike,” Padilla remembered. “The following day we went out and picketed, and the rest is history.”64
Numerous scholars and journalists have documented the history of the Delano grape strike and the beginning of the modern farm worker movement. Many tell the familiar story of how a reluctant Cesar Chavez was drawn into the strike by the more radical, union-oriented AWOC members, especially Larry Itliong. This Filipino farm worker vanguard took the first brave steps toward the formation of a new multiethnic union. According to Padilla, the collaboration between AWOC and NFWA forced members to deal with cultural differences between Mexicans and Filipinos, as well as the very different relationships these two organizations had with the established national unions.
Early on, differences in resources brought the two closer together. The NFWA had not accumulated a strike fund or a permanent home, whereas AWOC had AFL-CIO money and Filipino Hall. The situation forced many Mexican families to rely on the generosity of Filipino workers to feed their families while out on strike. Many recalled strikers eating meals together in Filipino Hall, often sharing cuisines. “We [were] introduced to fish heads and bitter lemon and all that Filipino food,” Padilla fondly remembered.65 As the growers dug in and resisted a settlement, many of the men—both Filipino and Mexican—began to seek work elsewhere, testing the fortitude of the striking families. At these moments, Mexican women picked up the slack and led the picketing in the fields. The now famous photo of UAW president, Walter Reuther, leading a march, flanked by Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong, in November 1965 conveys the multiethnic solidarity of the moment, although it obscures the significant role women played in sustaining the movement.66
FIGURE 4. AFL-CIO and AWOC members march in support of farm workers during the Delano strike, 1965. Left to right: Larry Itliong, AWOC; Walter Reuther, UAW; Cesar Chavez, NFWA. ALUA, UFW Collection, 362.
The photo also hides the simmering tension that existed among the various labor factions that composed the movement at the beginning. AWOC struck, in part, because of worries that NFWA was about to take the lead in the race to establish a farm worker union. This misperception was fueled, in part, by Al Green, who had been active throughout rural California in search of the right formula for success. A mercurial figure, Green had belonged to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters before the organization was ejected from the AFL-CIO for corruption in the national office. He maintained connections to packinghouse workers organized under the Teamsters and advised Itliong and other AWOC members to be open to whatever affiliation gave them the best chance for victory. Meanwhile, the presence of the UAW’s Walter Reuther at the November march and his gift of $10,000 to both AWOC and NFWA indicated more than just a helping hand from a big national brother. During the mid-1960s, Reuther locked horns with AFL-CIO president, George Meany, over a range of policy issues, including the role of the national union in the civil rights movement. That Reuther had an especially close relationship to Chavez spurred Meany to send Bill Kircher, an AFL-CIO representative, to shore up the national union’s influence over the new movement. By August 19, 1966, Kircher had forged a merger of AWOC and NFWA under the name United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and brokered an agreement for Chavez rather than Itliong to become the president of the union.67 The decision made sense, given that the majority of workers were Mexican; however, it also threatened to alienate the significant number of Filipino workers who still maintained allegiances to other unions, including the Teamsters.
By 1966, leaders had worked out much of the logistical issues related to who would guide the union, but many issues remained unresolved, including how this movement would succeed where others had failed. Although many noble efforts had been made over the previous sixty years, no organization or leader had figured out the right approach to earning collective bargaining rights for farm workers. The typical union strategy, the strike, had thus far failed. By the end of the harvest that year, growers showed their usual stubbornness in resisting negotiations and a confidence that they could outlast the poorly funded union. To succeed, Chavez would have to consider the boycott, a strategy that had lapsed since the NFLU used it in 1948 but that would have new potential in the era of the civil rights movement.
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:
