carry their own boxes back to their rows. As we fell further behind, some packers had to unfold and fasten the boxes themselves. I could have been fired after three days. The workers graciously granted me a couple more, but after a week I was out.
Over the next eight years I worked short stints in the Spreckles sugar factory near Salinas, as a laborer on a large housing project and in road construction, as a lumper (truck loader) at Watsonville’s frozen food plants, and as an adjunct lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz. But I never found anything like the ambience of the fields. Like Maniz, I particularly hated the factory work; it was noisy, hot, dirty, lonely, oppressive. So I found myself during those same years back in the fields again and again. In the spring and summer of 1972 I returned to thinning lettuce. In 1975 I thinned some more and harvested cauliflower, broccoli, and lettuce. In 1976 I finally made it onto a piece-rate crew at West Coast Farms in Watsonville, where I met Pablo Camacho. The car pool years, when I worked in the celery at InterHarvest, were 1977 and 1978. When you count them up, it is six seasons in the fields between 1971 and 1979.
By the time I was part of the car pool, I felt very much like a farm worker, a rather bizarre Anglo one but a farm worker all the same. It was hard on my body—I had already had two back incidents—but it was an okay job. I felt like I was part of a poorly paid athletic team, absent the cheers of the crowd. The work was seasonal: at InterHarvest we began work on the summer solstice, June 21, and ended on the winter solstice, December 21, and we collected top unemployment for the other six months. My wife, Julie Miller, managed to get jobs in the fields, apple sheds, and frozen food plants around Watsonville and Salinas for stretches of time that did not overlap with mine, and we took turns working and being at home taking care of our young children.
Although politics did not bring me into the fields, politics drove me out. In the early 1970s I had worked closely with a handful of would-be Maoists (including my friend from the coffee house) who were working in the fields. But I didn’t last long as a card-carrying Maoist revolutionary—less than a year. I was a strong supporter of the union, went to the meetings, participated in the life of the crew, but was not deeply involved in the internal life of the UFW. Then the 1979 strike came, and it was impossible not to be caught up in union politics. During the strike, some UFW staffers moved against the people in my old collective, roughing up my friend and prohibiting the distribution of their newspaper on the picket line. Those people were all UFW members, and although I disagreed with much of what their newspaper said, I thought they had the right to pass it out at union events. That was too subtle a distinction in the middle of a strike, and as far as the staff was concerned, I was an unwelcome member of the union.
I wasn’t excluded from the strike, but when it ended in a victory I was among those who were not called back to work. The company and the union had agreed to cross some people off the seniority lists. I didn’t fight it. I figured in the long run it was going to be hard to be an Anglo farm worker and at the same time be free to express differences with the union leadership. That was too tight a jacket, so I left the fields.
I went back to loading trucks at the frozen-food plants. I did that for a couple of years, and helped form a Watsonville branch of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which got me blacklisted from loading trucks. I got a job on an assembly line at Hansen’s Bottling Plant for another year as a way of staying in the Teamsters local, but I hated it and eventually managed to get laid off. By 1983, my sojourn in the traditional working class was over, and I got a job teaching English as a second language at Watsonville Adult School, where I worked for the next twenty-five years.
Most of the people who came to my classes were farm workers or children of farm workers. Watsonville is a small town, and I still see farm workers I used to know in the fields. Sometimes I run into Pablo Camacho as I walk my dog on the levee. Every once in a while I get together with Maniz. I am often asked if I miss the fields. I have a standard answer: Todavía siento el dolor en mi espalda, pero extraño el ambiente del fil—“I can still feel the pain in my back, but I miss the life of the fields.”
People know what I am talking about.
I have my own bag of fieldwork memories, but this book is not a memoir. It is my explantion of what happened to the UFW, my account of its rise and fall. It differs from what Camacho and Maniz have said, but it puts people like them into the story. Not as noble victims nor as adjuncts to the grand work of one great man, but as political actors who helped make their own history.
* Originally a derogatory Mexican word for a Frenchman, gabacho has replaced gringo as a favored farm worker term for an Anglo from the United States.
UFW history cascades over much of California’s famously diverse topography. A striker was shot dead in an irrigated patch of its immense Southeastern Desert. Petitioning pilgrims walked three hundred miles through the state’s great Central Valley. Boycotters raised money in the living rooms of its populous port cities. Farm workers controlled the pace and quality of their work in two of California’s narrow coastal valleys. The embattled union set up its headquarters in the foothills of the mountain pass that used to be the main gateway to the Golden State. Only the mighty Sierras lie outside the UFW saga—although it is their melted snows that, through marvels of engineering, make much of California agribusiness possible.*
But topography, like everything else under the California sun, is no fixed mark. It is a field of battle, a clash of contending forces. Grinding, jerking subterranean plates pushed the California coast up out of the sea, shaped its two massive mountain ranges, and still alter the contours of the state. Water rushed through hills, robbing them of their topsoil and depositing it in long valleys, boggy deltas, and an enormous bay. Fire raged through the prairies, destroying the old and making way for the new. Wind tore away soil, taking from one place and giving to another. Later on, people transformed a barren prairie into productive farmland; converted swamps and sloughs, once diverse in flora and fauna, into a homogeneous dry basin; rerouted, dammed, and nearly tamed the great rivers; and made one enormous lake disappear while creating several others.
Topography buckled before capital. The federal government funded the four dams along the Colorado River that transformed a large section of the Colorado Desert into the Imperial Valley. State and federal money financed the twenty-five dams in the Sierras that channeled water to the men who owned the grapes, cotton, tomatoes, and rice in the Central Valley. By the mid-twentieth century California was the most highly capitalized agricultural region in the history of humanity. People who threatened its returns could expect to be treated as harshly as any river, lake, or desert that stood in the way.
Three valleys figure most prominently on the UFW map: the Salinas Valley, west of the central coast range; the Central Valley, between the coast range and the Sierras; and the Imperial Valley, southeast of Los Angeles. The Imperial and the Central were constructed as intentionally as any theatrical set. Only in the Salinas Valley did agriculture come easily to the land. But even there, human labor shaped the stage on which the UFW actors played their parts, made their exits and their entrances. Typically that first entrance happened in a dark spot in the desert, at the Mexican border, about a hundred miles directly east of San Diego.
Farm workers didn’t talk much as they lined up at the Mexicali border crossing. They started arriving at about 2 am, and some stood with their eyes closed, as if to convince themselves that they could sleep standing up. Between November and March, thousands waited in darkness to show their papers to the uniformed men guarding the entry gates to California. They came to cut and pack lettuce and a few other crops in what was once the Colorado Desert, called the Valley of the Dead by Mexicans, and rebranded as the Imperial Valley by Anglos in an early-twentieth-century real estate scheme.
Mexicali
