Some boxes of Pagliarulo grapes had been loaded onto the SS President Wilson, whose main cargo was 400 passengers, bound for Hawaii and Tokyo. But the longshoremen refused to load the rest. After a day’s wait, and with no guarantee that the rest of the grapes would be loaded anytime soon, the ship’s owners decided to leave the fruit behind. Gleeful workers took the boxes off the ship, and the enraged truck driver took off for San Pedro to see if the grapes could be loaded there. No luck; the alerted longshoremen refused to touch them, so the grapes had to be taken back to Delano and deposited in cold storage. The El Malcriado staff found a picture of an ocean liner and put it on the front page with the headline, “The grapes are rotting on the docks.” They quoted Tony Mendez: “When the unions and working people help each other, we can beat even the richest growers.” A triumphant editorial closed: “The huelga is a huge social movement involving the respect of a whole race of people. When outsiders—thousands of them—decide to help the farm workers in their fight for a better life, the ranchers say it is none of their business. The huelga has become everybody’s business. That is why it is winning.”11
The strikers’ surprising victory was a potentially disastrous defeat for the growers. If the ILWU, which controlled the West Coast docks, refused to handle scab grapes, the bosses would lose a lot of money and might be forced to settle with the workers despite having beaten them in the strike. The DiGiorgio Corporation, rich in antiunion experience, was sure that these activities were illegal. It got a restraining order forbidding the NFWA, AWOC, and 100 John Does from engaging in a secondary boycott and interfering with six upcoming shipments of grapes, naming the ships and the ports they would be sailing from. The strikers couldn’t believe their luck. They wouldn’t have to follow the grapes from Delano to figure out where they were bound. They could just meet the trucks at the docks and alert all their Bay Area support networks in advance. Large spirited picket lines easily turned back the friendly longshoremen. A few of the arrested picketers were brought before the judge for violating the injunction, but he dismissed the charges. Taft-Hartley and Landrum Griffin were amendments to the original National Labor Relations Act, but farm workers had been written out of the NLRA. They were not covered by its provisions and therefore could not be enjoined from breaking its rules. It was perfectly legal for the NFWA to engage in a secondary boycott and urge workers not to handle scab grapes. It was a sweet little irony: left out of the benefits of being covered by labor law, farm workers were also free of its restrictions.12
But the ILWU was not. Farm workers were free to ask for solidarity from fellow workers, but those workers were not free to give it. DiGiorgio, Pagliarulo, and other offended growers immediately got a judgment that allowed them to collect financial damages equal to the value of their grapes from any union that honored an NFWA picket line. The ILWU had very little wiggle room. All it could argue was that longshoremen had a right to refuse to cross picket lines if they felt that their health and safety were endangered by doing so. In all but one case brought before the courts, the grape growers won. Individual longshoremen, acting on their own, could refuse to work on scab grapes and maybe get away with it. But the union as a whole would have to repudiate such actions and would be liable for any losses. Finally, Padilla understood why Jimmy Herman was so adamant that those first four pickets not mention his name.
The law was not the only problem. In Los Angeles, which in its anti-union tradition was more like the rest of the West than like San Francisco, the NFWA learned that worker-to-worker solidarity was not only illegal but usually hard to put into practice. At the downtown produce market, some swampers, who unloaded the trucks, immediately agreed not to touch the scab product, others simply weren’t interested, and a few were openly hostile. Debates raged in the dark hours just before dawn, as the swampers and picketers, warming themselves by fires the workers had built in fifty-five-gallon drums, waited for the first trucks to arrive. Stopping those grapes would be a tough task, the picketers reported back to Chavez, so he assigned the job to a group of strike militants, including some young Filipinos who had already proved quite adept at sabotaging packing sheds, irrigation pumps, and other grower property.13 Among the strikers they were known as “special agents,” and their work was much admired. Rudy Reyes was one of them, as was his friend Ernie Delarmente, who had made a name for himself by holding his own in a short picket-line fistfight with the grower Bruno Dispoto, who was a head and a half taller and 125 pounds heavier than Delarmente. Chavez chose Dolores Huerta to head up this group, as she was, in her own way, just as fearless as the special agents.14
The LA swampers were members of Teamsters Local 630, whose contract allowed the membership to refuse to cross “a legitimate and bona fide picket line.” On December 3 the Los Angeles Teamsters Joint Council had ruled that the NFWA-AWOC pickets were, in fact, legitimate and bona fide, and members of Local 630 had received letters saying, “Your employer will be in violation of the contract if he discharges or otherwise punishes you for exercising your right to refuse to cross these picket lines to unload the Delano grapes.”15 But the letter also left the decision whether to unload the grapes up to the individual swampers.16 Some friendly swampers consistently refused to unload the grapes, and at first even the hostile ones would occasionally ignore a load, as long as the picketers stayed around. But a few swampers began to specialize in unloading the scab grapes, either sheepishly explaining that they needed the $80 to $100 they could make per truckload or openly defying and confronting the small band of picketers.
Rudy Reyes and company, spurred on by the majority of the men on the docks who were sympathetic to the cause, did what they could to interfere with the loading. The grapes came from Delano on pallets and were unloaded with pallet jacks, hand-operated, heavy metal forks on wheels. Rudy and a few others, picket signs in hand, would get on the docks and do what they could to get in the way of the jacks and prevent the grapes from being unloaded. The swampers were furious and tried to hit the picketers’ ankles with the forks of the jacks. One time Gilbert Padilla was knocked off the loading dock, badly twisted his ankle, and spent a couple of weeks on crutches. Only the support of the other dockworkers for the pickets prevented an all-out bloody battle. Dock supervisors started to call in the police, but by the time they arrived the folks from Delano were just peacefully parading back and forth. Nevertheless, some of the picketers were arrested, and the relations with the police deteriorated. Reyes began to dread the early-morning confrontations:
One of those forks could do some damage. One time when I was trying to get out of the way, I accidentally-on-purpose leaned into the grape boxes and made the swamper spill his load. He was really mad, and tried to corner me for a fight. I was about half his size, nimble and quick, and got away. That night when we got back to the apartment we really laughed about it. But I was laughing because I was so nervous and scared. I remember my back hurt, and I thought, well, that must be why they say you have a streak of yellow down your back, it was my yellow streak that was hurting. I could even feel it. And, as usual, the cops just made things worse. They came and tried to shove us off the docks. And they arrested us, too. Usually we got bailed out pretty quick because there were so many friendly lawyers in LA. Sometimes we had to stay in jail overnight. It was not too bad to be in jail for a while. It was not as bad as having those pallet jacks come at you. I had nightmares about those metal forks.17
Eventually, the drama on the docks seemed not only too dangerous but a silly waste of time. It had degenerated into a kind of turf war. One morning Rudy was sitting with a few others at a table in the coffee shop across from the terminal where the pickets and the produce workers sometimes waited for the trucks to arrive. Beside him was a college student who had come to Delano during the first days of the strike and stayed. She was an attractive young woman, and she had had to endure a string of vulgar insults from the strikers’ opponents on the docks. A Los Angeles policeman had called her a whore. On this particular morning one of the enemy swampers had come by the table, put his hand on her shoulder, and suggested she come service him. Rudy Reyes couldn’t let that pass. He picked up one of those old fashioned sugar bowls with a heavy bottom and delivered several quick, sharp blows to the offender’s head. Blood and sugar were flying everywhere. The man slunk away, and some of the other swampers came by and told Rudy he had done the right thing. Maybe so, but the attempt to
