blocked his driveway with her truck, locked it, took her key and left. Dolores’s bold act, prefiguring many to come, was much celebrated inside the NFWA, and later became one of the main stories told about the rose strike—the heroine organizer preventing a reluctant worker from scabbing. The story, however, inverted the actual trajectory of the struggle, because it had been a bold worker, Camacho, who had activated the reluctant NFWA organizers.
The day the strike started, the NFWA tried to begin negotiations with the company. Huerta went to the local Mt. Arbor office, where a company official called her a Communist and briskly escorted her out of the building. The parent company, Jackson & Perkins, was more polite to Chris Hartmire, but it also refused to negotiate. Its representatives were curious about the nature of the NFWA, though. They pressed Hartmire on whether it was a union.
On Wednesday, day three of the strike, company foremen visited many of the striking grafters. Their message was both an offer and a threat. They would accept all the wage demands, including dropping the 90 percent scam, but they would not sign a contract. Anybody who did not show up for work on Thursday would never work for the company again. That night Chavez, Jim Drake, Gil Padilla, Bill Esher, and Wendy Goepel were in a little trailer behind the office talking about the strike; they were divided on how to respond to the company’s offer. When a small group of grafters knocked on the door and asked Chavez to come outside, Padilla, who advocated holding out for a contract, suspected that these workers wanted to go back to work. He urged Cesar not to talk to them, to tell them to wait until the next day when all the strikers could have a formal meeting to discuss what to do. But Chavez, who favored accepting the wage concessions without a contract, went outside and gave the workers his permission to return to work without a general meeting. Padilla was furious. He knew the strike was over. After the group of night visitors went back to work on Thursday, everybody returned on Friday. The company backed down on its threat, accepted all the men back, and kept its promise on the wages. And within a couple of weeks, all the other companies had been forced to raise their wages, as they did not want to lose their best grafters to Mt. Arbor.6
El Malcriado hailed the victory, and the NFWA organizers assessed its meaning. Jim Drake thought that they might possibly have won a contract and was disappointed when the strikers went back to work, but ultimately he agreed with Chavez: “It was premature, we didn’t have enough people, we didn’t have the masses of farm workers. It was a very special situation; Epifanio was a very special person. It was better to get the raise and get out.”7 Padilla saw the incident as a lost opportunity, and an example of the NFWA’s confusion over its own goals. If the association had been a union, if Hartmire could have said to the parent company, yes, we are a union, then the company might have negotiated with them. Camacho, he argued, had been exactly right about the situation in the fields: nobody who was capable of doing the work was going to scab. If the men had held out, and if the NFWA had been unequivocal, the strike might have been a total victory. But Camacho was not at all discouraged. The workers had won the full raise they demanded. He wasn’t even that disappointed that the blacklist against him in the roses remained in effect. He was energized by the strike. Soon he got a job in the grape vineyards. He told his friends to be prepared, because strikes were contagious.
For the California growers, the end of the Bracero Program had become the worst kind of concession: the growers’ defeat, rather than dampening farm workers’ enthusiasm and channeling their battles into more acceptable venues, as concessions often do, only encouraged workers to fight, and with a more threatening set of demands. Rarely has the age-old fear of appeasement turned out to be more prophetic: the growers gave an inch, and farm workers took a mile.
The rose strike was part of a general rebellion that broke out in the fields in 1965. The California Department of Employment officially acknowledged that there were sixty-three agricultural “labor disputes” that year.8 It is certainly a low estimate. The on-the-ground battles between farm workers and their employers in 1965 have become part of farm worker lore—and one of the reasons workers remember that time so well is that they won many of those fights. Officially, wages rose from an average of $1.33 an hour in 1964 to $1.50 an hour in 1966, but again, the official figures seem to have underestimated the change. All the farm workers I talked to who were in California in 1965 remembered the general upheaval after the termination of the Bracero Program, and many reported that wages rose sharply. Pablo Camacho, for example, remembers that in 1965 his boss not only raised his wages but also began to pay his rent and give him gas money so that he would not move to another job.
The strikes and accelerating wages were largely a consequence of the labor shortage that followed the shutdown of the Bracero Program. The growers and the INS had anticipated the problem and had done what they could to head it off. Starting in 1961 the Immigration and Naturalization Service began a massive distribution of green cards to Mexican farm workers. The agency kept no record of how many cards they gave out, but estimates go as high as 100,000; by 1969 the INS figured that there were 750,000 Mexican with green cards in the United States. In addition, between 1960 and 1969 the INS issued more than 2.2 million “white cards,” designed as temporary permits but used by farm workers to immigrate illegally to the U.S.9
But green cards and white cards weren’t enough in 1965. California growers, especially those far from the border, still had to scramble for workers. They tried to use Los Angeles County welfare recipients, members of the Lakota Sioux tribe from North Dakota, Navajos from New Mexico, high school football players, and housewives, but they still couldn’t find enough experienced workers to get the job done.10 Knowing they had the whip hand, farm workers once again moved onto the offensive. The galloping farm worker movement interfered with the plans of the NFWA, which was concentrating on self-help programs and was not prepared for mass activity. But the NFWA was flexible enough to change course, and it began to endorse the strike activity. Chavez—suffering from a bad case of pneumonia—did not have too much to do with this new direction, although he gave it a critical, lukewarm endorsement. (He had to go to the hospital in Bakersfield soon after the rose strike ended, and then spent a few weeks home in bed.) It was mostly the Migrant Ministry—sponsored staff, supported by enthusiastic articles in El Malcriado, who aligned the NFWA with the quickly ascending farm worker movement. Nobody voted on the policy change; it just seemed to happen, as if the organizers had stumbled into a small stream, liked the feel of the water, and got swept into the rapids.
The NFWA’s next battle was a rent strike over bad conditions in a labor camp that Migrant Ministry organizers learned about while going door-to-door passing out contraceptive foam to farm worker women. The Woodville and Linnell camps, built by the Farm Security Administration in 1938, contained 400 structures, the majority of which were small one-room shacks, made completely out of heavy tin, or wood siding with tin roofs. For ten years the FSA had provided these “houses” to farm workers free of charge. In 1950, the FSA gave the camps to the Tulare County Housing Authority, which charged rents—$18 to $38 a month by 1964. In 1965, the authority wanted to raise the rent by as much as 47 percent. The increase was especially steep for farm worker families that had to rent several structures so that all of their children would have a place to sleep. As an added insult, the rent was being raised for shacks that had already been condemned by the Tulare County Health Department. To keep the inside temperatures bearable during the summer months, tenants had to find heavy carpets or old mattresses, throw them over the roofs of the hovels, and keep them soaking wet day and night. After hearing the residents’ complaints, Gilbert Padilla, David Havens of the Migrant Ministry, and Jim Drake decided to try to organize some kind of rent strike.11
One of the main complainants was Pablo Espinoza, who was occasionally employed by the housing authority to do some work in the camps, and was a member of a large extended family that rented several shacks in the Woodville camp. Espinoza, who later became a farm worker leader in the UFW, was the fourth of twelve children in a family that in the 1940s and ’50s had followed the sugar beets from the Rio Grande Valley to Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Ohio, moving from one labor camp to another. Everywhere they went, blacks, whites, and Mexicans lived in different areas but usually shared the same toilet and shower facilities,
