as is required by the surprises of life and work. But bad trios do not last as long as bad marriages, as bickering packers damage the whole crew, and the squabblers return to cutting or trade places with other packers sooner rather than later.
During the UFW years, some piece-rate crews formed soccer teams and played in recreational leagues, at night or on weekends. Well paid, skilled, proud of their jobs and their abilities, they were greatly admired in farm-worker communities. The cooperative nature of so much of their work prepared them for various kinds of collective action. The dominant ethos of the crews, that combination of solidarity and competition that is essential to a successful sports team, had always been useful in coordinating harvest-time job actions, like slow-downs and short work stoppages. It was also useful in building a union. The piece-rate crews of Salinas were not the only workers who built the organization that ultimately became the UFW, nor even the first. In fact, in the beginning none of the people who founded the union were thinking much about the ways the jobs in the fields had already organized workers, and what that might mean for a union. Only later would it be clear that the character of the work itself was as pivotal in the story of the union as the workers who did it and as telling as the character and deep background of the founders.
’27 to ’39
The tenant sat in his doorway, and the driver thundered his engine and started off, tracks falling and curving, harrows combing, and the phalli of the seeder slipping into the ground. Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, footbeaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so that it fell sideways, crushed like a bug. And the driver was goggled and a rubber mask covered his nose and mouth. The tractor cut a straight line, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder. The tenant man stared after it, his rifle in his hand. His wife was beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.
—The destruction of the Joads’ house, John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath
I remember the tractor heading for the corral. I shudder now to think of it. It was there that Richard and I had fun together riding the horses and the young calves bareback . . . Now the tractor was at the corral, and the old sturdy fence posts gave way as easily as stalks of corn. It was a monstrous thing. Richard and I were watching on higher ground. We kept cussing the driver, but he didn’t hear us, our words were lost in the sound of tearing timbers and growling motor. We didn’t blame the grower, we blamed the poor tractor driver. We just thought he was mean. I wanted to go stop him but I couldn’t. I felt helpless.
—Cesar Chavez remembering the destruction of the family
homestead in Arizona, Jacques Levy, Cesar Chavez,
Autobiography of La Causa
Cesar Chavez was twelve years old in 1939 when he and his brother Richard watched the tractor destroy their childhood. It was the same year The Grapes of Wrath was published; a year later, moviegoers in theaters across America watched as a tractor smashed the Joad homestead on celluloid, and Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda) told enthralled audiences that wherever people were fighting against injustice that is where you would find him. By that time the Chavez family was on the migrant trail, sleeping in a leaky tent in Oxnard, trying to squeeze a living out of the California fields. Cesar and his younger brother, Richard, got jobs sweeping out an Oxnard movie theater every day after school. They earned a nickel each, which they gave to their mother, and a free movie pass. The young migrants soon became movie fans: Cesar told his main biographer, Jacques Levy, that he went to the movies so often that he saw almost every Lone Ranger serial.1 But he never said anything about seeing the popular movie version of his own family’s tragedy, even as he told Levy about an incident in his life that seemed to come right off the screen. Maybe he missed the movie. What he didn’t miss, what he knew in his soul, was the shocking difference between his Arizona homestead and the California fields: a family surrounded by a community of friends and relatives, working on their own plot of land; that same family uprooted, traveling among hostile strangers, working on large corporate-owned farms for other people’s profits.
The Chavez family’s doomed corral was part of their hundred-acre ranch outside Yuma, in Quechan Indian country. It had been homesteaded by the boys’ grandfather Cesario, a muleskinner from Chihuahua. Cesario laid claim to the land thirty years before the family lost it, and he was lucky not to live long enough to witness the disaster. Cesario’s son, Librado, had been unable to pay all the taxes on the farm. An Anglo absentee landowner who held title to the adjoining property had paid the taxes and wrenched the family homestead away from the Chavez family.
Losing his father’s land was just the latest in Librado’s long series of losses. When the Depression first hit, another Anglo, a lawyer, had swindled him out of the title to his own forty-acre ranch. As the bad times got worse, Librado lost the grocery store, pool hall, and garage that he had bought in the prosperous twenties. Broke, he moved the family back to his father’s original homestead, where he tried to make a go of it growing corn, squash, chilies, and watermelon. But the Gila River, which irrigated the farm, was unreliable. Twenty years of overgrazing had destroyed the native grasses along its banks. Often it was dry, but in wet years it flooded.2 Librado’s first harvests were hampered by drought. Then, in the midst of his troubles, the rampaging river broke through the irrigation ditches his father had built. Librado couldn’t sell the crops he managed to salvage. By the time the boys saw the tractor crush the corral, the family had spent one last year on the homestead after a wasted season working in the California fields in hopes of raising money to pay the taxes. Now they would have to go back to California.
Until the family hit the road, Librado Chavez’s problems had barely registered on his oldest son, Cesar. It had been mostly good times in the North Gila Valley: playing in the grocery store that had doubled as the family’s first home; learning about horses from his father and charity from his mother; catching gophers, feeding them to the cats, and selling their tails for a penny a piece to the local irrigation district; playing pool with Richard on the table that sometimes doubled as their bed; gathering chicken eggs and bartering them for bread or flour with neighbors and relatives; listening to the old people’s stories at summer barbecues at night; playfully teasing his nearly blind grandmother, who was almost one hundred and who taught him prayers in Latin and instructed him in the lives of the saints.
For the young Cesar Chavez, the California fields were a disaster. He saw his father, a master horseman, tricked and humiliated. He went hungry for the first time and joined the family to search for wild mustard greens to have something to eat. Alongside his father, he walked out of the fields in informal strikes, losing every time. His world of play, interrupted only by chores on the family farm, was replaced by a world of unrelieved work on other people’s land. “Unlike the ranch, the work was drudgery,” he told Levy. It was hard, unbearably hard. He remembered working with the short-handled hoe as a kind of crucifixion. He had lost the corral, the horses, the dogs and cats; the pool table had been left behind. He had lost the community of the North Gila Valley, peopled by relatives, friends, other Mexicans. Now home, or what passed for it, was the family’s 1927 Studebaker. He slept in a series of tents, shacks, hovels. He traveled among strangers in unknown places, victim of a new set of rules. When he went to the store, he was cheated. He was beaten by older boys. When he left his toys outside, they were stolen.
This is a familiar story: a family hits the road to California when the old homestead is lost to unpaid taxes, lawyers, and the Depression. But it is more familiar as an Okie story, and the Chavez family—Librado, his wife, Juana, the children, Rita, Cesar, Richard, Vicky, and Lenny—were clearly not Okies. They called themselves Mexicans;
