supporters, into an effective organization. They drew a tight circle with a nine-mile radius and declared it the official strike zone, where no on could work.23 Beyond the circle, work could proceed as usual. This had always been a common, informal strike tactic among farm workers; now, the skilled, experienced organizers of the NFWA formalized it by organizing car pools to take workers to other jobs away from the strike area. The organizers also got official strike certification at some thirty ranches within the strike zone. State certification came with documentation that showed that at least one worker at the ranch had gone on strike, which prevented the state employment service from legally sending workers to those ranches and also made it more difficult for the growers to claim that no strike existed. The NFWA organized a set of “flying squadrons,” which, just like the roving automobile picket lines of the cotton strike thirty-one years earlier, set out in the early morning, armed with the workers’ knowledge of picking patterns and their own informal intelligence reports, to find and harass the remaining scabs.24
The first great triumph of the strike was the newfound warmth and solidarity between the Mexican and Filipino strikers. The AWOC was supposed to picket certain ranches and the NFWA others, but from the beginning the Filipino and Mexican picketers intermingled, stood up to the police and growers together, and jointly tried to convince the workers to leave the fields. Gilbert Padilla’s experience was representative. “For the first time I began to talk to the Filipinos as brothers and friends. Before that we never talked to them, and they never talked to us.”25 Out of conversations like that among hundreds of workers came the invitation from the Filipinos to the Mexican strikers to come eat at Filipino Hall. Food was free there for AWOC strikers, paid for by the AFL-CIO. Meanwhile, the NFWA pickets had been trying to get by on baloney sandwiches from the association hall or on the small amounts of food they could afford to prepare at home. Neither sufficed, and many NFWA strikers came to the picket lines hungry, a fact not lost on the Filipino strikers. The invitation to Filipino Hall came without prior approval from either Green or Itliong and without the knowledge of the NFWA leadership. This was just the kind of cooperation that Green had denied Chavez at their meeting just before the strike. But looking at it from the bottom up, how could there be any objection? There seemed to be plenty of food. Letting the Mexicans eat at the hall did not mean that the Filipinos would have any less. And what better way to strengthen the bonds of solidarity? Two sets of strikers sitting down to eat together, the Filipinos sharing one of the most prized parts of their culture, unable to hide their pleasure as some Mexicans began to appreciate the Filipino food they had long ridiculed. Those meals made Filipino Hall into Strike Central, and the memory of that shared pleasure would endure long after most of the Filipino and Mexican strikers had gone their separate ways.
But Chavez had been right; this time his pessimism about strikes proved to be well grounded. This was no little skirmish that the growers would be inclined to settle quickly. They were reluctant to give ground on wages and even more opposed to recognizing either of the two organizations as official representatives of the workers. Through an extensive network of labor contractors, the growers recruited strikebreakers from outside the area—first from Tulare, Stockton, and Bakersfield, later from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and finally from as far away as Oregon, Texas, and Mexico. Local judges issued injunctions that set limits on the picketers’ ability to gather in large numbers or get close enough to talk to the scabs. The Delano police and California Highway Patrol faithfully enforced the injunctions, and were quick to arrest aggressive strikers but slow to constrain equally aggressive foremen and supervisors. The police were particularly reluctant to take on the growers, some of whom drove their cars dangerously close to the picket lines or threatened strikers by firing shotguns in the air. Other growers quietly met the strikers’ wage demands, encouraging people to come back to work and allowing those who did to argue in their own defense that the main demand of the strike had been won.
As many local Mexican strikers returned to their jobs, the Filipinos began to waver. Their biggest concern was the possible loss of their homes, as the growers began housing strikebreakers in the old Filipino camps. At what point would they lose their place in the camps indefinitely? Where else would they live? They couldn’t live in the Filipino Hall forever. In the first weeks of October, when it seemed clear that the strike would not be strong enough to force the growers to capitulate, the Filipinos started to return to the camps. The foremen, who were often the authentic leaders in the Filipino bachelor community and intermediaries between the men and the bosses, led the return. Pete Velasco, who later became a member of the UFW Executive Board, was one of only two foreman who did not go back to work. Although the AWOC officially remained committed to the strike and Itliong continued as one of the important strike leaders, most of the rank-and-file AWOC activists also resumed work. The minority of younger Filipino strikers, who tended to be more mobile—working in Alaska’s canneries, on the Seattle waterfront, and in the Stockton asparagus, as well as in the Delano grapes—simply moved on to another town as the strike’s power diminished. When the harvest ended in November, fewer than a hundred Filipino strikers remained at Filipino Hall. For most of those men, their act of defiance in early September came to mean the end of their working lives.26
In the aftermath of the strike, the NFWA leadership and the growers argued over how many people actually had participated. The growers claimed that no more than 500 people walked out in the first couple of weeks and that most of them subsequently returned. The NFWA claimed that 5,000 had walked out and that the vast majority never returned but were replaced by scabs, mostly people from Mexico. Great efforts were made on both sides to establish the validity of their own figures. But the debate was beside the point. In the long run, the number of people who originally left the fields and what percentage of them returned, mattered not one whit. The figure that counted in the battles to come was the number of loyalists who in the process of the strike were recruited, body and soul, to the NFWA and Cesar Chavez. Many of them were outside supporters, not farm workers, but the majority were exactly the people whom the NFWA had been trying to organize since 1962: the Mexican American farm worker families who had settled in the small towns of the southern Central Valley.
Although the strike’s first great accomplishment among farm workers was the solidarity of the Mexican and Filipino strikers, its most lasting achievement was that about a hundred original strikers, plus a few other militant farm workers who came to Delano to get in on the action, joined the farm worker families who had been fully committed to the NFWA before the strike. These people together, somewhat more than a few hundred strong, remained fully committed to the strike even as the growers managed to resume full production in October and November. They got up early in the morning and went to the picket lines, and often volunteered at the NFWA office in the afternoon and evenings. In the early days they survived on nothing more than the donations of food and clothing that poured into the Delano office, plus the once-a-day meals at Filipino Hall. Many of these people remained part of the union family over the next five years. Some of them turned their lives upside down, leaving the small towns that had been their homes and traveling to the nation’s largest cities to become the crucial players in what came next the biggest, most successful boycott in U.S. history.
* Depending on the conditions workers could usually pick two to four boxes an hour, so the twenty-five-cent incentive the workers wanted would add a minimum of fifty cents an hour. The previous year the wage was $1.25 plus ten cents a box, putting the hourly average at about $1.50. (See Dunne, Delano.)
* Law has it limits. Some Pinoys went to Arizona or Mexico where they could get legally married and others set up households with women and children in what I suppose could be called illegal families.
September ’65 to January ’66
Generations of California growers and police officials have done what they could to keep farm workers separated from their potential allies in the rest of the country.
