Cesar and his siblings had all been born in Arizona. Librado had been brought across the border when he was only two; Juana, when she was six months old. Cesario had voted in Texas elections before the turn of the century and had carved the homestead out of the Colorado desert three years before Arizona became a state. But despite the three generations in the United States, the family did not “hyphenate” itself. People didn’t start doing that until after World War II. Speaking Spanish, living in close contact with new immigrants who had firsthand news from home, settling in a territory they knew had been taken from Mexico in a war of conquest, they remained Mexicans and were proud of it.
Only in school did Cesar feel that there was anything suspect about being Mexican; teachers in the North Gila Valley punished him for speaking Spanish, but what had been occasional in the valley was normal in California.* There, Cesar first saw a sign stating “White Trade Only.” There, he was denied service at a restaurant, was stopped by the migra, and for the first time felt somehow diminished because his skin was dark and he was Mexican.
The California fields robbed the young Cesar of almost everything that was good in his life except the love and comfort of his family. “I was like a wild duck with its wings clipped,” he said.3 Farmwork for wages was an affliction. It took his youth. It hurt his back. It humbled his proud father. Everything about it was wrong. He could know it was wrong because he had lived right: “Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on the land, and I knew a different life.”4
The Chavez family hit the migrant circuit in what arguably were the hardest times in California agricultural history. It wasn’t just that wages were low. What made matters worse was that the sweeping farm worker upsurge of the early 1930s had passed. As the Studebaker carried the sometimes-hungry Chavez family from job to job, the strikes that had raised both wages and spirits in the fields in 1933 were long gone, replaced by losing battles directed by disheartened union organizers who would soon leave the fields to focus their attention on cannery workers rather than farm workers.
No sophisticated economic analysis is required to understand the melancholy that dominated the California fields at the exact moment that the young Cesar Chavez picked up a short-handled hoe. Too many workers were chasing too few jobs. In cotton, where most farm workers were employed, acreage had climbed steadily, from 130,000 acres in 1924 to 670,000 in 1937. In the next two years, though, under the provisions of Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, California cotton acreage was cut nearly in half, to 340,000 acres, just as displaced people from Oklahoma, southern Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas were pouring into the state.5 Some 400,000 of these Okies came to California between 1935 and 1939, and many of them headed directly for the fields, where they competed for disappearing jobs with the 200,000 mostly Mexican farm workers who were already there. It was a competition that only the large growers won.
For those entering the fields in 1939 it would have been easy to regard the natural condition of farm workers exactly as it was depicted in the documentary art and literature of the period. In that one remarkable year, three books of photographs of farm workers and dispossessed small farmers evoked a wave of sympathy among large swaths of the American public: You Have Seen Their Faces, with photographs by Margaret Bourke and text by Erskine Caldwell; An American Exodus, with the photos of Dorothea Lange and a text written by her husband, Paul Taylor; and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans. These books were stared at, studied, worried over, looked at again and again by millions of people, most of them far from the California fields. Steinbeck’s magnificent Grapes of Wrath became an immediate best-seller that year. Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field also was published in 1939, and became popular at the same time that hundreds of witnesses in a sensational few weeks of testimony were telling the U.S. Senate Labor Committee and its chair, Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr., about the systematic, well-organized, usually brutal, and often legal repression of California farm workers.
This was more than a coincidence or an inexplicable agreement among diverse artists and journalists about what was important and how to present it. It was a campaign with an agenda. As Arthur Rothstein, the first photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and Lange’s colleague, put it: “It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them.”6 McWilliams’s book was a straightforward call for farm workers to be covered by the protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and to be granted the same rights as factory workers. Steinbeck, whose purpose and art were more complicated than the others’, nonetheless fully affirmed the overall agenda, and made it clear directly in his pamphlets and indirectly in his novel, that the migrants deserved government help because they were true American whites. La Follette, the professional politician, could be most direct. His introduction to the transcript of the hearings called for farm workers to receive the full range of federal protections and benefits.
The campaign failed to achieve its immediate aim, as concern for farm workers was pushed aside by the approaching world war, and as the white migrants who were featured in the photos and the prose moved out of the fields and into California’s expanding war and food-processing industries. But those early images of suffering, kept alive by reprints and museum revivals and by the continuing popularity of Steinbeck’s masterpiece, remained seared in the national psyche. They came to stand for the entire farm worker experience and engendered a latent nationwide sympathy for farm workers that Cesar Chavez would later use as a powerful lever with which he moved the world. He could do it so convincingly because the images of 1939 documented his own childhood tragedy and thereby enabled him, in good faith, to draw on the deposits of empathy that Steinbeck, Lange, and the others had made a generation before.
But the collective portrait created by Popular Front artists and their colleagues was incomplete: at best it related only to a particular time and place; at worst, it was an insult to farm workers’ genuine tradition and history. Workers acting on their own behalf never win in these representations. They can’t, because winning, or even fighting effectively, would muddy the moral waters. This cultural agenda was so fixed that in Steinbeck’s morality tale of an apple strike, In Dubious Battle, farm workers suffer a grand defeat, although farm workers won in the actual 1933 peach strike on which his story was based.7 In Lange’s photographs, noble migrants suffer and endure. Rarely in the photos do we see images of farm workers throwing back tear gas canisters, or angrily confronting scabs, or giving a rousing speech at a mass meeting. All of that happened on a regular basis in the early 1930s, and even amid the general defeat of the late 1930s. The farm workers’ combative tradition and their recurring power during harvest seasons and in times of labor scarcity have been trumped by the images of 1939, where, as the cultural historian William Stott put it, farm workers come to us “only in images meant to break our hearts.”*
A more complete portrait of California farm workers requires quite different images. In the early Depression, farm workers were united in a movement that had blown hot and cold since 1928 and became a mighty storm by 1933. Of the several winds that have blustered through the California fields, that was the biggest. Never before had so many farm workers gone on strike. At the height of their struggle in 1933, led by the Communist-sponsored Cannery and Agriculture Workers Union (C&A), ten thousand people were striking in the peaches, four thousand in the grapes, and fifteen thousand in the cotton—three of the most important harvests in the state at the time. Five days into the cotton strike the battle’s first chroniclers, Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr, called it an earthquake and the New York Times called it a war; the San Francisco Chronicle compared it to a volcano. No cataclysmic metaphor was too excessive. For the almost exclusively Mexican strikers the first days were a determined, joyful demonstration of their unity and strength. Trucks and cars overflowing with strikers went from field to field, the caravans getting larger as other pickers joined them. The growers and police were overwhelmed. Twenty-five strikers stopped a rancher’s car and broke all the windows before allowing the two frightened growers to escape. In the midst of a small confrontation, a woman striker took a cop’s gun and car keys. Some strikers ran into the fields to chase off scabs. Others set fires.
