The NFWA’s organizing model and attention to Mexican workers gave it a stronger influence in the San Joaquin Valley, where ethnic Mexicans dominated in the labor market. In addition, the rent strike served as an important training experience for new organizers. One of the camp residents, Paul Espinosa, went on to organize Radio Bilingue, a radio program in Spanish and English that fed the local populations important information regarding the union. Another resident, Ernesto Laredo, continued to organize tenants, along with a sixteen-year-old girl, Yolanda Barrera, who served as a translator and who eventually became a federal prosecutor. According to Padilla, Espinosa urged him to branch out into organizing on the local grape ranch, J. D. Martin’s Rancho Blanco, where many of the tenants worked. There, a foreman had agitated male workers by separating them from their wives. When the women relieved themselves in the fields, the foreman would follow to sneak a peek at them. Espinosa believed they could organize the workers to get the foreman fired or to arrange for adequate bathroom facilities on the job.
A lack of agreement on the next step and Chavez’s health, however, initially delayed further organizing. The demanding schedule of house meetings and travel landed Chavez in a Bakersfield hospital with pneumonia that August. This setback and a preference for building the union one member at a time prevented him from moving aggressively. In addition, NFWA organizers wanted to respect the wishes of their allies. Unlike AWOC, which had been organized by union men and supported by the AFL-CIO, NFWA had started as a coalition of community organizers, religious leaders, and college students who did not always have a common vision for what the organization would become. Padilla, for example, recalled the moment Espinosa came into the Porterville office to ask him to organize at Rancho Blanco. “Jim Drake happened to walk in when I was talking to [Espinosa] and he [said], ‘Don’t go strike, you can’t strike.’” According to Padilla, Drake worried about conservative funders from the Church who might withdraw their support if they learned that they were organizing a union. Padilla appeased Drake by promising to evaluate the situation on the ranch and not get involved in labor matters.61
Padilla’s encounters at Rancho Blanco compelled him to take action. He witnessed several instances of abuse of workers on the job and heard from a number of employees who were ready to protest. He knew many of the workers from the rent strike and discovered that at least half the workers lived in Earlimart, a small town near Delano that had been fertile ground for recruiting new NFWA members. “So, one day,” Padilla recalled, “I got up and I said, ‘Ah, I’m going to pull them out.’” While Chavez lay in the hospital, Padilla directed the first labor strike of the decade in the San Joaquin Valley. When Chavez heard of the action, he called Padilla from his hospital bed, ribbing him for waiting to make the move until he, Chavez, was sick. Upon Chavez’s release by the doctor, the two immediately hit the fields with picket signs and called all NFWA members to participate in the labor action. When Chavez called the owner of the ranch to reach a settlement, the owner refused to meet. Padilla recalled the grower’s response: “Let [Chavez] rot; I don’t care.” The unwillingness of J. D. Martin to settle the dispute signaled an important difference between growers in the San Joaquin Valley and those in Coachella. The longer seasons and a thriving day-hauler labor market gave San Joaquin Valley growers confidence that they could weather the storm.62
Chavez and Padilla viewed the strike as an impromptu action initiated by the workers rather than the beginning of a new movement. The strike came toward the end of the season and over issues not related to wages or a contract. In fact, as Padilla recalls, they did not even refer to NFWA as a union. In this regard, for Chavez the strike symbolized a flexing of NFWA’s muscles and put the growers on notice that they could no longer mistreat their employees. For Larry Itliong, however, the strike represented a potential threat to usurp a union movement that he and AWOC members had been planning to take over. Padilla recalled his response: “Dolores told him that I was striking and I’m moving in, so he got scared.” On September 8, 1965, Itliong pulled Filipino workers out of nine vineyards in Delano, initiating the grape strike.63
The AWOC action caught Chavez by surprise and forced upon him a decision about striking that he was not prepared to make. Padilla recalled his concern immediately following the news that Filipinos had walked off the job: “You better come; the world’s coming to an end! There’s 5,000 Filipinos on the street, [on] strike.” When the two met, Chavez asked Padilla to attend an AWOC meeting in Delano at a community building known locally as Filipino Hall. He also instructed Bill Asher, a staff member on the newspaper El Malcriado, affiliated with NFWA, to join Padilla to document the historic meeting. Padilla and Asher sat in the front row in the mostly Filipino audience. For Padilla, the meeting revealed a diversity among Filipinos he had never known. “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” he remembered, because they were “speaking all their different languages.” The meeting required several translators for the Filipinos alone to communicate among themselves, because members spoke at least three languages: Tagalog, Illocano, and Pangasinan. In spite of the language barriers, Padilla interpreted the sincerity of AWOC’s commitment and received an appeal from Itliong for NFWA to join them. When Padilla returned with the news, Chavez arranged with the local priest to hold a meeting of NFWA members at the local church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Delano. He called on allies in the civil rights organizations, CORE and SNCC, to use their connections to draw in activists interested in supporting farm worker justice and told Asher to get the word out to the community of farm workers via El Malcriado. Meanwhile, Padilla took a sleeping bag down to Filipino Hall to live among AWOC members and discuss mutual interests.
Strategically called on September 16, Mexican Independence Day, the meeting of NFWA drew a capacity crowd that overwhelmed the small church built with money donated by many of the Catholic Slavic growers in the valley. Padilla conducted the meeting, which led many in attendance to confuse him with Chavez. He invited AWOC members to address the crowd to explain the reasons for their strike. Chavez, who waited patiently off to the side, had yet to decide whether he would ask NFWA members to join in the labor walkout. “Cesar was afraid to call a strike,” Padilla remembered. When he finally spoke, however, he discovered a readiness for action among the people. He resisted shouts of “Come on, say it!” from people in the audience who wanted him to initiate the strike there and then, largely out of respect for the priest, who had asked Padilla and him not to call a strike that evening. Instead, he called a meeting for the following week at the American Legion hall. “That’s where we called the strike,” Padilla remembered. “The following day we went out and picketed, and the rest is history.”64
Numerous scholars and journalists have documented the history of the Delano grape strike and the beginning of the modern farm worker movement. Many tell the familiar story of how a reluctant Cesar Chavez was drawn into the strike by the more radical, union-oriented AWOC members, especially Larry Itliong. This Filipino farm worker