and private welfare rolls, shoved back to Mexico in a series of highly publicized Border Patrol raids, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans left the U.S. and returned to Mexico.17 It was so bad that by 1933, one-third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles, including many U.S.-born children, had gone.18
The Padillas were among those who stayed and fought, not as militants but as rank-and-file participants in the great upheaval in the fields in the early 1930s. Gilbert Padilla’s father, Longino, and his oldest brother, Cesario, walked out of the cotton fields along with thousands of others in 1933. They returned home to Los Banos after walking the picket line for several days. They talked excitedly about the collective dashes into the fields to confront the scabs and heard reports about the strikers who were shot down in response. Family friends told them of the enormous funeral marches and of the encampments that became living quarters for the embattled strikers. They got news of the 3,000-strong Corcoran camp, with tents in long rows along dusty paths named for Mexican towns and heroes of the revolution. They learned how the authorities tried to starve the workers into submission and then bribe them with food; how, at Corcoran, with everyone hungry and at least two children dead of starvation, the strike committee called a general meeting, and people debated, took a vote, and decided not to accept the food as long as it was conditioned on their return to work; how at another meeting workers shouted, “We are all leaders”; and how after all that, the strikers won higher wages but failed again to win recognition for their union.
Gilbert Padilla was only six years old during the great cotton strike of 1933, but he heard the stories as the years passed, and he absorbed the essential lesson: his father, his brother, the ordinary laborers who peopled his world, were hard workers and proud fighters. When he was a boy, it was not work in the California fields that struck him as wrong and degrading, but inequality, segregation, and discrimination. On the Hamburg ranch in Los Banos, the Mexicans lived in one camp and the whites in another, though they often picked cotton together in the same crews. School was worse. Azusa had one elementary school for Mexicans and two for whites. At Lee Intermediate School, Mexicans stayed on one side of the school and whites on the other. They had separate recesses, and at lunchtime whites ate in the cafeteria while Mexicans ate outside. That and the segregated movie theaters in town had a deep impact on Gilbert. But his most lacerating memory was of the Azusa public swimming pool. The white kids could swim all week; the Mexicans and African Americans, only on Fridays. Friday nights the water was drained and the pool was filled again so that the whites wouldn’t have to swim in the supposedly contaminated water.
Work in the California fields didn’t feel wrong until Padilla came back from the U.S. Army, in 1947. He had been a squad leader in basic training and had been sent to Japan, where he worked as a crane operator. The Army “opened my eyes,” he says. He became a noncommissioned officer. He made friends with whites. He operated complicated equipment. When he and two of his brothers were discharged and returned to chop cotton at the Hamburg ranch, they were making less than the braceros. Once when he and his brothers stopped at the end of a row to have a cigarette, the foreman came by and bawled them out. The three brothers walked out of the field together, and then walked six miles home.
“My brother had been a prisoner of war, another brother was wounded and a hero, and David had just come back from the Philippines. There were six of us in the Army, and to come back and be treated that way! So we left. We weren’t going to chop cotton anymore.”
Gilbert went to work for a dry cleaner, but he didn’t like it much. Then it was back to the fields. He listened to the old-timers talk about earlier strikes. He saw some melon workers sit down on the job until they got the wages they wanted. He remembered his mother’s stories. He got interested in politics. When more braceros came during the Korean War and drove wages down further, he went back to the job at the dry cleaner, but he still didn’t like it. He joined an old mutualista and tried to revive its burial insurance plan. He was looking for a fight, looking to learn how to do it, listening to everybody with a plan. In 1955 he met Cesar Chavez. Chavez had a plan.
* Victor Villaseñor, born in 1940 in Carlsbad, California, about fifty miles from the Mexican border, writes in Rain of Gold (New York: Delta, 1991) that not until he first went to school did he learn that he didn’t live in Mexico.
* They are allowed but a single emotional register. Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother,’ holding a swaddled babe in her lap and framed by two distracted young children, leans forward with a hand to her face, looking past the photographer with an inexplicable combination of worry and grace. “She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too,” Lange’s boss at the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker, said. The actual woman, Florence Thompson, was a full-blooded Cherokee, but she comes into history as an Okie, an honorary white. Lange took seven shots of Thompson. The ones that showed the two young children smiling for the camera and her teenage daughter with a dreamy, flirtatious look were never published until after Lange died. See Levine, “Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s” in Fleischhauer and Brannan, 1988, p. 16; and Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” Metro [Santa Cruz], January 19–25, 1995.
* When Padilla’s parents went to Merced to register his birth, a county clerk listed his name as Gilbert rather than Gilberto (another clerk had listed his brother Carlos’s name as Charles). His family always called him Gil or Flaco—meaning Skinny. When he went to school, people started calling him Gilbert. Monolingual Mexicans know him as Padilla. Among the UFW staff he was usually called Gilbert.
Cesar Chavez left the North Gila Valley with two other treasures besides his memories. Although he had not liked school, he had become a good, quick learner out of the classroom. One uncle taught him to read Spanish; another read him the Mexican newspapers. A classic autodidact, throughout his life he would suck up one subject after another, move from one enthusiasm to the next: the art of shooting pool, Catholic Social Action, the theory and practice of Saul Alinsky, the life of Gandhi, the history of unionism in the fields, the varieties of religious experience, the intricacies of labor law, printing, faith healing, the Synanon Game, theories of scientific management. His biographer Jacques Levy, who was also a dog trainer and helped Chavez train his two dogs, told me that Cesar was the most absorbed, committed student of dog training he had ever met. Chavez read, he questioned, he listened, he learned.
Just as Cesar did not learn to read in school, he did not learn religion in church. There was no church in the North Gila Valley; his mother taught him his first prayers, as well as the power of charity and nonviolence. The spiritual leader of the family, she transformed a folk Catholicism filled with Mexican dichos (popular aphorisms) into a rough moral sensibility that helped the Chavezes through their tough times. Her improvised ethical code was backed up by the formal Catholicism of Cesar’s grandmother, who had spent time in a convent; she taught the children Latin prayers and Bible stories. Chavez’s religious faith would not be shaken by the loss of his childhood or by his family’s trials. In Brawley, a regular stop on the migrant circuit, he was a crucero, an altar boy, who helped the priest celebrate Mass. Nor did his mild adolescent rebellion—it didn’t amount to much more than pachuco-style clothes and a taste for jazz—ever interfere with his devotion to the Church. Many years later he said, “I don’t think that I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. I don’t think there would be enough to sustain me. For me the base must be faith.”1
So it is not at all odd that a Roman Catholic priest was the one who introduced Chavez to politics in 1950. At twenty-three years old, Cesar was a World War II vet trying to make his way in the world. He had joined the Navy when he was seventeen, “mostly to get away from farm labor,” he told Levy. Two years later, in 1946, after serving as a deck hand in the Pacific and a painter in Guam, he was discharged. Like Gilbert Padilla, he was uncomfortable in the fields after the war. He worked in cantaloupes, grapes, cotton, and apricots. He tried his hand at celery, where
