and then he left with the money. They divided up the sweets among themselves, that gabacho—I can’t remember his name—and the Golden Parrot.
So we not only lost our high wages but also our benefits, our vacations, our seniority, our pensions. We lost everything. They had their whole scene together: the contractors, the scabs, the new companies, the police. And what did we have? Traitors in our midst.
I argued with Maniz for a while, but it was no use. Nothing I could say would dissuade him. This story, which he had been told in the union office, is a wild fabrication, but it’s interesting because it was part of a concerted UFW campaign to blame the union’s demise on what Cesar Chavez would call “malignant forces” inside his organization, forces that Dolores Huerta, a cofounder of the UFW, still claims were led by Marshall Ganz, the union’s lead organizer from 1970 to 1980.
What to make of such charges is one of the concerns of this book, as are the various internal purges and debates that preceded the attacks on Ganz. Who were the traitors and who were the loyalists, and what was being betrayed? Where did farm workers fit in these internal troubles? How important were these battles in the crushing defeat suffered by the UFW, and all California farm workers, in the 1980s?
There are not too many peasants in my family tree. The closest I can come is my paternal grandfather. A nonreligious Odessa Jew, he became a devoted Tolstoyan, believing that Russia’s redemption lay in a prosperous peasantry and a return to the cultural values of the countryside. Depending on which family story you believe, he either borrowed and never paid back or stole a large sum of money from some distant in-laws in Manchuria, and then, in 1910, he, his wife, mother, and four younger brothers left Vladivostok for Alberta, Canada. There they tried to put their ideals into practice, homesteading a farm, but the Bardackes were city folk who knew nothing about farming. They lost the farm and most of the money.
Unlike my grandfather, I didn’t go into the fields for political reasons. I was a New Leftist, but not one of those who consciously set out to “proletarianize” myself as a way of reaching out to the working class. I just needed a job. It was 1971; I was in my thirtieth year and was living in Seaside, California, renting a house right next to the fence that separated the Fort Ord army base from the local community. I had been working at the GI Coffee House in Seaside, one of a string of coffee houses around the world where antiwar activists tried to talk with U.S. soldiers about Vietnam. I made my money as a physical education teacher at an elementary school, but was fired after the school learned I had been arrested six times in Berkeley and Oakland during various demonstrations. I was out of work and down to my last dollars when I picked up a hitchhiker who told me he had gone to the UFW hall in nearby Salinas, where he joined the union and was dispatched to work on a lettuce-thinning crew.
I decided to give it a try, and convinced a friend, who also worked at the coffee house and was in a small Maoist group, to go along with me. Nineteen seventy-one was quite a time to enter the Salinas fields. The previous year farm workers there had fought one of the biggest strikes in California agricultural history, and the UFW had come out of that strike with a few contracts, including one at the transnational giant United Fruit, which had recently changed its name to United Brands, and called its Salinas subsidiary, InterHarvest. On the thinning crew at InterHarvest, where we were dispatched, the workers were still celebrating their victory, as well as testing its limits. It wasn’t as dramatic as stumbling into a Detroit automobile factory in 1937, one year after the victorious sit-down strike. But it had some of the same flavor.
We worked with short-handled hoes and were paid by the hour. The crew was about half men and half women, old and young, all Mexican, except for my friend and me and a Puerto Rican. “Puerto,” as he was called, was the elected shop steward and seemed to have more power than the two company foremen. Every day after lunch, the crew slowed down together, talking and visiting as we worked, as if to say to the foremen, “We have already done a day’s labor; now it is time to rest.” In that first summer the crew twice refused to enter fields that smelled of pesticides. Once, the foreman tried to give a warning ticket to someone who he claimed was leaving two small lettuce plants where he should have left one. The foreman beckoned the shop steward, who by contract rule had to co-sign the ticket; three warning tickets, and a worker could be fired. Puerto listened to both sides and then tore up the ticket in the foreman’s face. Nothing happened to Puerto or the accused worker. The foreman was fired several weeks later because “he couldn’t control the crew.”
I was astounded. I had been part of the wing of the New Left that considered the working class hopelessly reformist, bought off by post–World War II prosperity. Part of what made us New Leftists, and not old ones, was our disagreement about the role of the traditional working class as the main enemy of capitalism. The working-class jobs I had had before—as a janitor, an usher at a race track, a beer vender at Raiders games—had given me some appreciation for the resiliency and militancy of black culture but had not shaken my view that the Old Left had put too much hope in the working class. But here I was now, witnessing, almost by accident, a level of sustained militancy among workers that I had never known in twelve years of New Left politics.
It gave me pause. I had left Berkeley despairing of the future of youth culture politics, thinking I might restore my political faith by getting deeper into antiwar work. But the coffee house was also pretty much a disaster, as we dedicated white antiwar activists didn’t have too much to say to the black soldiers who had just returned from Vietnam and were awaiting their discharges. We lived through a series of bad misunderstandings over drugs, sex, and politics. By the time I got to the fields, I was politically washed out.
It was the people in the fields who revived my political zeal. But did I want to be a farm worker? I went back and forth on that question. The work was hard, and the pay was low. And as a farm worker I would always be different, a stranger, a sport, almost, for among the 15,000 farm workers in the Salinas Valley less than a dozen were Anglos. But there was an upside: I liked the physical challenge of the work. It was hard but not impossible. Also, the political life of the crew was almost always interesting, and sometimes exhilarating. And then there was the UFW. As a student at Berkeley I had gone on one of the union’s marches, but I knew little about its struggles. Now, working in the fields, I became interested in the union, thrilled by the possibility that the militancy on the crew was reflected in the politics of the union. Finally, there was Spanish. I had never been able to learn a foreign language. In the fields, swimming every day in a sea of Spanish, I slowly began to learn. So slowly that I exasperated my farm-worker teachers, who had to spend a couple of days teaching me my first words: Mucho trabajo y poco dinero—a lot of work and a little money.
I wanted to stay in the fields, and when the thinning crew’s work ended and we were laid off, I tried to deal with the poco dinero by making the mucho trabajo into a whole lot more work. I figured if I could make it onto a piece-rate crew, I could earn a reasonable amount of money. I worked out in preparation, lifting weights and running.
Trying to make that first piece-rate crew in the celery, after only six months’ experience as a farm worker, was one of the more ridiculous things I have ever done. When I got to the field the first day and gave the foreman my dispatch, he asked me if I had any experience cutting or packing celery. I said no, but I was willing to give it a try. He gave me a funny look, handed me a celery knife, and put me in a row. I watched the person next to me cut for a short while before trying it myself. Five minutes later he took the knife away, saying he was worried I was going to cut myself. Making me a packer, he explained, was out of the question as it requires very quick sizing of the celery, and it appeared that maybe I had never even seen a piece of celery let alone tried to size one. He decided to give me a chance as a cajero, one of two people who make and distribute the empty celery boxes to the fifteen packers.
Although it was by far the least skilled job on the crew, there were various tricks to unfolding, fastening, and carrying the wood and wire boxes. The other cajero, an experienced worker, was eager to teach me, but I was too slow; we could not keep up with the packers, who shouted for more and more
