The Territory
2. The Work Itself
3. Childhood as Destiny
4. The Lay Catholic Activist
5. The Alchemist
6. The Organizer in Oxnard
7. Climbing the Fence
8. A Family Affair
9. New Wings
10. The Grape Strike
The Boycott
11. Moral Jujitsu
12. “Boycott Baby, Boycott”: The Civil Rights Coalition Regroups
13. Battle Theater
14. The Spring Pilgrimage
15. Democratic Delano
16. Cutting Back and Rooting Out
17. The Fast
18. Boycott Heroics
Farmworkers Win A New Deal
19. Salinas Before the Storm
20. “Reds Lettuce Alone”: Farmworkers Stun Salinas
21. Up on the Mountain, Out in the Fields, Back in the Cities
22. “Fighting for Our Lives”
23. Forcing the Great Concession
24. The Wet Line
Victory in Hand, Confusion at Heart
25. Living with the Law
26. “The Game”
27. “That Wall Is Black”: The La Paz Makeover
28. Imperial Strike
29. “Esta Huelga Está Ganada”
30. The Good, the Bad, the Unlikely
31. Civil War
32. Exeunt Omnes
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Index
Maps
Photo
Copyright
Most California farm workers do not ride to work alone. They travel in company buses and vans, or squeeze together in private cars with other workers, who often are also their relatives or lifelong friends. For three-quarters of a century, people have been driving their cars up and down and across the Golden State looking for work. Caravans of cars—perhaps the most essential agricultural implements in California—loved and hated by mechanically skilled Joads of all nationalities, who intimately knew the carburetors and fuel pumps and transmissions of the Studebakers, Fords, and Chevys, and now struggle with the injection systems of the popular Toyotas that may also be their homes, death beds, and birth beds. Cars are so vital to the internal relations of farm workers that the Farm Placement Service, faithful servant of California agribusiness, had as one of its policies in the 1950s and ’60s to break up car pools and disperse their members to separate farms, as the bosses knew from bitter experience that the bonds of solidarity built from traveling and living together often spilled over onto the job.
Pablo Camacho remembers every car. In his first car pool, from 1961 to 1967, “we started with my ’49 Ford; next we got a ’55 Ford, but after that it was all Chevys.” In 1977 and 1978, Camacho drove two identical 1969 Impalas, and I was in his car pool. We were part of a crew that cut and packed celery for InterHarvest in the Salinas Valley, a region made famous by the travails of some of Steinbeck’s protagonists, and still one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. Those were the high days—among the last high days, as it turned out—of the United Farm Workers. Just a little more than ten years earlier the union had been born, improbably, in a grape strike in a dusty town in California’s Central Valley, and, decisively, amid a mass movement in America that, for a very brief time, made everything seem possible. By 1968, Cesar Chavez1 was being hailed as a hero in a country quickly running out of them, and the union was making its name outside the fields with the most powerful boycott in U.S. history. In Salinas, where the union was most successful in the fields for the longest time, and where farm workers’ wages were the highest, piece-rate vegetable workers such as Camacho formed the core strength of the United Farm Workers union (UFW).
We worked on one of the several dozen piece-rate vegetable crews in the valley. Piece-rate crews are paid collectively. Each member gets an equal share of the price the company pays for each box or bin of lettuce or celery or broccoli. Those were the three main crops harvested by piece-rate crews when I worked in the fields; other crops were harvested by the hour, by individual piece rate, or by machines. At InterHarvest we were paid about $1.40 for each box of celery we cut and packed, which we split thirty-eight ways. It worked out to about $12 an hour, more than $48 dollars in today’s money. The four loaders were paid separately, and they made even more. Positions on these crews were greatly prized in farm worker communities, and the workers were highly skilled, tightly organized, and deeply loyal to the UFW. They were hard to replace during strikes except with similarly skilled workers, and in nonstrike periods they wielded their power through slowdowns, work stoppages, and mild forms of sabotage.
For anyone who was not there, it may be hard to imagine that celery workers in the 1970s made what would be about $50 an hour in today’s economy. Piece-rate lettuce cutters and melon pickers made even more. People who tied rubber bands around cauliflower leaves to protect the flowers from the sun made quite a bit more. These people, working seasonally, earned annual incomes comparable to those of other well-paid unionized U.S. workers. Although piece-rate vegetable workers were a minority of farm laborers, they were not a tiny one. In the 1970s they constituted about 10 percent of all California farm workers who worked at least six months a year.
Such crews earned substantially more than other farm workers, but even the lowest-paid fieldworkers in the late 1970s made more than one and a half times the minimum wage. There is no better measure of the UFW’s success than the formidable ranks of those well-paid vegetable workers who once dominated their industries, and no better measure of its defeat than a list of current wages. Union membership, mostly vegetable workers, had hit 50,000 by the end of the 1970s. By 1985 it had collapsed to around 6,000, where it has hovered ever since.2 Today, entry-level farm workers make just above the $8.00 California minimum hourly wage; celery workers make about the same per box that they made thirty years ago, meaning their real wages are about one-third of what they once were; and most lettuce workers—once the princes of their communities—no longer work by the piece and are lucky if they make $9.00 an hour.
The full history of the UFW, then, is not just a tale of how Cesar Chavez came out of obscurity to lead his new farm worker union to victory, although it is authentically that. It is also the story of the farm workers who were at the center of the union’s strength in the fields, and of how, once Chavez lost their support, the UFW was doomed.
When
