to the next stop on the farm worker circuit, the citrus harvest in Porterville.
It was the NFWA that broke farm worker custom. It refused to call off the strike, although no one—not even the top leadership—could say for sure what it meant to be on strike after the harvest was over. The strike was now like the word huelga. It had come to mean more than just collectively withdrawing labor power; rather, it was a general call to arms, whose very utterance, thanks to the Kern County sheriff ’s department, was a symbolic act of defiance. Huelga didn’t mean that to everyone yet, only to the strikers and their few thousand supporters in the student movement, labor unions, and the church. But it would soon come to mean that to millions of people. And it is one measure of the impact of Cesar Chavez and the farm worker movement that those millions came to recognize huelga before most of them knew what an enchilada was.
The baby steps that would lead to the grape boycott were taken by a few people, newly liberated from the picket lines, who attempted, on the fly, to make a crude map of the grape distribution system and to develop a strategy for disrupting it. They followed the grapes out of town, trying to figure out exactly where they went, and how they got to the supermarkets. Trains carried the grapes from Delano to the Roseville yard, outside Sacramento, and then traveled east. Most of the trucks leaving the warehouses went to the big wholesale produce markets, where the grapes were unloaded, and then distributed to retail stores, primarily big chains. Some of the trucks went to the docks in San Francisco, Oakland, San Pedro, Stockton, and Long Beach, where they were unloaded and then loaded onto ships for distribution around the world. What were the possibilities? The Roseville yard was a logistical disaster, eight miles long and fifty tracks wide. As the railroad cars were switched from engine to engine the farm workers couldn’t identify the trains that carried the grapes. Furthermore, federal laws against interfering with train travel were strong, and the several unions with jurisdiction in the yards almost always obeyed them. The big-city produce terminals looked more promising. The strikers could easily follow the trucks, and the Teamsters who loaded and unloaded the grapes had a lot of control over what actually happened at the terminals. Thus, the downtown LA terminal, a two-hour drive from Delano, became an early focus for activists.
But the first intimations of the future strategy came on the San Francisco Bay Area docks. Work there was entirely in the hands of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the large left-wing union that was born in the victorious 1934 San Francisco general strike. The ILWU had a unique historical commitment to organizing farm workers and cannery workers, starting with the 1937 “march inland,” which was intended to protect the gains of longshoremen by extending some measure of the 1934 victory to “inland workers.” That organizing drive had been substantially defeated by the Western Conference of Teamsters, which offered the bosses the carrot of a more friendly, business-oriented union. Nonetheless, as a few striking farm workers arrived on the San Francisco docks in early December 1965, top ILWU officials were still interested in bringing farm workers under their wing, and the rank and file was still vigorous and proud of its power and traditions.8
Two days after the first hard rain, Gilbert Padilla, a young striker named Tony Mendez, his wife, Socorro, and Sergio Tovar of the AWOC got into a car and drove to San Francisco. Gilbert can’t remember whose car they took, but it wasn’t his. He had lent his to Dolores the first week of the strike and never saw it again. Cars came and went in those days. This time, his car full of spirited young people was following a truck carrying 1,250 cases of scab grapes from the Pagliarulo warehouse in Delano. The pursuit ended at Pier 50, after dark; the truck got into a long line, apparently not to be unloaded until the next day. Despite the light rain, the four from Delano, armed with homemade signs that said “Don’t Eat Grapes,” started to march up and down in front of the pier. Almost immediately, longshoremen on night shift and truck drivers waiting to load and unload came over and asked them what they were doing. Many dockworkers encouraged them to remain, and one even brought them a couple of raincoats. Soon, Jimmy Herman, head of the clerks’ division and one of the most powerful officials in the ILWU, rushed to the dock. He took the four wet, enthusiastic people back to his office and gave them coffee. Padilla was surprised by how much Herman already knew about the strike. Then Herman got down on his knees and made up some new signs that said “Farm Workers On Strike.” He told them to return just before dawn and stand in front of the dock with those signs. Herman said that the bosses would throw an injunction at them, but it would be too late; they could stop the grapes from being unloaded first. “Don’t tell nobody about who gave you these,” he said, gesturing to the signs. “You just stand there. Don’t say a god-damn thing.”9
Padilla later declared that the next day’s surprise was “the most fascinating thing that ever happened to me.” Gilbert tends to dramatic speech, but that is still quite an assessment by a child of the labor camps, war veteran, father of eight children, and close compatriot of Cesar Chavez for twenty-six years before Chavez forced him out of the union in 1980. But in some respects, Padilla has it right. On that rainy morning and afternoon, clerks, longshoremen, and a few truck drivers took a first step in reversing the historical separation between California’s rural and urban workers. It was a major reversal: at the very dawn of California labor history, in the late nineteenth century, San Francisco’s Irish union workers had fought the bosses and Chinese farm workers, mistakenly believing that by taking the big growers’ side against the Chinese, they could get concessions from the bosses in other areas and eliminate the competition from low-wage Chinese laborers. Those Irish anti-Chinese riots set the tone for California union history. The California branch of the American Federation of Labor acted completely within the spirit and logic of those riots when it refused to give charters to nonwhite farm-worker unions, right up until World War II. As did the vast majority of unionized city workers, who from the 1920s to the 1950s, rebuffed most appeals for solidarity from farm worker representatives. But on November 17, 1965, ILWU clerks and longshoremen on the San Francisco docks, encouraged by their own officers, gave the first indication that solidarity could, and would, be extended to farm workers.
At first Gilbert was just shocked. As soon as he and his friends arrived, the clerks started leaving the docks. Without the clerks, no work could get done. Then the longshoremen walked away. Some of them came by and gave the four bewildered picketers money. One guy gave them his lunch. Others joined the picket line; at one time fifty longshoremen were picketing in the rain. The line of idled trucks seemed to stretch back for miles. Some of the truckers were mad and started to honk their horns. That stopped quickly, though, as a group of longshoremen broke the windshields of a few of the complaining drivers. Even the lunch trucks were shooed away. One little lunch wagon whose owner refused to move had all its tires punctured. The whole dock came to a halt. “I felt like I was ten feet tall,” Padilla remembered. “Everybody walked out. . . . It was something that I had never seen before—the solidarity.”10
By 1965, this kind of elementary worker solidarity, termed “secondary boycotts,” had long been illegal in the United States—several times over. Late-nineteenth-century courts had been overwhelmingly hostile to unions and often ruled that ordinary strikes were unacceptable acts of coercion. Judges considered most sympathy strikes even worse, and universally declared them illegal. In 1911, the Supreme Court, in Gompers v. Bucks Stove and Range Co., ruled that even the AFL’s “We Don’t Patronize” list was an illegal attack by outsiders against an employer. This legal tradition was reversed by the 1936 National Labor Relations Act, which not only gave unions legitimate legal status but was silent on the issue of boycotts. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, however, again made secondary boycotts of “neutral parties” illegal. But the ban was difficult to interpret and enforce. Workers continued to refuse to handle scab products. Teamster truckers argued that they were not boycotting a neutral party but rather an individual commodity. Similarly, some factory workers refused to work on what they called “hot cargo.” The legal web tightened significantly with the 1957 Landrum Griffin Act, which added hot cargo campaigns to the prohibition against secondary boycotts, and provided for extensive fines for unions that violated the typical “no strike, no secondary boycott, no hot cargo campaigns, and no slow down” clauses that had become prevalent in union contracts. Some of the legal language was obscure, but its meaning was not: effective,
