the six-week Coachella harvest, grape pickers moved on to their main destination: the Central Valley. Most favored a back road that led into the small towns around Bakersfield. They drove to the eastern foothills of the Tehachiapi Mountains through the high desert, which was untouched by irrigation or major human settlements, apart from the sprawling Edwards Air Force Base. Although just as hot as the Imperial Valley, its multicolored canyons, Joshua trees, various kinds of yucca, and seasonal desert wildflowers are a more attractive sight. Then winding through the Tehachapis and passing the UFW headquarters at La Paz, they could catch fleeting glimpses of the enormous plain that awaited them below: miles of fields, brown and gray, with occasional patches of irrigated green, stretching out endlessly without a landmark to measure the vast emptiness in between.
Once they were on Highway 99, competing with produce trucks and tractors on the two-lane, undivided road, they got a closer view of the valley, only to find each town on the 275-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Sacramento—McFarland, Delano, Tulare, Madera, Chowchilla—barely distinguishable from the next. The monotony was achieved honestly: meant to be collection depots for wheat, the valley’s first bonanza crop, most of these towns had been designed in the 1870s according to a standard pattern. Almost a hundred years later they were still company farm towns, with Anglos living on the east side of the tracks and Mexicans, Filipinos, and a few blacks crowded into the older, more rundown houses on the west. Their flat, often treeless main streets featured a Fosters Freeze, a few diners, gas stations, a Giant Orange drive-in, tractor retailers and always a branch of the Bank of America, which held much of the town’s money and where many of the most important decisions were made.
The poverty of the towns stood in contrast to the wealth generated by the Central Valley’s unique combination of a long growing season, alluvial soil, extensive irrigation, and farm worker labor. The lower part of the valley alone, the 112-mile stretch between Fresno and Bakersfield, was the most productive agricultural area in the world. Its grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products were worth more than $1 billion in 1970, about a quarter of California agribusiness’s total gross receipts.7 But the money did not spread around. It remained under the control of large growers and their bankers, who owned vast amounts of land along with the necessary processing and shipping facilities, and who were loyal to their dynastic families and not to the towns nor to the people who worked the valley’s soil.
This area has little to do with the California that looms large in the national imagination. The whole region, from Mt. Shasta in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, is home to less than 15 percent of California’s population. Delano, which the UFW put on the map in 1965, had fewer than 15,000 residents then, and has about 50,000 now. Although it produced most of the crops that made agriculture California’s number one industry, the Central Valley was relatively unknown even to most Californians, until the UFW came along to point an accusing finger at it.
Its name hides its history. As recently as a hundred years ago, what is now called the Central Valley was made up of four different regions. In the north were thick riverside forests. In the Sacramento Delta, marshes, swamps, and sloughs meandered west, rose and fell with the seasons and flowed into the sea. In the wider midsection the San Joaquin River made its way to the sea from the Sierras through a much smaller riparian forest and a broad expanse of grassy plain. In the south, three seasonal lakes in the Tulare Basin produced tropical springs and genuine autumns, unlike the incessant ten-month summer the current residents endure.
The diverse flora once supported an impressive array of fauna: perch, beavers, turtles, and otters inhabited the region’s lakes, and salmon, trout, and sturgeon swam in its rivers. Badgers, raccoons, minks, and foxes lived not far from the water, while antelope, deer, and elk roamed its plains. Bears and wolves ate the smaller critters; coyotes were everywhere, and hundreds of different birds crowded its skies.
Most of that is gone. One estimate has it that 4 percent of the original landscape remains. The lakes of the Tulare Basin vanished, victims of successive irrigation systems. Even the idea of the Tulare Basin as a separate region has been largely forgotten, as the area has been merged into the San Joaquin to its north or the Central Valley as a whole. No comparable area in the world was transformed so quickly, for the valley was settled by Europeans while they were perfecting their electrical and petroleum-driven technologies of destruction. They hunted the animals and fished out the rivers and lakes. They cut down the trees, diverted the rivers and streams, pumped out the aquifers, and loaded the land with insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, biocides, and chemical fertilizers. And they built the monumental system of dams and canals that remade the valley into a farm factory floor.8
What drove those settlers was profit, not farming. The people who directed the transformation of the valley sought quick fortunes as surely as the miners who preceded them. New names had to be coined for what they were up to: wheat mining, vandal agriculture, bonanza farming, shopkeepers with crops, and, finally, the one that stuck, agribusiness. Although they were in competition with one another, these agribusinessmen knew how to cooperate when necessary. They worked together in irrigation districts to capture the water and distribute it among themselves. They formed marketing associations to restrict production and publicize their products. They funded lobbying associations to protect their interests. They formed labor associations in attempts to fix the price of the men and women they employed to maintain their property and to tend and harvest their crops.
By the early 1960s, these men had already beaten back many attempts to organize the workers on whom their agricultural empire depended. It had not been an easy victory. People were more resourceful than rivers, lakes, and animals. The sixties brought new opportunities that allowed the farm workers to deliver a series of astounding, unprecedented defeats to these virtually undefeated men. It took awhile for them to recover—but only awhile.
Agribusiness is not a single industry, like the auto or steel industries. It is more like the garment industry, a series of separate but related businesses that specialize in different products. The men who grow grapes differ from those who grow lettuce, each possessing particular, specialized knowledge about how to produce and distribute the commodity. The industry as a whole shares a common infrastructure that is largely subsidized by federal, state, and local governments. Various irrigation districts deliver water at scandalously low prices: growers in Kern County, in the San Joaquin Valley, have paid as little as $10 per acre foot while Northern California households were paying $1,000 for the same amount of water.9 The state and national highway systems, improved and expanded with large amounts of public money in the 1950s, freed growers from their dependency on railroad oligopolies. The University of California does much of the industry’s research at public expense. Nevertheless, the men running the whole operation do not sit on a single board of directors, or even a group of interlocking boards. They have their capital invested in particular crops and separate regions, and do not often mix in one other’s businesses.
The farm workers who made UFW history also specialized in particular crops. Typically they were either grape pickers or vegetable workers, people who spent most of their time in either the Central Valley or in Salinas. Some of them lived side-by-side in Mexicali or worked together in the Imperial Valley, but once the desert harvest season ended in March, they went their separate ways. Some people who worked the winter lettuce followed the harvest through the desert towns of Yuma and Blythe and then to the Central Valley town of Huron, before cutting through the Coast Range at Pacheco Pass on Highway 152 and dropping down into the lush San Benito Valley, to enter the Salinas Valley from the north. But many skipped the small intermediate harvests, took time off, and traveled from Mexicali to Salinas by taking Highway 10 to the edge of Los Angeles, and then 101 up the California Coast. There, along the edge of the continent where the vast majority of Californians live, the traveling workers passed some of California’s picture postcard sights: missions, surfers, citrus orchards near the sea, gentle hillsides, the affluence of Santa Barbara, and the weekend party town of Pismo Beach.
Some eight hours after leaving Mexicali, they entered the Salinas Valley. On this western side of the Coast Range, rain-bearing winter
