Early on, boycotters did not perceive such differences; they pursued large targets such as Schenley and DiGiorgio because these companies depended on easily identified networks of unionized workers to deliver their products to market. In the case of Schenley, whose profits depended on the consumption of liquor in urban restaurants and hotels, the “jobbers,” or middlemen between the producers and the businesses that sold the product, became the keys to the execution of the boycott. Once again, Padilla turned to a friend in the hotel and restaurant workers union, Herman “Blackey” Levitt, who served as the president of the joint council for labor unions in Los Angeles. Padilla recalled, “This guy Levitt said, ‘Let me tell you how to do this.’ And he got this book with all the jobbers. So we sent letters to all these jobbers we were going to boycott.” Padilla’s appeal to the wholesalers worked. In San Francisco, the union picketed the docks against the advice of AWOC leader, Al Green, who worried about embarrassing longshoremen, whom he assumed knew little about the farm workers. Chavez stood his ground, and, to the surprise of Green and other established labor leaders, the longshoremen aided the boycott by refusing to unload grapes. By April, Schenley was experiencing steep sales declines in Los Angeles and San Francisco, two key urban markets. The success proved that the boycott was useful to the movement, making it a permanent fixture in the UFW arsenal.5
The boycott worked in tandem with the evolving situation on the ground as rural communities prepared for the 1966 grape harvest. Throughout the off-season, the UFW conducted marches, challenged local law enforcement to manage the strike fairly, and reached out to established unions in hopes of maintaining momentum. The tenor of union events rose to the level of a religious revival, as songs, theater, and art developed to promote la causa. The movement inspired the creation of the theater group Teatro Campesino by a twenty-five-year-old native of Delano, Luis Valdez, who had graduated from San Jose State University but returned to the valley to be a part of the action. In addition to staging productions that presented growers, scab workers, and law enforcement officials as caricatures of themselves, Valdez penned something of a manifesto in El Plan de Delano that articulated the broad goals and cultural aspects of the farm worker movement. El Plan announced the arrival of a new social movement and its close affinity with the Catholic Church, whose symbols of sacrifice and piety became a part of the iconography of the UFW. The manifesto also announced a pilgrimage or perigrinación from Delano to Sacramento in which Chavez and UFW officials would march 280 miles through farm worker villages northward through the valley in anticipation of the 1966 harvest.
Drake and Chavez sent a handful of organizers out to unfamiliar cities across the country with the phone number of a sympathetic local contact, $100, and the charge of identifying and organizing volunteers to dedicate as many hours of their day as possible toward instituting the boycott in their assigned city. Organizers endured time away from home or school, and some boycott leaders occasionally moved their entire family to a location of the union’s choosing. Unlike a march that came to many farm workers in their villages and demanded a finite amount of time from its participants, the boycott functioned like a full-time job with poor pay, usually in an unfamiliar environment. The strike demanded a similar level of commitment, although the fact that such battles took place near workers’ rural homes among a community that shared a common language and culture made it slightly easier to organize, compared to the boycott.
Hijinio Rangel was one worker who made tremendous sacrifices for the boycott. Rangel worked in the Giannini packinghouse in Dinuba, California, in the San Joaquin Valley when Chavez recruited him. Although packinghouse workers received pay superior to that of most agricultural workers and enjoyed collective bargaining rights, Rangel chafed at the abuses suffered by field workers. As the movement matured, Rangel became loyal to UFW, recruiting field workers while driving a tractor and distributing water to pickers in the vineyards. He also hosted recruitment meetings at his home, where Chavez reached out to a small group of hearty farm workers willing to fight for the union. Rangel eventually earned enough money to buy a tortilleria (tortilla store) in Orosi, California, but maintained his commitment to the UFW, using his store as a base for organizing farm workers. In 1968, Chavez appealed to Rangel to work for the movement full time under the California Migrant Ministry. Rangel remembered, “I [had] to leave my job and my business and persuade my wife (which was not so easy) to move.” That year, Rangel, his wife, and eight children committed their lives to the union, going first to Portland, Oregon, and eventually to Detroit, Michigan to oversee the boycott.6
College students imbued with a desire to make change also signed up in significant numbers. For some young people, such as Marshall Ganz, getting involved in the farm worker movement proved to be a homecoming. As a Jewish boy growing up in Bakersfield, California, during the 1950s, Ganz had developed a consciousness about the fight for civil rights in the South but had not yet recognized the relevance of this battle to his own backyard. “I grew up in the middle of the farm worker world,” recalled Ganz, “but of course never saw it.” Although his debate coach in high school tried to direct his attention to the farm workers, it took a trip to the Deep South while in college for him to discover the importance of civil rights activism back home. “I had to go to Mississippi and get [an] education about race and class and politics,” Ganz remembered, “so that when I came back, I could see with what we call ‘Mississippi eyes.’” Ganz acquired this new way of seeing during Freedom Summer, a Mississippi workshop in 1964 run by a coalition of northern black youths and southern black activists to train mostly white, northern college students to help in the fight to extend the franchise to African Americans in the South.7 Ganz made his way to Mississippi that summer from Harvard University, joining such future leaders as Mario Savio from the University of California at Berkeley, who went on to lead the free speech movement, and Heather Booth from the University of Chicago, who later founded the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. The experience changed Ganz’s life and made him more aware of the shared history of segregation and violence between African Americans in the South and people of color in rural California: “I mean, it was like seeing through a different lens, and it was like, oh, people of color, oh, no political rights, just like the South … marginal wages, just like the South. California’s own history of segregation, racial discrimination, just like the South.… And so it was much more like an extension of the movement than it was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to work for a union,’ which wouldn’t have occurred to me [before Freedom Summer].”8
FIGURE 6. At a United Farm Workers rally, Cesar Chavez looks over a binder with Marshall Ganz. Location unknown, 1971. ALUA, UFW Collection, 3248.
Ganz belonged to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the primary recruitment and training organizations for Freedom Summer. For SNCC, 1964 was a sobering experience, as their peaceful but persistent protests went unheeded by the national Democratic Party. At the Democratic National Convention that year, the party stalwarts, including the Party’s nominee, President Lyndon B. Johnson, refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as the representative for the state even after national media coverage brought the violence against civil rights protesters in Mississippi to public light. The murders of several civil rights workers, including three volunteers involved with Mississippi Summer—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—proved to organizers that black and white activists could be killed with impunity. As a consequence, SNCC leaders contemplated a more confrontational politics but also embraced an expansion of the movement by placing SNCC representatives with social justice organizations operating outside of the South.
Ganz’s path to the union came by way of the kind of diversity and inter-group dialogue that had lifted the farm worker movement in the early days and made the success of the boycott a possibility. Ganz, who had come back to Bakersfield at the end of 1964 in preparation for his return to Harvard in the fall of 1965, reconnected with an old friend, LeRoy Chatfield. By this time, Chatfield had abandoned the clergy to work with Chavez on the rent strike. Ganz had read about the strike while working for SNCC and accepted an invitation from Chatfield to meet Chavez. As with so many young people, Chavez persuaded