made by the NFWA exclusively.8
Given the volatile situation in both SNCC and SDS—SNCC would merge with the Black Panther Party in less than two years, and SDS would fall apart in 1969—it is hard to fault Chavez’s decision. But it involved one complication that the young Mike Miller was keen enough to notice. In a letter that followed the Delano visit, he pointed out to Chavez that the new boycott plan would make the NFWA “an organization of farm workers and a staff organization—all in one.” Miller made the remark in passing; it was by no means the theme of his letter, and he did not attempt to spell out the possible difficulties inherent in such a two-chambered structure. That would have been far too much to expect, as the full consequences of this seemingly reasonable, apparently unimportant, and certainly innocent shift in the boycott structure would not become clear to anyone until much later. In early 1966 no note of alarm accompanied Miller’s comradely observation. He assured Cesar that civil rights organizations were still committed to helping the NFWA and the boycott. But Miller could also see that unless he was willing to join the association staff, there was now no point in continuing as the cochair of the boycott. Miller quietly left, without any great sense of disappointment.9
As 1966 began, Chavez put his new ideas about the boycott structure into practice. An old-time NFWA board member, Tony Orendain, was sent to Chicago to run the boycott organizing there; he was accompanied by the card-carrying Wobbly, Eugene Nelson, who had just finished writing Huelga, a book on the strike. Jack Ybarra was sent to San Francisco; three new NFWA volunteers, Eddie Frankle, Ida Cousino, and Sal Gonzales, were sent to Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston, respectively. Gilbert Padilla was directed to continue with the work in Los Angeles, which had become a model for boycott organizations elsewhere.10 In New York, where the boycott was also quite strong, CORE was allowed to remain in charge. By February, Jim Drake claimed that there were 100 boycott committees throughout the country, and although the vast majority had been set up without the presence of an NFWA staff member, they all were understood to be part of the NFWA structure. Drake’s status, too, had changed—he was given a small staff. Donna Sue Haber, one of the most competent new volunteers, was assigned to be his secretary, and they had a new office in downtown Delano. The boycott was now out of the bathroom.11
Reuther’s visit had one other important effect. Newsmen had become interested in the NFWA—not in its structure or strategy or social base, but in the personalities of its leaders. Newsmen started to quote Chavez regularly and began to identify him, by name and title, in articles and photographs. Their interest in writing about Cesar was matched by the NFWA’s interest in promoting him. Drake remembers several conversations among the leadership about the usefulness of projecting Chavez in the press. The thinking went like this: “Well, we have their attention now, and we want them to know what is happening. Wouldn’t it be good to have Cesar as the ultimate source of information, the public representative of the effort?”12 Chavez would not only lead the NFWA internally but also would be cast as its representative to the outside world. It didn’t seem to be much of a stretch: Chavez’s unique strategic sensibility had helped the NFWA survive what was essentially a losing strike and had put the organization in a position where its power was continuing to grow. Since his authority within the NFWA was well established, what could be wrong with projecting it outward? The only person who seemed to have doubts was Chavez himself. Drake remembers that Cesar, though quite comfortable about having the last word on strategic matters and quite willing to exercise his authority by, for example, asking staff members to move to cities and set up boycott offices, nevertheless did not like some of the tasks of a formal leader. He especially was uneasy as a public speaker. While driving to speaking engagements, Cesar, Drake said, “would be half desperate: ‘What should I say? What should I do?’ he would ask. We would talk over his speech, but when we got there he would talk for just ten minutes and then answer questions. He was good at that. But he couldn’t give a big charismatic speech.”13
Chavez never did learn to give that speech. But within two years he had mastered the big charismatic act.
Winter ’65 to ’66
On most winter days in the southern Central Valley, a thick fog rises from the ground, enveloping the entire countryside in an opaque gray, which deadens the sun, obscures vision, and depresses even the most cheerful. In that persistent ground cloud—“tule fog” or “valley fog,” in local parlance—the National Farm Workers Association rebuilt its picket lines in January 1966. But it was as if the picketers had ventured into the void, as they stood, befogged, in the cold, drizzly, dense mist, on deserted back roads, yelling slogans that only they could hear, holding signs that no one could see. They knew that the bosses had recruited more than enough scabs to prune the vines, that the NFWA’s alliance with AWOC had collapsed, and that the bosses continued to say they would never negotiate. People went to the picket lines every day because they needed the food, clothing, and beds that the association provided, or because they wanted to remain a part of the NFWA volunteer family, or because they had a rich enough imagination to continue to dream of victory, or because they were too stubborn to accept defeat.
The NFWA had little choice but to rebuild the lines. If it was launching a boycott it had to keep the strike alive, and to do that it had to put up at least token opposition to the pruning of the vines. By mid-January El Malcriado claimed that there were as many as 150 to 200 people picketing (compared with 2,000 pruners), but even that was overly optimistic.1 The pickets were divided into several groups, and Chavez, in informal consultation with the picketers, chose the picket captains. Epifanio Camacho was one of them. He took the job seriously. He agreed with the idea of seeking outside support, but he believed that the strike would ultimately be won or lost in the fields. For him, the picket line was not just a symbol that the struggle continued but a way of actually stopping the pruning. Many who agreed with him joined his picketing group. They were generally peaceful, but they did not avoid occasional face-offs with the scabs. Strikers confronted scab pruners in the fields, at their homes, or in farm worker cafés and bars. When the police were not around, they rushed into the fields—sometimes to talk with small groups of workers, at other times to fight them or to take away their pruning shears, which the workers themselves had to buy. They threw rocks and dirt clods from the sides of the vineyards. Camacho even rigged a catapult on the back of his truck so that, away from the fields and hidden in the fog, he could send several rocks at once hurtling toward the scab pruners.2
There were a lot of good fighters among the strikers, but Camacho was different. He didn’t carry a gun or a knife, as did some others, and he did not just fight in the fog, or at night, or in secret. Although he did what he could to avoid the police, he was not shy about defending his actions, and he defended them in colorful, well-reasoned fashion. The strikers were acting in self-defense, he argued. The whole strike was an act of self-defense against the daily violence of hunger, overcrowded housing, lack of education for their children, humiliations on the job. And besides, he said, not only the scabs but this whole unjust system was being protected by uniformed, armed, violent men, who were doing in the strike what they did every day anyway: using their billy clubs, guns, jails, and laws to protect the bosses. Camacho delivered those arguments in formal meetings at the NFWA hall and in casual get-togethers at homes and bars, but most frequently on the picket line with a hand-held megaphone.
His daily picket line speeches included amusing accounts of Mexican history, a fair amount of wit, and unrelenting invective: “Pigeon-brained sons of Satan! Why don’t you foul spawn of demented chimpanzees understand what it is all about? Open up your ears, you groveling pigs. Would you sell the souls of your children as well as your own to these grower swine?” The bullhorn oratory was intended as much for the good cheer of his fellow strikers as it was for the pruners, and the defiant Camacho did not tone down his rhetoric when the police arrived. They had arrested him a couple of times back in September, and now they wanted to get him out of the way as soon as possible. They made their move in early January, coming by a peaceful picket line and arresting
