that seems to be the most urgent at the time is the unemployment of the local workers in the area due to the Braceros. Have had reports in the house meetings where whole crews of locals have been displaced from their jobs to hire Braceros. The most recent experience was the one where a labor contractor, Eleuterio Gonzales, had a local crew of about forty men and about three weeks ago he was asked by his employer to lay off these men and go pick up Braceros at the camp the following morning. So forty locals were displaced at once because there are plenty of Braceros in the area. I happened to have talked to one of these men at one of the house meetings and believe me he was fighting mad when he was telling me about the problem. At the meeting after I got through giving them the CSO history he wanted to know what if anything could the CSO do to help them. My only answer was that we would try to do something after we were organized. And again at all, most all, the house meetings, the same question is asked of me. In discussing this with Tony Rios I was asking him for advice and also for permission to commit the organization in this line of action.14
The question of braceros had not come up in Chavez ’s earlier CSO work, and although there were some farm workers in other chapters, braceros did not dominate the local fields as they did in Oxnard. Braceros were not evenly distributed throughout California agriculture. They were contracted by the biggest and best-organized growers and grower associations and became the primary labor force in some crops but not others. When Chavez arrived in 1958, Ventura County growers enjoyed the use of 6,140 braceros during the peak harvest period; 2,500 were concentrated in the lemon orchards, with only 150 local workers sprinkled among them.15
The braceros had changed the landscape of Ventura County agriculture. Before the program that brought them into the fields during World War II, the picture was simple: along the narrow Santa Clara River valley thousands of lemon trees were controlled by a few big and many medium-sized ranches. Through their ownership of the processing sheds and distribution services, a few of the biggest farmers became very big indeed, masters of the company town of Santa Paula, and some of the most important businessmen in California. On the southeast side of the river in the large Oxnard coastal plain, production was mostly sugar beets, which had replaced the first cash crop, lima beans, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sugar beet farmers were much smaller than the big boys across the river, and most of the sugar beet profits went to the Oxnard brothers, whose antecedents had generously given the town its name. Their descendents still owned the huge sugar refinery that sat on the southeast border of La Colonia.
Both the well-organized lemon bosses and the smaller, relatively unorganized farmers of the plain were blessed by Ventura County’s unique combination of deep alluvial soils, abundant ground water, mild climate, and coastal fog. When the braceros were added to the mix as something other than a temporary answer to a wartime labor shortage, the lemon baron C. C. Teague and his partners built the Sunkist Corporation into one of the most powerful agricultural associations in the world, and the farmers of the Oxnard plain expanded acreage and diversified production, moving away from sugar beets and into more profitable, labor-intensive crops such as celery, broccoli, strawberries, and cut flowers. In 1948, Ventura County’s total farm receipts had been less than $40 million. In 1958, agricultural sales topped $100 million.16
Local workers were the big losers. In a period when agriculture was booming and agricultural employment climbing, there was less work for locals and at lower wages. A small group of local farm workers held on, finding work mostly in the vegetables from the spring to the fall. Meanwhile, real wages of braceros actually declined during this remarkable decade of growth: the nominal wage in lemons, the best paid of all local agricultural jobs, was ninety-five cents an hour in 1947, and just ninety-seven cents an hour in 1959.17 Lots of people made money off the braceros. The men who ran the labor camps overcharged them for meals that were so bad they often went uneaten. Small businesses that catered to the bracero trade flourished, not only legal establishments such as bars and cafés, and grocery, clothing, bicycle and appliance stores but also plenty of what the Mexicans called transa, dirty business, including bogus public accountants, who sold counterfeit documents, and women who sold their favors to the men who had left wives and girlfriends back in Mexico.18
During the year he spent in Oxnard, Chavez could do nothing about getting UPWA contracts in the lemon sheds or getting the braceros out of the trees. But CSO’s employment committee did contribute to the growing pressure against the entire Bracero Program. About a dozen workers, mostly middle-aged men, attended the weekly Friday night meetings. They began documenting the particular way that the local Farm Placement Service (FP, as it was called) got around Public Law 78, which contained a legal guarantee that the Bracero Program would not “adversely affect” domestic labor and decreed that braceros could not be contracted to a job if there was enough domestic labor to do it. The scam in Ventura County worked like this: in order for a local to get dispatched to a job, he first had to go to the FP for a referral card. Then he had to take that card to the Farm Labor Association, where workers were sent out every morning to the fields. The problem was that the FP office didn’t open until eight in the morning, while the braceros, who did not need referral cards, were all dispatched by six. And here is the clincher: one day’s referral card was not good for the next day’s work, so the cards that were issued in the morning by the FP were obsolete before they were written.
Chavez and three or four members of the employment committee made the useless twenty-four-mile round trip to the FP office several times a week, making copies of all the worthless forms they were issued. Meanwhile, Chavez cashed in some of his CSO voter registration chips. After Edward Hayes, the state director of the Farm Placement Service, ignored his telephone call, Chavez sent a telegram to Governor Brown with a copy to the CSO president, Tony Rios, describing the problem and reminding him that over the previous few years CSO had registered 300,000 new voters in the state, most of them Mexican American Democrats. Brown wired back, saying that he would direct Hayes to investigate. The telegram from the governor produced high excitement in the little CSO Oxnard office, but Chavez, who had been taught by Ross and Alinsky not to be limited by what politicians were willing to give but rather to push them to deliver what he wanted to get, sent another telegram: “Hayes unacceptable.” Brown wired back that he would put Hayes’s immediate boss, the state’s employment director, John Carr, on the case instead. Carr called the CSO office directly and urged Chavez to get as much documentation as he could.
It was quite a boost to the employment committee. More people made the trek to the FP office to document the fraud, and the committee took a census of unemployed farm workers in Oxnard. By then it was fully winter, and the list of the unemployed had grown to nearly one thousand. Chavez followed up his calls to the state officials by making contacts with federal bureaucrats, developing relationships with people in the Labor Department and in the Bureau of Employment Services. His relationship with Carr became increasingly close.
Nor were Little Cesar and Big John content just to establish a paper trail. They organized increasing numbers of unemployed workers to go out to the fields to claim the jobs where braceros were working. They pressured local, state, and federal officials into coming to large meetings where farm workers told their stories. They organized a march in front of television cameras where the angry workers burned their useless referral cards.19
Nothing on this scale had ever been done before to combat the Bracero Program, although everywhere that the program operated the fiction had to be maintained that there were not enough locals to do the work. That was not the only fraud essential to the game. By law braceros had to be paid the “prevailing wage” in the crops and area where they worked. In a giant sham, grower associations throughout California announced the “prevailing wage” at the beginning of the season and then, with that wage fixed at a level below the minimum wage, the various state farm employment services certified farm labor shortages. It was a fixed wage, fixed at a level that would not attract significant numbers of domestic workers.
Even at the fixed wage, however, there were locals who wanted the jobs. Since the late 1940s farm workers had made various attempts to get them and to expose Bracero Program fraud. Just the year before, in 1957, the
