attracted computer-savvy veterans to upload memoirs, documents, and photos and to engage in discussion online. Regarding the collections at Wayne State, most documents and recordings focus on organizers who ran the union and, to a lesser extent, the farm workers who benefited from their activities. This is not to say that farm workers’ voices are absent or that worker opinions are not available. Nevertheless, a systematic collection of oral histories and documents from farm workers during the heyday of the UFW remains to be done.19
These limitations notwithstanding, From the Jaws of Victory conveys a tale of hope, triumph, and disappointment that will be useful to anyone who has harbored the goal of bringing justice to this world.
The book is organized into a balanced focus on the United Farm Workers before and after the historic grape contracts in 1970. Chapter 1 explores the many activists who revived an effort to end rural poverty in California and explains how Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers emerged as the leader of this new movement. Chapter 2 examines the evolution of the boycott as the primary tool for the union and the many tactics employed by boycott volunteers to make it effective. In chapter 3, the conditions that contributed to the signing of the first UFW contracts for grape workers, including the efforts of boycott volunteers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, are explored. Chapter 4 considers the changes in the U.S. economy and the policies President Richard Nixon employed to expand the “free trade” of California’s agricultural bounty. This policy included encouraging the Teamsters to organize farm workers in an attempt to divide (and conquer) the farm labor movement. Chapter 5 examines the UFW’s decision to enlist the support of California’s state government in regulating labor relations through the revolutionary Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA). Chapter 6 explores Chavez’s failed attempt to shift consumer activism generated by the boycott to support for Proposition 14, a California initiative that aimed to resolve funding and legal ambiguities in ALRA. Chapter 7 examines the fallout from the failure of Proposition 14, including Chavez’s attempt to root out disloyal staff who dared to criticize him. Chapter 8 explores the struggle between Chavez and the boycott volunteers, staff, and members of the national executive board who challenged his increasingly autocratic management of the union and resisted his plans to focus the union’s energy on the creation of an intentional community at La Paz. Although these brave volunteers and organizers failed to bring democracy to the UFW, they succeeded in preventing Chavez from taking the union down the path of notorious cults of that age. Taken together, these chapters tell a new history of the United Farm Workers, one that honors the service of volunteers who have been overshadowed by a previous generations’ search for heroes rather than usable knowledge.
ONE
Birth of a Movement
FARM WORKER ADVOCATES have often contrasted visions of rural California as the land of milk and honey with the gritty reality of farm workers’ lives. This, in part, was the approach that novelist John Steinbeck, photographer Dorothea Lange, and other agrarian partisans used in the 1930s to arouse the nation’s appetite for reform. Their ability to undermine growers’ idyllic impressions of the California countryside led to the creation of programs that brought temporary relief to field hands. Although the New Deal ultimately fell short, artists and union organizers proved that they could counter advertisements celebrating the bounty of nature and, for a time, shift the balance of power in favor of workers in the long struggle to end rural poverty in the Golden State.
Such a tactic was at the heart of a 1948 film, Poverty in the Valley of Plenty. A coproduction of the National Farm Labor Union and Hollywood filmmakers, the film drew attention to the anti-union practices of the DiGiorgio Fruit Company located in the lower San Joaquin Valley. An Italian immigrant, Giuseppe “Joseph” DiGiorgio, began modestly, growing fruit on 5,845 acres in 1919. By 1946 he had expanded production on thirty-three square miles worth $18.2 million, becoming the largest grape, plum, and pear grower in the world.1 According to NFLU organizers, much of this wealth had been built on the backs of laborers who lived in substandard housing. With the film and their activism, they sought to make the DiGiorgio Fruit Company more accountable to its employees.
In 1947 union organizers at DiGiorgio petitioned for a 10 cents per hour raise, seniority rights, and a grievance procedure. The company promptly responded by expelling striking workers and replacing them with several hundred Filipinos, undocumented workers, Tejano recruits, and 130 Mexican guest workers, known as braceros. The employment of the last group violated the agreement between Mexico and the United States that stipulated no foreign workers would be used during labor disputes. Members of the Hollywood film unions regarded DiGiorgio’s reaction as so hostile that they waived all wage and pay contracts to get the film made.2
The collaboration between the NFLU and filmmakers marked a new phase in the evolution of farm worker activism. Besides evoking the contrast between growers’ wealth and farm workers’ poverty in the title, they portrayed the stark differences between the natural beauty of the fields and the ramshackle homes of employees. The first thirty-seven of fifty-seven scenes accentuate this contrast, offering viewers a visual context for the last portion of the film, which is focused on the DiGiorgio strike. In terms of activism, the union paired Poverty in the Valley of Plenty with highly public appeals to consumers across the nation not to buy DiGiorgio’s products. The first large-scale consumer boycott of its kind, the strategy worked, cutting deeply into the company’s profits and provoking angry clashes between loyal employees and strikers on the farm.3
If the NFLU’s film and boycott signaled a new level of sophistication among farm worker activists, it also demonstrated the resolve of DiGiorgio to maintain the status quo. In addition to hiring a photographer and filmmaker to produce a visual counter to Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, the company unleashed a legal torrent on the NFLU, suing them for libel and fighting to suppress any further screenings of the film. Although an independent investigation by CBS News and Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas revealed the company’s version to be false and the repression of workers to be real, DiGiorgio simply overwhelmed its opposition with images and lawsuits. Unable to match the wealth and power of the company in the courts, the NFLU agreed to destroy all copies of Poverty in the Valley of Plenty and end the strike and boycott in exchange for DiGiorgio’s dropping charges against the union leaders. The settlement brought an end to the NFLU, which ceased to exist by the summer of 1950.4
DiGiorgio achieved its intended goal of destroying the NFLU and ending the circulation of the film, but the episode signaled a core truth about agriculture: consumer opinion matters. The union’s ability to engineer a boycott demonstrated to both sides that the conflict extended well beyond the fields, and that simply replacing workers at the point of production could not solve the conflict. Indeed, DiGiorgio’s suppression of Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, even at the expense of free speech, demonstrated how seriously the company took this challenge. Although DiGiorgio won this battle, growers remained susceptible to such campaigns as long as they refused to take responsibility for solving the problem of rural poverty.
It took time for activists to recover from the collapse of the NFLU. Although Ernesto Galarza, a labor intellectual and the former director of education and research for the union, reconstituted the NFLU as the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU), the new union struggled as a consequence of the bracero program. Throughout the 1950s, the single goal of ending the program consumed farm worker advocates, delaying the use of tactics briefly employed by the NFLU. By the beginning
