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
