demonstrators had arrived by car in the dark, after gathering a few hours after midnight at el hoyo, the hole, where a huge shape-up took place, a few feet this side of the Mexican border. As light arrived, some braceros and picketing men began to talk across the wire, in Spanish. Although the locals were either U.S. citizens or legal residents, they also called themselves Mexicans, and many lived across the border in Mexicali.
The men had a lot to talk about. The strike was in the interest of the braceros, too, the locals argued. Instead of the ninety cents an hour offered by the growers (up from eighty cents an hour the year before) the UPWA was demanding $1.25 for all hourly workers, locals and braceros alike. The strikers even passed union cards through the fence. The men were not unknown to one another, but there were differences to hash out. In the mixed crews they had worked on together for years, the braceros always worked by the hour, while the locals often worked at a piece rate that could earn a good lettuce cutter on a good day as much as $4 an hour, $1.70 more than the average factory worker made in 1961.2 The braceros knew that the growers’ unilateral decision to end piece-rate work had made the locals strike, and that while “uno veinte cinco” may have been the slogan of the strike, the restoration of piecework was the demand most important to the locals. Yes, the braceros agreed, they would benefit from the hourly raise, but when could they, too, start earning the piece rate? And did the union want them all sent back to Mexico? And what was the Mexican consul going to do to protect their interests? The strike was six weeks old on that February morning, so there were already a lot of stories to tell, a lot of rumors to consider and evaluate. Soon, most of the demonstrators stopped circling the camp. It was hard to walk around and also talk to the braceros. The picket line ceased to exist in the ordinary sense; it had been transformed into scores of conversations, carried on across the wires of a now mostly pointless fence.
Not until 8 a.m. did Sheriff Slim Lyons drive up, bringing two deputies and a machine gun. The lawmen had been unprepared for the demonstration, thinking the trouble that morning would be across town, where two hundred California ranch foremen and their friends had scheduled their first public rally of the strike. But the union had not wanted to engage in a scripted confrontation. The cops were late getting the news. When Lyons finally arrived at the camp, he tried to enter, but the demonstrators had blocked both gates. “Get more men out here; they won’t let me in the damn gate,” he shouted over his radio as he drove off. More than a hundred deputies, many of them recently deputized local foremen as well as police, Highway Patrolmen, and federal agents answered the call and swarmed to the camp. They carried shotguns, billy clubs, tear-gas canisters, and gas masks.
A man on horseback holding a huge flag emblazoned with the union demand rode back and forth in front of the cops, raising cheers from the strikers. Inside the camp, some foremen herded a couple dozen braceros onto two flatbed trucks and drove them up to the front gate as if to break through the blockade. Over bullhorns, Lyons and another sheriff ordered the demonstrators to clear the way. The demonstrators sat down and began calling out to the braceros to get off the trucks. Soon the flatbeds were nearly empty. As the demonstrators chanted, a bracero began to climb the fence. Ten feet up, he still had three feet of barbed wire to clear. The great mass of men sitting in front of the gates urged him on. He made it over the top, jumped to the ground, and joined the sit-in. Others followed. All along the fence, braceros were climbing up and over. Sitting among the striking workers, John Soria remembered that more than a hundred braceros braved the barbed wire and made it to the other side.3
Sheriff Lyons was in a difficult position. He was under instructions to avoid any incident that would alarm the Mexican government about the braceros’ safety and give it reason to pull them out of the valley. If the eight thousand bracero lettuce harvesters were ordered back to Mexico, the strike would be a sure winner, as the overwhelming majority of the three thousand locals were refusing to work. What could he do? There were too many people to arrest everybody, and besides, it didn’t look as though they would come quietly. Tear gas would cause just the kind of incident that he had to avoid, and the demonstrators knew it. When he took the bullhorn to declare the demonstration an unlawful assembly, the UPWA’s Clive Knowles shouted, “Stay put. Sit down. They’ll probably use tear gas. If they do they will lose every bracero in Imperial County.” The sheriff responded by calling out the names of the strike committee and a few of the paid union staff, asking them to come forward peacefully to be arrested for illegal assembly. Only one person stepped forward, a confused striker who happened to have the same name as one of the union organizers. The sheriff knew whom he was looking for and refused to arrest the man. Finally, some deputies bullied their way into the crowd and pulled out fourteen union leaders. Before he was arrested, John Soria turned to one of the men sitting next to him and gave him his red flag. It was just before noon; the day’s work had been lost.
The Imperial Valley lettuce “deal” (as the growers call the seasonal harvests), which starts in mid-November and ends in early March, expanded rapidly during the 1950s, and grossed nearly $20 million by 1959. But costs also rose. By 1959 only 10 percent of the Imperial Valley farmland was owned by people living in the valley, and fifty years of speculation by absentee landlords had made land rent high. “Making the desert bloom” also had required extraordinary expenditures on chronic drainage problems and periodic pest infestations. The growers with the deepest pockets, and especially those who had become grower-shippers—handling the wholesale distribution of lettuce as well as managing its production—were the winners. The smaller growers, who couldn’t survive one bad season, were the losers. As bracero labor enabled the growers to expand production, the industry became more concentrated: by 1959, eighteen grower-shippers produced half of Imperial Valley’s lettuce, and distributed 80 percent of it. And yet size was no guarantee of profits. The Imperial Valley Lettuce Association complained that since 1956 its members had had only one profitable lettuce season.4
In the fall of 1960, months before the Dannenberg Ranch sit-in, there had been no union plan to strike in the Imperial Valley. But when the season started, the growers, in an attempt to end their string of losses, refused to pay the piece rates. Quickly, momentum for a strike started to build among the lettuce piece-rate workers. These lechugueros (from “lechuga,” Spanish for lettuce) were the precursors of the proficient workers who later would feature so prominently in the UFW. But in 1960 they were not yet organized in crews of thirty; rather, they worked and were paid in groups of three, and these “trios” moved independently from job to job, field to field, harvest to harvest.5 Although they were highly skilled and invaluable to the growers when fields had to be picked quickly, they were not essential to production because the braceros did the bulk of the work. Mario Bustamante, who started working in the lettuce with his dad in 1963 and was still a lechuguero twenty years later, remembers the difference between the early and later workers:
They were all tough guys back then, or at least most of them. They were very skilled, but they fought among themselves, and there was a lot of drinking and some drug addicts. But they could cut and pack lettuce so they weren’t ordinary winos, and they didn’t live on Skid Row. They were from all over—Arizona, Texas, Mexico—true wanderers. Oh, they could get together and fight the bosses for a few days, but they didn’t have the same staying power we had later.6
In late November 1960, a group of lechugueros had gone to the UPWA office seeking help. They were led by Francisco Olivares, known as El Machete, a self-proclaimed Magonista who lived in Mexicali and was a veteran of many earlier farm worker strikes. Some of the men had walked off the job already. Others hadn’t gone to work in the first place after they heard about the wage cut. The rest were working but damn angry about their pay. They knew about the union because the year before, Neil Busby, a local UPWA official, had led several large marches to the El Centro Farm Placement Office protesting the hiring of braceros in place of domestic workers. They figured the union was looking for a fight.7
At the office they found Jerry Breshears, whose family had come to California from Arkansas in 1943. As a child, Breshears had followed the crops: tying carrots and picking cotton, peaches, and grapes. When he was fifteen he got a job in a lettuce shed, but when most lettuce packing was moved to the fields, he
