and five or six drunk white tramps stumbled upon us. They either didn’t know Billy or they were too drunk to realize who he was. They said they were going to kick the shit out of us. Billy told me to give him my knife and leave. I gave him the knife; he knew how to use it better than I, but I didn’t leave. I picked up a rock instead and hurled it at the drunks. It wasn’t much of a fight; the men were too juiced up to be dangerous and soon ran off. But I knocked one down and started to kick him as he lay on the ground. Billy grabbed me. “No, no, Rudy. Don’t you dare kick a man when he’s down. We done defended ourselves. That’s all that matters. Let’s get out of here.” I never forgot those words. They have always been my guide when it comes to violence.
Reyes kept on reading: cowboy stories, mysteries, nonfiction. At one hobo camp, he found a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. For three days running the book was hardly out of his hands. He was reading about white tramps in a camp dominated by white tramps, old Okies. As he read about the Joads, he just looked up from the book and there they were. The only things missing were the cars and the strikes. Cars didn’t interest him. But strikes? Hemingway and Kerouac hadn’t said anything about strikes. And the people Rudy ran with thought of themselves as hobos, not farm workers, although farm work is what they did. They never got involved in a labor dispute. If they didn’t like something about a job, they just left it. Sometimes everyone went at once, knowing they had left the farmer with a big problem, but they didn’t call it a strike.
Reyes had heard about Delano up in Washington; people said you could make good money in the grapes. He was in Los Angeles in 1965, in Watts, when he decided to head north. The Watts Riots had broken out, and “it was a lot of fun for a while . . . like a big party. Then the cops came and started shooting into the crowd . . . [and] it turned ugly.” He took a freight train out of LA and wound up in Delano’s Chinatown. “I walked into the Manila Café. I didn’t have to be too smart to figure out that was a good place to start.” The next day he was in a Filipino labor camp owned by Vincent Zaninovich, Marco’s brother. An AWOC enthusiast, Julian Balidoy, younger than the Manong, who were the majority in the camp, but older than Reyes, told him that a strike was coming soon. Rudy wanted to start right then; he was twenty-four years old.
In September 1965 there was nothing inevitable about Mexican solidarity with the Filipinos. Such solidarity was not unheard of in California’s agricultural history, but it was the exception. More Filipino strikes had been broken by strike-breaking Mexicans (and vice versa) than had been helped by acts of interethnic solidarity. And this time, the Filipinos were particularly vulnerable. They were mostly an aging, shrinking part of the workforce, and if the local Mexican majority decided to scab, not only was the Filipinos’ strike doomed, but the Filipinos’ very presence in the vineyards might be jeopardized.
The National Farm Workers Association’s decision to join the strike, unlike the act of defiance that began it, was made by the association’s leadership rather than by the rank and file. The workers were confused and divided. What should they do? Some were already crossing the picket lines; most continued to pick grapes on the ranches where there were no strikes. A few of the Mexicans saw the same opportunity that the Filipinos had seen, but no Mexican work stoppage, organized from below, added its weight to the Filipino action. Instead, people came to the NFWA office to see what the association was going to do now that the struggle had arrived at its own doorstep.
Formally joining this strike would require a commitment different from anything the association had ever attempted. Potentially some 5,000 workers might be involved, and the fight would engage a group of powerful and hostile bosses directly. The NFWA leaders did not want to be dragged into such a battle against their will if, in their best judgment, they were sure to lose. The leaders had to make that judgment. They could not avoid making it, as there were no local Mexican strikes in progress, no farm worker militants pulling them along and making the decision for them. No delegation of striking Filipinos came to Cesar Chavez and asked for his support. Rather, Mexican workers came and asked him what he was going to do. It was mostly the more militant ones who wanted to know, but they would not act on their own.
Manuel and Esther Uranday, dues-paying NFWA members, remember rushing into the office and telling Chavez about the strike and catching him by surprise. Bill Esher remembers the same moment: “Damn them,” Chavez said, “we will have to either break the strike or join them. We’re not ready for this.” Cesar swore in Spanish, sat at his desk for a while “holding his head in misery,” and then went to the bathroom, the only place he could escape the excitement and tumult of the office. Esher remembers that he was in there for half an hour. When he finally came out, he was “grim, without hope or joy.” But he told Esher, “We are going to join them.”17
But joining them would not be easy. Chavez called Padilla in Porterville. “The world’s coming to an end, Gilbert; the Filipinos are out on strike. Come on down.” When Padilla arrived, Cesar still seemed unsure about what to do. He asked Gilbert to go over to Filipino Hall to see what was happening. Padilla walked in on an enthusiastic meeting of a few hundred people. Five languages were flying around—Tagalog, Ilocano, Viscayan, English, and Spanish. The AWOC chief, Al Green, was there, but seemed to have very little to do with the strike. Larry Itliong chaired the meeting, and although there was a lot of talk about the wage demands, Padilla heard little mention of the issue of union recognition. Padilla had a friendly conversation with a few Mexican members of AWOC, and later, when Chavez, still hesitant, asked, “Well, what do we do?” Gilbert, caught up in the excitement of the mass meeting, had no doubts: “We are going to strike.”18
Itliong was friendly but somewhat standoffish in his first conversation with Padilla. He didn’t take the NFWA seriously. If its members really wanted to help, they could all join AWOC, he said. After that, Bill Esher wrote up a leaflet calling AWOC the “union of the north” (a reference to its Stockton headquarters, which implied that NFWA was the authentic Delano-area farm worker organization) listing the demands of the strike and the growers being struck. It ended with an injunction: “The Farm Worker Association asks of all Mexicans: HONOR THIS STRIKE. DON’T BE STRIKEBREAKERS.” Chavez issued a press release that said, in part, “Now is when every worker, without regard to race, color, or nationality, should support the strike and must under no circumstances work on those ranches that have been struck.” A special edition of El Malcriado gave unconditional support to the AWOC strike.19
Meanwhile, dozens of Filipino pickets walked in front of the packing sheds and cold-storage facilities alongside the railroad tracks that run through the center of Delano. On the working-class west side the talk at bars and cafés was dominated by strike stories: the foreman who shot at an evicted Filipino because he wasn’t leaving his camp fast enough; police cars patrolling in front of Filipino Hall; the vulnerability of the wooden packing sheds to fire; late-night actions against water pumps. The NFWA was essentially on the sidelines. Padilla, Huerta, and Esher were anxious to be at the center of the battle. Chavez was cautious. Some Mexican farm workers were crossing the picket lines, but at one ranch, a young woman led her Mexican crew out in support of the strike. Chavez called an executive board meeting for September 14 to decide what to do.20
The meeting saw Chavez at his strategic best. At the very least the NFWA had to continue to support the AWOC strike, he said. If not, the Filipinos would blame the Mexicans for what was surely an upcoming defeat. The inevitable mutual recrimination would destroy all possibility for Mexican-Filipino cooperation. AWOC would be more damaged than the NFWA, but both groups would have a hard time organizing after such a major loss. No one at the meeting disagreed with that. The question was whether to go beyond support for the AWOC strike, and exactly how to do it. Itliong’s suggestion that the NFWA dissolve itself into AWOC was unacceptable, and yet he had offered no other way for the association to become more involved. No half measures came to mind. If the NFWA wanted to go beyond a statement of solidarity, it would have to call its own strike. Chavez acknowledged that if the question were put to a vote at a mass meeting, people would decide to extend the strike to their own ranches. But he also argued that the enthusiasm would soon pass, the growers would hold firm, and most people would go back to
