1965, only thirty-eight in the Delano-Arvin area also owned the packing sheds, enormous cold storage warehouses, and shipping facilities without which a table grape was a useless commodity.6 These grower-packer-shippers charged the smaller, dependent growers for precooling, inspecting, storing, and selling the crop. Often they also provided the smaller producers with their harvest crews, and charged them a fee for picking and packing. In bad years—and the years had not been particularly good for a long time—the vast majority of growers often lost money, but the grower-packer-shippers were somewhat insulated from the weakening market. In 1965, the small and medium-sized growers, by this time heavily mortgaged and in debt, were in a near panic about the prospect of a significant rise in wages. The grower-packer-shippers—the DiGiorgio, Giuamarra, Divizich, Merzoian, Steel, Zaninovich, Pandol, Bianco, and Caratan families, plus a handful of others—while not nearly as threatened, were still uneasy about the industry’s long-range prospects. Jack Pandol had averaged only $22,500 in net income between 1961 and 1965 on a 2,000-acre ranch valued (along with all its equipment) at about $4 million, with gross annual sales of $1.35 million. As Pandol told the writer John Gregory Dunne in 1965, “A business that grosses that much and nets that little is in trouble.”7
These grower-packer-shipper families, all of them Catholic, some of them still headed by the patriarchs who had acquired the Tulare Basin land and put in the first vineyards, had settled in the area around Delano. Of the big grape growers, only Schenley and DiGiorgio were absentee landlords, and even the local DiGiorgio operation was run by one of the old man’s nephews, who lived near Arvin. These people, especially the Slavs (as the Croatian families are called around Delano), formed an insular community, where intermarriage was common, where even the second generation spoke with a slight Croatian accent, and the highlights of social life were grower luncheons, children’s christenings and first communions, dances at Slav Hall, and an occasional night on the town in Bakersfield. Even after they became rich, most remained wedded to agriculture and did not branch out into the professions. (Dunne noted that there was not one Slav doctor or lawyer in Delano).8 The fathers and sons were hands-on directors of their farm businesses, and although they didn’t prune, thin, girdle, pick, and pack themselves, they knew how that work was supposed to be done. Most of them got up early in the morning and spent a lot of time going over the various tasks of the day with supervisors and foremen. Their family stories were all about dedication and hard work, and many were intensely proud of what the first-generation immigrants had accomplished. They started out poor and now they had money. They were typically neither golf players nor country club bar sitters. They had plenty of land, big air-conditioned homes, nice cars, private planes, and expensive private educations for their children. They were more than just wealthy. They were an authentic rural bourgeoisie, but they were still proud of their peasant backgrounds, and were determined to remain rural small-town people. They were even proud of their insularity and lack of sophistication. Their one venture into big city life was their significant financial and political support for the Democratic Party.
The interests of these families were directly threatened by the farm workers’ demands for higher wages and union recognition. Aside from a direct calculation of cost, their whole understanding of themselves mitigated against any easy accommodation with a Mexican or Filipino union. The big growers had no doubts about their own story. They had worked hard and prospered. Their compatriots who had not worked hard, or who had made bad decisions, had failed. Wasn’t that the way of the world? Why should it be different for other poor immigrants? They lived in a world of easy assumptions about inherent racial inferiority and deficient national character, which went a long way toward explaining to themselves not only why they were successful and others weren’t but why it should remain ever so. In the Delano grape fields in 1965, racism and national chauvinism were not just historical and ideological baggage warping the world outlook of the major players; they were still part of the organization of production. Although different wage rates according to race were no longer the rule, on the large ranches Mexicans, Filipinos, blacks, whites, and Puerto Ricans still lived in separate camps, worked in separate crews, and often specialized in different jobs, which did have different rates of pay. Such strict divisions made it easy for most everyone to maintain the longstanding stereotypes graven into California history: Filipino gambling and excessive sexuality; Mexican thievery and dishonesty; Negro indolence; Puerto Rican hot tempers; and Okie filth. Those fictions, combined with the self-congratulatory family stories of the big growers, served to blind the Slavs and Italians to the real life histories of their workers. But was it not better to be blind? Clear vision might have produced an uneasy conscience, and any self-doubt about the justice of their cause might have interfered with the growers’ defense of their own power and interest.
As the Delano grape harvest began in late August, the Filipinos who worked for Marco Zaninovich decided that they wanted their boss to pay them the $1.40 an hour and 25 cents a box that grape workers had won in Coachella earlier in the year. It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Most of the Pinoys had worked for Zaninovich for more than a decade—some had even planted the first grape vines for him back in the 1920s—and over the years they had learned how to negotiate. A respected elder, who was also often a leadman or foreman, would let Zaninovich know what the men wanted. Usually, the negotiations were carried on without rancor, even when the workers backed them up with slow downs, short work stoppages, and other semi-ritualized job actions. Zaninovich was the boss, and his power was respected. But the highly skilled Filipino workers, who were almost always completely united, had their own measure of power. Even though they had suffered from discriminatory wage rates in the 1920s and ’30s, by the 1960s they were, on average, the highest-paid ethnic group in California agriculture.9
But this time the informal negotiations did not go well. Zaninovich was in no mood to give in. Even though the Delano growers had not used braceros, they feared that the labor shortage around the state would push up wages everywhere. The successful strike in Coachella, in the midst of statewide uncertainty and labor troubles, seemed to justify their fears. And the Delano workers were asking for a significant raise. A $1.40 minimum plus a piece-rate incentive would push the wage to around $2 an hour, about a 33 percent jump over the previous year.* The growers had beaten back the workers’ attempt to extend their Coachella victory into Arvin, and they had decided that they wouldn’t knuckle under in Delano, either.
The workers had another option besides the limited job actions. They could stay away from the fields entirely; they could strike. They had done it several times before, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but usually minimizing their losses by returning to work quickly if they could not win their demands. Often they would strike without picket lines, just as the rose grafters had done; though “a stay at home” for the Zaninovich Filipinos meant remaining at the company-owned labor camp in the midst of Zaninovich’s fields, playing cards, eating and drinking a bit, and waiting to see what they could extract from the boss. Starting September 5, 1965, that’s what they did.
The first day of the stay-at-home, Larry Itliong came by for a talk with Zaninovich. Itliong was the head of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee operation in the area. He had been involved in labor fights almost since the day he got off the boat from the Philippines, in 1929; he had been a Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (C&A) organizer in the early 1930s, and then a paid organizer off and on for various Filipino unions. Since 1959 he had been in charge of AWOC’s Filipino membership. He knew the work and was an excellent card player (Gilbert Padilla says that often he would collect union dues by going to a camp, playing an evening of cards, and if he won, which he usually did, making a show of subtracting each man’s union dues from his winnings). He was generally respected as a shrewd, knowledgeable, capable representative of the workers to their bosses.
Itliong wanted the men to give up their stay-at-home and go to the vineyards. He didn’t think it could work. The victory in Coachella had been a bit of a fluke, he said. Coachella had received a hit of especially hot weather, which made the growers even more eager than usual to get the grapes picked. But in Arvin, where AWOC had first tried to extend the new pay raise, the cops had arrested twenty-four people just for being on the picket line. Now, in Delano, Zaninovich couldn’t give in to the demands even if he wanted to. To do
