get a court order to ban and destroy all copies of a film about a farm worker strike. In the 1930s, reporters were arrested in rural California counties for filing harvest strike stories in big city newspapers. In 1934, Imperial County’s Sheriff Charles Gillett prohibited a Nation journalist from sending a cable to New York from a local Western Union office. Despite the sheriff ’s efforts, news did get to Los Angeles about the 1934 strike, and about twenty people set out for the Imperial Valley on what they called a “Good Will Tour” to bring aid to the strikers. The sheriff and his deputies stopped them at the Imperial County line, where everyone in the caravan was handcuffed and arrested.1
Even more than geographical distance, however, race and language separated farm workers from other people. With the brief exceptions of fruit tramps in the early 1900s and Okies in the late thirties, California farm workers have been primarily Asian or Mexican immigrants who were often monolingual in languages other than English. The fictions of race were hard enough to break through, but not being able to talk to other people made it especially difficult to reach out to them for aid. The isolation of farm workers was even codified in law. In 1936, farm workers were purposefully written out of the National Labor Relations Act, and between 1941 and 1965, a large percentage of farm workers were braceros legally separated from other U.S. workers.
But space and race were very different in 1965 than they had been thirty years before. Television, radio, faster cars, better roads, and both commercial and private airplane travel had shrunk the country and brought the California fields closer to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. World War II, the Jackie Robinson–led integration of major league baseball, and the early civil rights movement had transformed many people’s attitudes towards race. The fact that farm workers were mostly “nonwhite” was no longer a guarantee that other sectors of society would not support their struggles. Interracial solidarity had blossomed in the early sixties. Many white Americans had been willing to support African Americans, opening the possibility that they would also support Mexican Americans, and even Mexican immigrants.*
When farm workers first refused to go to work in Delano in 1965, they were still isolated, largely unknown to the dominant, citified American culture. But the conditions that had produced that isolation had changed. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the stage was set for farm workers to reach out to potential white supporters in American cities—but a set stage does not a drama make. Farm workers needed a strategy to connect them to their potential supporters in the cities. They needed someone to help them find a way out of their rural, racial, linguistic, and legal isolation. They found that someone, and he found the boycott.
Cesar Chavez first heard about the possibilities of a boycott soon after the grape strike began. Jim Drake was driving him to a fundraiser on the California coast, and in the relative calm of the drive, he told Cesar the story of the Irish campaign against Captain Charles Boycott, a story Drake had stumbled upon in a book whose name he had forgotten. In the late nineteenth century, Captain Boycott’s job was to collect rents from impoverished Irish peasants and turn them over to wealthy Anglo-Irish landlords. Led by a small-town priest, the peasants, some of them literally starving, decided to stop paying the rent and to ostracize the rent collector from the community in which he lived. No one would sell him anything, nor would anyone buy his goods. Laborers refused to work on Boycott’s small piece of land. He and his wife were isolated, shunned. The Irish government sent a regiment of troops to defend Boycott, but he didn’t need defending. No one had threatened him with violence. Useless, the troops quartered themselves on his land, chopped down his trees for firewood, and ate his livestock. The campaign became famous, not only in Ireland but in London and New York, and was promoted by the Irish Land League as a nonviolent alternative to the contemporaneous armed struggle for Irish independence. Boycott was ruined, a prisoner in his own home, and finally left town in disgrace.2
Drake could see that the story pleased Chavez. How could it not? The boycott required thorough organization. The peasants’ poverty and Catholicism had helped unite them. At the center of the story was an organizer, a small-town priest. But Cesar did not immediately take hold of the idea. The campaign against Captain Boycott had been a local affair. Local folks had made their power felt against a local enemy. Sure, other Irish peasants used the same technique against their own tax collectors—in that sense it had spread—but what Chavez was looking for was a way of involving other forces in the grape strike, not of moving the strike to other areas. He agreed it was an excellent story, but he would not commit himself.
At the time, labor boycotts—strangled by law and lacking appeal because of the general disdain toward AFL-CIO officialdom—had degenerated into the largely ignored “Unfair” lists in the back of union newspapers. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott repopularized the word, but in that case the people doing the boycotting were the actual participants in the conflict, not outside supporters. Northerners picketing Woolworth stores after the 1960–61 Greensboro sit-ins were a better example. But although those picket lines were important in linking the civil rights movement and the new student left, they were not particularly instrumental in ending the segregation of southern lunch counters. That victory was achieved closer to home, in the southern cities themselves.
Ultimately grape workers and their supporters reawakened the country to the power of the boycott. Their example spurred the Chicana-led boycott of the Farah Pants Company from 1972 to ’74, which was consciously modeled on the farm workers’ efforts. After Farah capitulated, the National Council of Churches launched an unprecedented worldwide boycott of the Nestlé Company for its aggressive marketing of baby formula to third world mothers. When the church action forced Nestlé to back off its attack on breastfeeding, the boycott became a standard weapon in contemporary social struggles, finally picked up by organized labor in the early 1980s as a part of its anticorporate campaigns. But in 1965, a boycott did not quickly come to mind as a way of spreading a union fight. It took NFWA leaders a full six months of experimentation and discussion before an unexpected victory made the boycott their primary strategy. Even then it wasn’t so much that the leaders chose the boycott—it was more like the boycott chose them.
When Drake first floated the idea of a boycott, picket lines were still active in the grape strike, and the NFWA was asking supporters to send them money, food, clothing, and endorsements, or to come to Delano and help build the strike. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the left was thriving, filled with energy, and quick to respond. Ann Draper, a socialist official of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and a member of the Executive Board of Citizens for Farm Labor, organized a food and clothing caravan to Delano in the first weeks of the strike. She also brought $6,000 in cash. Students from the Bay Area who had just lived through the victorious Free Speech Movement and were now building the antiwar movement at full bore, came to Delano with their enthusiasm and sleeping bags. Many young radicals driving between LA and San Francisco made a semi-obligatory stop at the Delano picket lines. Independent union militants stopped by. Priests, rabbis, and Protestant clergy from all over California spent time picketing and issued statements and decrees. So much used clothing arrived that the strikers could pick and choose, and finding a place to store the extras became a problem. These moral and physical contributions were important in holding the strike together in the early days, but they were not a dramatic enough extension of the scope of the battle to make a significant difference in its outcome.
The major news outlets ignored the strike: the big papers ran a few small paragraphs, but there was nothing on TV outside of the Central Valley. The only regular newspaper reports were from Ron Taylor of the Fresno Bee and from a few left and labor publications: The Valley Labor Citizen, a weekly publication of regional labor and trade councils, edited by the brilliant photographer George Ballis; The People’s World, published by the California Communist Party; and The Movement, put out by the Friends of SNCC, which publicized and analyzed developments in the rapidly changing black and student movements. “How to get the story in the news” was a common topic of conversation in Delano, just as it was becoming a major consideration in the bourgeoning antiwar movement, and among all U.S. political actors. Portable video cameras, first introduced in the early 1960s, had changed the nature of TV news. Live radio reports were becoming increasingly
