Chavez’s reluctance to embrace the boycott is understandable given the difficulty of maintaining such a campaign well beyond the primary site of struggle. As a product of an agrarian community, Chavez remained devoted to those who occupied similar spaces. This, in part, explained his withdrawal from the Community Service Organization in San Jose and Los Angeles in favor of organizing farm workers one house at a time in the San Joaquin Valley. The CSO experience, however, had opened him up to the possibilities of cultivating support for the farm worker movement among urban consumers, if for no other reason than to occupy union organizers’ time during lulls in the harvest. A cadre of young, energetic, and intelligent college students willing to take a leadership role in this experiment made the effort all the more worthwhile. Their involvement would change the complexion and strategy of the movement and force Chavez to cede some of his control to youthful protesters in the marketplace. At the time, however, Chavez had limited options due to the grape growers’ refusal to yield to the strike and a lack of resources to keep workers on the picket lines in the fields. Born of necessity, the boycott proved to be a stroke of genius that grew out of a period in which Chavez embraced creativity and independent thinking among the movement’s many contributors.
THE NEW FRONT: BOYCOTT GRAPES!
The excitement caused by the impromptu strike by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the merger of AWOC and the National Farm Workers Association into one grand union produced an army of organized workers ready for battle. The seasonal nature of the grape harvest framed the period of conflict, concentrating the fight in the fields to the late spring and summer months, from May through August. As summer became fall, the struggle to stop the flow of scab workers onto Coachella and San Joaquin Valley grape plantations became less urgent, although the need to keep organized workers committed remained important to the survival of the movement. Gilbert Padilla recalled, “We talked about what the hell we were going to do in the winter.” Leaders of the union worried that a lack of activity after the key summer months would deplete the organization of bodies and energy vital to its momentum.
These challenges confronted union organizers as early as the fall and winter after the initial 1965 strike. According to Padilla, the idea for a boycott was not the result of a grand plan, but originated in the community organizing experience of CSO veterans. “We learned in CSO,” he recalled, “you don’t organize people unless you have something for them to do; otherwise you lose them.” In need of a task for the off-season, a core group of organizers, including Padilla, Chavez, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, and Jim Drake, brain-stormed about strategy. Now a seasoned twenty-eight-year-old, Drake had dropped his inhibitions about working with the new union and dove headlong into the fray. His commitment to social justice and Chavez’s incorporation of Catholic and Christian symbols into the movement laid the foundation for a long and important relationship that kept Drake at the center of the union for more than a decade. According to Padilla, Drake proposed the idea of a boycott of grapes as a way of occupying the newly organized volunteers for service until the primary tool, the strike, could be employed again during the 1966 season. Years later, a more modest Drake claimed that Chavez had agreed to the boycott “figuring it was an easy way to get this young kid out of his way.”3 Whether or not he initially believed in the efficacy of the boycott, Chavez embraced the new strategy, assigned Drake to be coordinator of the national campaign, and asked fellow veteran community organizers to utilize their networks in the service of creating boycott drives in key cities.
Padilla and Huerta turned to their old CSO contacts in Los Angeles to build the first of many “boycott houses,” as the location of operations in each city came to be called. Both had spent time building the CSO and developing relationships with numerous labor unions in East Los Angeles prior to organizing farm workers. Now, as members of the UFW, the two reached out to these same union leaders to kick-start the boycott. Padilla recalled, “I went to the Central Labor Council, the restaurant and hotel labor union, the auto workers union—you name the union, we went to them.” By appealing to fellow union members to boycott grapes, the United Farm Workers cultivated a beachhead. Padilla also brought in farm worker families from Delano in order to appeal to potential allies who might contribute their time to the cause. The appeals worked, as urban residents sympathetic to the farm workers left their jobs to serve the union.
FIGURE 5. Cesar Chavez at an unidentified event with Reverend Jim Drake, ca. 1970s. ALUA, UFW Collection, 3275.
Rudy Reyes, a veteran of the AWOC strike, joined Padilla and Huerta in Los Angeles, where they witnessed the evolution of the boycott from an off-season activity into an integral component of the movement. According to the twenty-three-year-old Filipino farm worker, the boycott unfolded intuitively:
When truckloads went to L.A., we followed them, and our L.A. supporters tried to prevent the unloading of the grapes. If they got them unloaded anyway, we tried stopping any big buyers from buying them. If the grapes still got into stores, we set up picket lines to ask consumers not to buy the grapes and, if possible, not to buy in this store. Then our dozens or hundreds of supporters took turns calling up those stores, telling the managers that they were long-time consumers, and they wouldn’t buy anything anymore until they promised not to buy and sell grapes from Delano anymore. After a while, we set up our boycott headquarters in L.A. to coordinate all our supporters into a cohesive army.4
The boycott slowly gathered strength through the winter of 1965 and spring of 1966 as the L.A. staff worked with local unions, followed the shipments, and appealed to store managers not to carry grapes.
Initially, the UFW directed its boycott indiscriminately, but the union eventually targeted two leaders in the industry: NFLU’s nemesis, the DiGiorgio Corporation, and Schenley Industries, primarily a producer and distributor of liquor. Both were anomalies among grape producers, given their corporate structure and size of production. Although DiGiorgio held several acres in the San Joaquin Valley, the Borrego Valley in the southern desert near Coachella, and cropland in Florida, Robert DiGiorgio, Joseph DiGiorgio’s son, began to diversify the company’s interests soon after he became president of the corporation in 1962. In 1964, the company dropped “fruit” from its title and increased its nonagricultural business to 87 percent, on its way to 98 percent by 1967. The younger DiGiorgio also declared in his 1964 annual report that DiGiorgio Corporation was now “a publicly held, profit oriented processor, distributor and marketer of foods,” moving further away from the production side of the business.
Schenley built a similar empire in the East. The company’s name originated from Schenley, Pennsylvania, where a Jewish businessman, Lewis Rosensteil, produced and distributed medicinal whiskey during Prohibition. In the 1940s, Schenley expanded on 4,500 acres of premium land in the San Joaquin Valley, but continued to draw most of its $250 million in annual income from the sale of such brands as Cutty Sark whiskey, Seagram’s Seven whiskey, and Roma wines. In the 1960s DiGiorgio’s main office was in San Francisco; Schenley operated out of Chicago, New York, and Delaware. Although both companies benefited immensely from the growth of agriculture in rural California after World War II, neither resembled the family-owned, immigrant-based, grape grower cliques that defined grower culture in California.
The distinctions between corporations and family-owned, immigrant growers became significant as the boycott wore on. Family-owned growers defended their turf as the ground on which they, as immigrants, had struggled to create a business and a way of life. For corporations, such as Schenley, DiGiorgio, and later InterHarvest—a New York–based company managed by Jewish mogul Eli Black—a commitment to business over culture made the corporations more inclined to settle labor disputes that crimped the flow of capital. Consequently,