The Most Memorable Times of Our Lives, 1968–1975

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The Most Memorable Times of Our Lives, 1968–1975

Essay

By: Rey Huerta

Date: 2003

Source: Farmworkers Movement Documentation Project. "Rey Huerta, 1968–1975: The Most Memorable Times of Our Lives." 〈http://www.farmworkermovement.org/〉 (accessed June 25, 2006).

About the Author: Rey Huerta, a Mexican-American, worked as an organizer for the United Farm Workers from 1968 to 1975. He was later employed as a math and science teacher, and currently tutors children and adults at his tutoring center in Coachella, California. Founded by César Chávez in 1962, the United Farm Workers was the premier organization for migrant workers in California.

INTRODUCTION

One of the poorest occupations in the United States is that of the landless, migrant farm worker. Migrant farm workers have long been a mainstay of the farms and ranches of California. Many of the workers, particularly the grape pickers, were organized by César Chávez and his United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 1970s to obtain better wages and working conditions. This labor struggle became one of the most publicized in American history, though it remained peaceful.

Prior to World War I, agriculture in the U.S. was largely family based and small scale. Independent family farmers, tenant farmers, and share cropping families lived on the land that they cultivated. For historical reasons, California was an exception. When California achieved statehood, former large Mexican estates were only partially broken up and a few thousand of California's wealthiest private proprietors soon owned most of the state's arable land. These landowners seldom resided on their land or directly worked the ground. To run the farms, they hired supervisors and small year-round crews that maintained machines and watched the crops. The growers authorized the hiring of large temporary workforces to harvest crops for a few weeks each year. The transient laborers were paid piecemeal for the number of pounds that they harvested each day. Workers lived in housing rented from the growers or in makeshift camps. Often pickers were not allowed to leave the ranches in the evening and were forced to buy groceries, toiletries, and other daily goods at exorbitant prices in company stores. As soon as a harvest was completed, a grower usually had no further need for the hundreds of field hands. They were quickly pushed and pulled to other farms.

Over time, little changed but the ethnic and racial composition of the huge migrating work force. At first, growers recruited down-on-their-luck miners, Native Americans, bankrupt former farmers, and newly arrived Europeans. At the start of the twentieth century, growers began using numbers of imported laborers from China, Japan, Mexico, and Hawaii. By the time that César Chávez organized the United Farm Workers (UFW) in 1962, the majority of the pickers were Mexicans. These Latinos occasionally engaged in local and spontaneous strikes (huelga, in Spanish) and slowdowns in hopes of securing better pay and working conditions. A few farm workers attempted to create permanent labor organizations. They did not succeed until Chávez and his fellow union organizers arrived.

PRIMARY SOURCE

By 1970, I was ready to commit and join the union as a full-time volunteer. Of course, my family was not thrilled with my decision to join the union full time. The family vote came to four against one, not in my favor. It left me with no alternative but to claim five votes so the motion could carry! They could not stop crying. I had to persuade them that they would not starve to death, that they would have clothes and shoes to wear to school, and that the growers would not drive by and shoot at us. It took them quite a while to adjust to the discipline, but we all finally did.

At 3 a.m., it is so dark outside that a person cannot even see his hand in front of his face, but there we were, at the west end of Fresno with flags flying and headlights flashing. It was my first huelga. My wife and children were all jammed into our old car, except my youngest son, Ray, who was still sleeping in the trunk of the old Pontiac. When we arrived at the designated ranch, we immediately got out of our cars and started setting up picket lines around a peach grower's field. The huelga ladies knew their job and started to set up the huelga kitchen. We all needed our caffeine and tortillas con chile so that we could be energized for the long day ahead.

We were assigned to picket all day and then spend the night at this particular ranch. Our cars needed to be moved out of harm's way during the night, so we resorted to sleeping on the ground around the perimeter of the ranch to assure that the peach grower would not try to sneak scab workers by us in the middle of the night. This particular strike lasted six days and seven nights. The tactics were raw, but the outcome was a positive one: The grower agreed to negotiate a contract. The reason we selected to hit that peach grove was because we knew that the grower also had grape orchards that we could not locate. Striking his peach orchard forced him to disclose the location of the grapes! Si se puede! The strikers were jubilant. They did not expect such an easy victory. That was in the spring of 1970, and the other grape strikes and boycotts were still going strong. I was then assigned to the UFW Selma field office. I was to work directly under the supervision of Gil Padilla, the UFW treasurer and one of Cesar's most trusted friends. Gil Padilla was also one of the UFW's top-notch organizers. Originally from Los Banos, California, Gil brought to the union years of experience in community organizing. He was very informed, diplomatic, and political; he could negotiate contacts and was a great leader. Gil reassigned me to Salinas right before the strike broke out. He felt it would be good training for me because I really did not have much strike experience.

Salinas was a rude awakening for me, as it was for most of the new volunteers arriving in the Salinas Valley for the lettuce strike. It was one of the first big gatherings of the UFW's finest recruits. Salinas was slated for a major strike. Fred Ross, Sr., along with Jerry Cohen, the UFW's legal point man and conciliari, were there to help Cesar schedule the various tasks needed as we grabbed the tiger by the tail. Marshall Ganz, Father Neri, Jim Drake and his charming wife, Susan, Eliseo Medina, LeRoy Chatfield, Chris Hartmire, and a whole collection of lawyers, organizers, various ministry folks, and office people were to take the thousands of calls and messages that would be generated from the strike. There were the huelga cooks and the security staff led by Richard Ybarra, Cesar's son-in-law. Also present were the many paralegals from all parts of the country. We were getting ready to do battle with California's agribusiness giants of the Salinas Valley, the West Coast lettuce industry. It looked to be a horrendous task, to say the least.

A chapter of the UFW's lettuce workers based in Calexico, California, was planning a general strike as they arrived to the Salinas Valley. The lettuce workers were on of our strongest groups, so Cesar decided to back the lettuce workers in their pursuit of a union contract that was to include seniority rights and a substantial pay increase for the arduous labor that the lettuce workers endured on a daily basis. The short-handled hoe would forever be outlawed in the lettuce fields of California because of the notoriety of its damage to a person's lower back. This was truly stoop labor in its cruelest form. Cesar put an end to it by having the notorious hoe banned from the fields in California.

Salinas is home to some of the largest lettuce, celery, cauliflower, artichoke, and strawberry growers in the country. Those growers have the money to support their whims. So who must have been running the city and county governments in the Salinas Valley? It was plain and simple: The multimillion-dollar giant agribusiness ran the show.

As soon as we set up the pickets, we began gaining immediate farmworker support as they started to leave the fields of the Salinas Valley. The growers and the courts got together soon enough and began handing down court injunctions like there was no tomorrow. They desperately tried to stop us from winning over their longtime farm laborers by trying to prevent such things as gathering in large numbers and limiting the area and space where we were striking or picketing.

The court injunctions were ludicrous. They soon arrested Cesar because he would not bow down and put an end to the strike! Si se puede! I recall our holding all-night candlelight vigils in front of the jail where Cesar was being held. There were thousands of supporters praying and chanting with us. We were out there for almost two weeks before they released Cesar from the Salinas County jail. Much to my dismay, I also spent a week in that same jail with 10 to 12 other strikers from one of the cauliflower companies for picketing a field that was covered by an injunction issued by the Salinas superior court. We were released after a three-day hunger strike; we were refusing to east the food that was given to us, which was primarily lettuce.

The cops chased us, the hired goons and thugs chased us, and the growers chased us. To add insult to injury, they even hired and brought in big dogs to chase us. We stood at the edge of the field next to the road waving our flags to attract the attention of the workers. The goons' supervisors would come at us with vicious dogs on leashes in an attempt to intimidate us enough to want to abandon our posts. Fat chance! Like a tree standing by the water, I remembered, we shall not be moved!

There were waves upon waves of red flags with the black eagle flying everywhere in and out of the city. One could drive along the highway from Salinas all the way south to Gonzales and beyond and see a continuous mass of flags waving in the coastal breezes. People waved at us in support of our struggle as they passed us in their autos. It was a beautiful sight: thousands of people, lined up for miles, waving their flags and shouting and singing with pride, "Viva La Huelga, Long Live the Strike," and as the chorus from the song of the time went:

Viva la revolucion,
Viva nuestra asociacion
Viva la huelga en el fil,
Viva la causa y la historia,
Viva raza llena de Gloria
La Victoria va cumplir.

We were enthusiastic and ready for all of the action. We took everything the growers and courts threw at us. My adrenaline was at a constant high and I was always ready to go and then some. We were operating on three or four hours of sleep each night. We got up before dawn in order to meet the workers as they tried to get into the fields on company buses. The esquiroles or scabs no longer drove into the fields in private autos. That year I also learned patience from Cesar. I learned to restrain the rage I felt toward the establishment that was obviously purchased by the growers. As was expected, I had to learn to incorporate the nonviolence practiced by Cesar. I had to do some real practicing myself. Let me tell you, this was not easy for a barrio dude like me! To let the rednecks call us degrading names, to let them beat us, arrest us, then run over us—all these things were really stretching my commitment to the cause for justice. As one of the Brown Berets so aptly put it, "The courts don't mean justice; they mean just us."

SIGNIFICANCE

In 1965, Mexican American field hands spontaneously struck for better wages against a group of powerful vineyards. The strikers asked Chávez and the UFW to support the strike. To everyone's surprise, the strike lasted for five years. In the face of likely defeat, Chávez coined a novel strategy: consumer boycotts of the growers' products. UFW activists traveled throughout the U.S. and spoke to students and parishioners about the need to boycott grapes and wines. Supermarkets that stocked the growers' products were boycotted until they stopped doing so. In 1970, the growers agreed to accept union contracts, allowing the unionization of most of the industry. By then, the UFW claimed 50,000 dues-paying members, the most ever represented by a union in California. In the 1980s, a conservative political climate and disputes within UFW weakened the clout of the union considerably. By Chávez's death in 1993, the UFW had about 20,000 members.

The history of farm worker protests and movements in California highlights both the ongoing powerlessness of migrant workers and the power of the state's agribusiness. After a century of struggles, California farm hands remain among the poorest in America. The easy availably of replacement workers, often undocumented immigrants willing to work for little pay under poor conditions, has made it difficult for farm workers to exert pressure on the growers.