stories. Those they did pick up could have a national impact many times their local weight. If the strike could be presented in a way that pricked popular interest, shutting off the news from the Central Valley would require much more than closing down the local telegraph office.
Chavez’s original idea of promoting the strike as a civil rights struggle provided a basis for winning sympathy from the general population and the rank-and-file producers of the news, but it didn’t automatically guarantee coverage. Farm workers were more unknown to the rest of the country than were the South’s young blacks, whose consistent courage in the face of brutal repression had pushed them into the headlines. Farm workers didn’t speak English, were not yet servants in other people’s homes, did not have the African Americans’ deep, twisted historical ties to their white neighbors. They were considered aliens and sojourners, as well as subordinates. Their labor camps were more isolated from rural communities than the typical black section of a southern town. The farm worker strikes that followed the end of the Bracero Program were big news in farm communities but hardly mattered to anyone else. The NFWA had to make them matter if they were going to win.
Originally, only two people in the NFWA leadership had any extensive experience with the media: Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. In her years as a lobbyist in Sacramento, Huerta had talked to many newsmen and participated in scores of press conferences. She was smart, fiery, and beautiful. She was good copy, and she learned how to use herself to promote her causes. Chavez’s style was completely different, but even in his role as the behind-the-scenes Alinsky organizer of the CSO he had built good relations with farm town reporters, so that he had a feel for what those reporters wanted and how to make as big an impact as possible.
Early in the strike, Cesar started talking to Gilbert Padilla, Jim Drake, Dolores Huerta, his cousin Manuel Chavez, and Chris Hartmire about what he called “moral jujitsu,” which he offered as a tactical solution to the problem of spreading the word and getting the story into the news. Chavez attributed the idea to Gandhi: the Mahatma had used it to defeat the English in India, and the NFWA could use it to beat the growers in Delano. Several degrees more subtle than Alinsky’s “dirty tricks,” moral jujitsu was a tactical approach that allowed Cesar to give full rein to his strategic sensibility and avoid the difficult political calculations of ends and means, the problem of doing bad in order to achieve the good. The growers had more strength than the NFWA, but just as the jujitsu expert with subtle feints and skillful shifts of weight can take advantage of his opponent’s thrusts, Cesar proposed to turn the growers’ power back upon themselves. Such a strategy seemed to present no moral danger, and although it might prove difficult to execute, it was not conceptually complicated.
One of the growers’ main strengths was their influence with the Delano and Kern County police, sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges, who had a legal monopoly on the use of violence and could be quite discriminatory in how they applied the law. Police harassment didn’t make the difference between winning and losing, but it made life more miserable for the picketers, and it was a measure of the growers’ local power—power that Chavez proposed to turn against them.
His first opportunity came in the form of the overzealous Kern County sheriff, who, seemingly on his own, decided in mid-October to interpret the court injunction that banned any disturbance of the peace on the picket lines to mean that strikers could neither use the word huelga—strike—nor shout at scabs over a megaphone. There was no need to shout at the strikebreakers, he explained, because they had heard it all already, and, anyway, huelga was not an American word.3 Such tactics had worked before. In the 1930s, several rural judges had made the use of Spanish on picket lines illegal. But what had worked in the 1930s simply set up the police and growers for a jujitsu move in the 1960s. The day after the sheriff ’s announcement of the new policy, Reverend David Havens of the Migrant Ministry tested the lawman’s willingness to enforce the order by standing in the back of Epifanio Camacho’s pickup truck and reading Jack London’s description of a scab: “a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone of jelly and glue.”* Havens, dressed in a coat and tie, was arrested. An excited group of picketers returned to the NFWA headquarters. The sheriffs were nibbling at the baited hook; maybe they would swallow it whole.
Chavez chaired an open strategy meeting that night at the crowded NFWA hall on Albany Street. Animated speakers assessed the situation. What about free speech? What about the Constitution? Didn’t it cover us, too? As a consensus emerged to challenge the sheriff ’s order, Cesar asked how many would be willing to go to jail for the right to say “huelga” on the picket line. All hands shot up amidst a tumultuous chant of the forbidden word. People were ready to act; now it was a matter of doing it right. Chavez had already asked Wendy Goepel to schedule a Bay Area campus tour to Berkeley, Mills College, San Francisco State, and Stanford University. Why not synchronize Cesar’s tour with civil rights–style civil disobedience in Delano?4
Chris Hartmire was assigned to recruit ministers who would also be willing to get arrested. He organized a Day of Christian Concern. On October 19, the NFWA called the Kern County sheriff ’s office to say that farm workers intended to defy the gag order that very morning and were about to leave from their office in search of strikebreakers. Lawmen in sheriffs’ cars and a paddy wagon rushed to the NFWA office to discover that reporters from most of the large California dailies and several TV crews were waiting for them. Undeterred, the sheriffs went to the end of “one of the strangest farm labor strike caravans of all time,” as the Fresno Bee’s Ronald Taylor put it. Rather than racing over back roads, trying to find the scabs and elude the police, as strike caravans had been doing since farm workers started driving cars, this line of vehicles moved slowly, with the picketers making sure that the big city reporters, patrol cars, and paddy wagon did not get left behind. After an hour’s search the NFWA drivers finally found a working crew, stopped, waited for reporters and sheriffs to take their places, and started to shout “huelga.” Forty-four were arrested: thirteen farm workers and thirty-one volunteers, including nine ministers.5
Chavez and Goepel, waiting in the Bay Area, received the news as soon as Jim Drake could get to a phone. It had all gone according to plan. Chavez knew about the arrests before his first speech, scheduled for the epicenter of the West Coast student movement, the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley. There, at noon, 500 students gathered to hear a strike report. As Cesar, in his quiet fashion, gave his straightforward account, Goepel dramatically interrupted him and handed him a piece of paper. Chavez read it to himself, and then to the crowd: forty-four people, including his wife, had just been arrested in Delano for shouting “huelga.” The response was immediate. “Huelga! Huelga! Huelga! ” the excited crowd shouted back at the farm worker leader. Later, at the other colleges, the smaller crowds had also taken up the chant, making the strike their own. As Goepel drove the VW bug back to Delano, Cesar counted the contributions: $6,700.6
But the money was not as important as the publicity. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Kansas City Star ran their very first stories about the strike.7 The arrests were featured on TV news programs throughout California. The NFWA finally made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Los Angeles Times ran a two-column picture on page three. The growers barely knew what had hit them, but the sheriffs got the drift. They never again tried to enforce the gag order. Eventually, the injunction was declared unconstitutional, and all charges were dropped. Too late. The strike had broken out of the Central Valley. Moral jujitsu had won its first victory. But the question remained: What was the best way to leverage the growing outside support to force the growers to sign a contract?
October slid into November, and rain came down hard in Delano. The strikers were relieved. The harvest was officially over. No need for picket lines now. Significant numbers of people wouldn’t be required in the fields until mid-January. The growers had held on to enough veteran workers and brought in enough new ones to collect a large harvest. For the next several months, the primary work of the industry would be to distribute its bounty. As far as AWOC director, Al Green, was concerned, the rains meant the strike was over. He
