care of the household. But Bertaliza wanted to work. She was stubborn about it.”
It is tough to begin farmwork in the strawberries, not only because the plants are so low to the ground but because of the way people are paid—by how many flats of berries they pick individually. Bertaliza, with no agricultural experience, ignorant of the tricks of strawberry picking, and unaccustomed to bending over or squatting all day long, worked harder than she ever had, without making much money. Farm workers say that people who work for an individual piece rate “die alone.” A friend of mine from Vera Cruz, a city boy who also tried to begin life as a farm worker in the strawberries, quit after three days. “That’s not work,” he said. “It’s a punishment from God.”
The Japanese owner of the strawberry farm paid half the Camachos’ rent even after Pablo moved on to a celery crew. It was 1965, the braceros were gone, labor was scarce, and the strawberry farmer wanted to make sure that Pablo would return the next spring, after the celery was finished. But it was still the bad old days in the celery:
There were two foremen, one was a Filipino and the other was a Mexican. They would put names of people on the work list who were not working. We called them muertos, dead men. Since the whole crew was being paid by the number of boxes we cut and packed, the muertos were getting part of our money. It was a perfect scam. The rancher was still paying the same amount, so he wasn’t upset, but the foremen were taking part of our earnings.
And we had to work hard. There were times we worked so long that they had to turn on the lights of the trucks so that we could see the celery. We worked ten, eleven, twelve hours a day. The Filipino used to tell us at the end of the day that we had done a good job and probably made thirty or forty dollars. But when we got our checks all we had made was a hundred or a hundred twenty for a six-day week. People were angry, but we never went beyond complaining.
In 1970, Chavez arrived. I got a dispatch for a job in the celery that very first year and began working with a union contract. The difference was tremendous. They paid well, but the main thing was they couldn’t rob us anymore. They had to give us a piece of paper for every truckload of celery that left the field. We now had proof of how many boxes we had cut and how many people were working. And so the muertos—the dead men—were dead forever.
“The union was the best thing that ever happened to California farm workers,” Camacho maintained. Most farm workers old enough to remember agree, as do the people who study them. Phillip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis, calls the high years of the UFW, 1965 to 1985, the Golden Age for California farm workers. But some farm workers give the union mixed reviews. After all, the union rose and fell twice: in the early 1970s, when membership fell from about 50,000 to 6,000; and ten years later, after it had been rebuilt in Salinas, when its power finally collapsed. Nevertheless, the worst thing that most farm workers say about the UFW now is that it eventually got beat, and that wages and working conditions quickly deteriorated once it did.
How it got beat, and to what extent it was responsible for its own demise, are the biggest questions posed in this book. I asked Camacho what happened. He had his answer ready:
The main thing that went wrong was that the Republicans won the governorship in 1982. And the governor put the friends of the growers on the Agricultural Relations Board. And they wouldn’t pay any attention to our grievances. Also, the peso collapsed, and more people had to come here to work. We were swamped with workers from Mexico.
I didn’t argue with Camacho’s answer, not on that occasion, as we sat in my kitchen drinking coffee, sixteen years after we had last worked together. His was the answer of a good chavista, and it has some truth to it. And I agree that the UFW was “the best thing that ever happened to California farm workers.” But did the union happen to California farm workers, or did California farm workers make the union happen? It is not just a question of the Spanish language’s proclivity for the passive voice. What led to the demise of the UFW is not the kind of question that has a straightforward answer. Rather, if this were a detective story, it would be a question for the reader to ponder. Think about it long enough and hard enough, and perhaps the fog will clear.
But if this is a detective story, it is a modern Mexican one, in which, as Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the master of the form, says, the main issue is not “who did it” but the context in which “it” was done. The mystery of the UFW’s rise and fall cannot be solved without understanding the fighting tradition of California farm workers, the character of farmwork itself, the history and opinions of some of the people who do that work, the nature of the UFW staff and the internal life of the union, the political weight of the union’s friends and supporters measured against the weight of its enemies and how that relationship changed over time, and, finally, the character, background, and ideas of the UFW’s leader, Cesar Chavez. Learn that context, and perhaps the mystery will dissolve. At least the story will have been told.
No one has told it yet, despite the appearance of a fair number of books about the union. The early ones were mostly hagiography, tales of how the wise and saintly Cesar Chavez miraculously built the UFW. More recent works blame Chavez for the union’s fall, citing his “personal demons” and his periodic purges of the UFW staff, especially the dismissal of his highly skilled top aides. In almost all accounts, the history of the union is essentially a story of Cesar Chavez and his staff, in which farm workers provide little more than background color as either the beneficiaries of his genius or the victims of his faults.
Pablo Camacho, who considers himself one of the beneficiaries agrees that it was Chavez who built the UFW and made history, and that farm workers only helped out. Pablo is proud to have been one of Chavez’s soldiers, and what a soldier he was! Once, during a 1979 strike, we were on a picket line together on the edge of a struck lettuce field. We had homemade slings, the kind that Camacho had used as a boy in Mexico to scare away the birds. They require some skill. You spin the piece of leather around your head and then let one end go; if you do it correctly, you can send a good-sized rock hurtling toward your target at a respectable speed. We were mostly fooling around, trying to see how close we could get our rocks to a helicopter spraying the middle of the struck field, some hundred yards away. Not very close—that was part of the joke. Suddenly, Camacho ran into the field, directly toward the helicopter, screaming a warrior’s roar and twirling a rock the size of a baseball in the sling above his head. The rest of us were astounded. Who knows what the pilot thought as he yanked the helicopter straight up and away from our little David’s attack.
Pablo Camacho did his job on the picket lines, went to the membership meetings, argued forcefully with his fellow workers about the importance of the union. Even the official historians of the UFW acknowledge that without people like Pablo Camacho there would have been no union. The union just didn’t happen to them. That much is clear.
But there was another level of farm workers’ involvement in the union, almost exclusively in the Salinas Valley, that was deeper than Camacho’s. Scores of farm workers, many of whom had been active in farm worker struggles before the UFW arrived in 1970, some of whom came from backgrounds in Mexico more radical than Camacho’s, and almost all of whom worked on piece-rate vegetable crews, became the leaders of the UFW in the Salinas Valley. Some of them, not all, called themselves chavistas, and throughout the 1970s they worked in alliance with Chavez and some of his staff. But they never became an official part of that staff until 1980, and when they did, differences between them and Chavez quickly arose. Chavez united most of the staff against them, trampled them, and pushed them out of the union. One might say that for ten years they made the UFW happen in the Salinas Valley, and then the UFW happened to them. Once they were gone, the union lost its authority in the fields, and the growers discarded their UFW contracts without serious opposition. The golden age was over.
I talked to another of my old car pool mates to see what he thought had happened to the UFW. In 1994, Raúl Medina, universally called Maniz, lived with his wife, son, and brother in one of Watsonville’s more
