The boss said nothing. Instead, he reached into the belt behind him, pulled out a pistol, and fired it into the air. Epifanio the boy turned and ran. Camacho the man would never again be naive about the power of his employers. But the gun blast had worked only temporarily, as Camacho’s fear passed, and he continued to petition his bosses for the wages he thought he had coming to him.
That is how the problem started in the roses, and that is what led Epifanio Camacho to Cesar Chavez and the NFWA. Camacho had become a champion rose grafter, paid by the number of stalks that he and a fellow worker could cut and and then graft with the desired variety of rose. Since the stalks were less than a foot above the ground, the work had to be done while squatting, or on your knees, or completely bent over. The graft had to be inserted carefully or it would not take. Since it was piece work, it had to be done as quickly as possible in order to make decent pay. Only a few people managed to become good at it, but for those who did, the wages were relatively high. An accomplished rose grafter such as Camacho could make $30 or $40 a day, which in the early 1960s was three or four times the minimum wage. Officially the pay was $10 for every thousand plants to the man who cut the stalk, and $8.50 for the man who went behind him and tied in the new rose, but there was a catch: $2 of that piece rate for every man was held back, not to be paid until the following year on the condition that 90 percent of the grafts took. In practice, that $2 was almost never paid, and so the real wage for even the most skilled and efficient workers was effectively 20 to 24 percent below the official wage. Like that Mexican farmer’s pistol shot in the air, the withheld $2 was a naked expression of the bosses’ power, as everyone knew that it had nothing to do with the success or failure of the grafts. Some workers went back to the fields the next year and checked the plants to see how they were doing. Not too many people did that, though, because once they saw that the plants were thriving, there was nothing they could do with the information; it was just bitter proof of how badly they had been cheated.
Camacho decided he would no longer put up with the yearly insult. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to get his fellow grafters to go with him, he went directly to his boss at Montebello Rose and demanded to be paid his full wage. Camacho had to threaten to change companies before the boss eventually relented. He would mail the money directly to Camacho’s house, on condition that he not tell his fellow workers. The boss lived up to his end of the bargain, but not Camacho. He told the others, and even showed them the first year’s check, but the following years he stopped, because the others still weren’t ready to demand their own back wages.
What ultimately led him to the NFWA began with a couple of weeks’ work at Konklyn Nursery in 1964, after the season was over at Montebello. The next year, after checking that the grafts had taken, Camacho got ten other grafters together, and they went to see Mr. Konklyn about their back pay. Konklyn said that they hadn’t hit the 90 percent mark and refused. Epifanio called him a liar. The dispute wound up at a hearing before a state labor commissioner in Bakersfield, which only Camacho and Konklyn attended. The workers who didn’t show up were regular Konklyn grafters, and they thought it likely that if they won their back pay, they would lose their jobs.
At the hearing, Konklyn argued that there never was any agreement to pay $2 per thousand for a 90 percent success rate. Rather, he occasionally tipped workers whose previous year’s grafting had turned out to be particularly successful, and he had come to Bakersfield that very day with a check of $30 for Mr. Camacho, who was, indeed, an excellent and careful worker. Camacho, who was owed $62 for the two weeks’ work, threw the check to the ground, exclaiming that he had never taken an unearned penny in his life, and he wanted no tips, only what was owed him. The commissioner reproached him for ungratefulness and declared the hearing closed. Camacho refused to leave; the commissioner called the cops who carried Epifanio out of the office and released him. He did not feel defeated. It had been a matter of principle. But when he returned to Montebello, the foreman refused to let him start work. He had been fired. No other rose company nor any other agricultural outfit in the area would hire him. He couldn’t even get a job in the sugar beets, the absolute worst-paid job around, paying as little as $3 a day on bad days. He was on the bola negra, the blacklist. In the spring of 1965, he had to steal food from the fields at night so that he and his wife and their two daughters could eat.
Meanwhile, he kept talking to other rose grafters about the back pay. His story got around. Someone told him to look up Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association. He had never heard of either one, but he had no trouble finding the association’s storefront office in Delano. Cesar was courteous enough, interested in Camacho’s life and his work (they even went out to the roses together, so that Chavez could see how the grafting was done), but Chavez insisted up-front that the NFWA wasn’t set up to organize strikes. Camacho pressed Chavez: Just what was the strategy of his group? Chavez explained that eventually they might get involved in strikes, but now they had to focus on building the organization, making it so big and strong that the members could truly help one another, and so powerful that they could force the politicians to pass laws that would give farm workers the same benefits that other workers already had: a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, good pensions. Camacho was not convinced, but neither was he easily deterred. He paid his $3.50 and joined the association, in hopes that he could change Chavez’s mind. In turn, Chavez suggested that Camacho set up a meeting of workers at his house, and promised to come and listen to their stories, and see what he could do to help.
Only four workers came to Epifanio’s house for that first meeting, but Camacho was still eager and Chavez always liked to pyramid house meetings, so together they scheduled another one. This time, Camacho focused his efforts on a single company, Mt. Arbor, and almost all the grafters, about thirty men, showed up. After a long discussion, they decided they wanted to strike. Chavez did not oppose their decision. A third meeting was scheduled, both to see if the men’s resolve would hold and to decide the details and demands of the strike. Camacho had won Chavez over. The NFWA dropped everything else and prepared for its first strike.
One last pre-strike meeting was held at Guadalupe Church. All of Mt. Arbor’s rose grafters came. The NFWA contingent included Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and Jim Drake. Cesar chaired the meeting. The workers set their wage demands, agreed to hold out for a contract, and decided that the NFWA would represent them in negotiations with the company. They also agreed that a picket line was unnecessary, as there weren’t enough skilled grafters to scab effectively. By not picketing, they would also be less exposed to potential blacklisting if it turned out that they lost the strike. They would simply not go to work, an old farm worker tactic used by the Wobbly-Magonistas, who had given it various names: walk-away, fade-out, stay-at-home.4 At the end of the meeting, Huerta handed Chavez a ten-inch wooden crucifix with a broken cross piece. Cesar held it in the air before the small assembly. He wanted the workers to swear on the cross that they would honor the strike and not go back to work until there was a contract. He passed it back to Huerta, who handed it to one of the men. He swore fidelity and passed the crucifix to the next man. Camacho was shocked. He believed in God, but didn’t believe that politics and religion should be mixed like this. He wondered what Jim Drake, the Protestant minister, thought. Camacho didn’t want to complicate the proceedings with a public refusal, so when the crucifix reached him, he also swore that he would be loyal to the strike and the other men. But he was angry at Chavez for not checking with him on this particular tactic before the meeting. And he believed that it was only a tactic, meant to extract the deepest possible commitment from the grafters, as Chavez had not talked to him about religion in the thirty days that they had been working together.5
The strike lasted three days. The workers had been right about the incompetence of scab workers: when the Mt. Arbor management brought in a small crew of Filipino strikebreakers, they couldn’t do the work. And the other grafters in town—about two hundred men, almost all known to one another—were not interested in breaking their compatriots’ strike. The company’s only hope was to get the strikers to return to work. For all three days of the strike, the NFWA leaders were up before dawn, scouting the workers’ homes, knocking on the door of any house where the lights were on to make sure that the grafter who lived there was not preparing to go to work. Once, when Dolores
