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,
