From the Jaws of Victory. Matthew Garcia

initially sought to have the Teamsters represent its workers rather than resist any union. The effectiveness of the boycott, however, compelled Perelli-Minetti to back away from the Teamsters and accept the UFW as the bargaining agent for its employees. On July 21, 1967, the Teamsters reached an agreement to turn over all its contracts for field workers to the UFW in exchange for Chavez’s recognition of the Teamsters’ right to represent all employees working in canneries, packinghouses, and freezers. The next day, many of California’s large wineries, including Gallo Wines and Paul Masson, followed Perelli-Minetti by agreeing to hold elections for their workers.²⁰ The wineries saw the virtue of this strategy because, like Schenley and DiGiorgio, they had made their money based on the quality associated with their brand names.

      The solution of union recognition stood in stark contrast to the thinking of local table grape growers, who fought to maintain exclusive control over the hiring and labor processes. When Schenley caved to the pressure of the march and the boycott, for example, the California Council of Growers, a nonprofit public relations firm representing the majority of owners, issued the following statement: “While the NFWA and its religious cohorts were righteously preaching democratic processes and marching on Sacramento, the leaders were closeted elsewhere, working out a deal that denies workers any voice in the proceedings.… Schenley Industries, whose farm operations are incidental to their basic whiskey-making business, is not representative of California agriculture, where growers steadfastly refuse to sell out their employees and force them into a union which does not represent them.”²¹

      Unwittingly, the movement exposed the class cleavages among farm owners, prompting the local table grape growers to articulate differences between them and their corporate peers. The diversity of brands used by Schenley, DiGiorgio, and Perelli-Minetti made them more susceptible to the boycott and more inclined to settle the conflict quickly. In addition, the union learned that by toppling a leader in a particular industry, other companies quickly followed. This was the lesson of the Perelli-Minetti boycott, in which Gallo and Masson sued for peace immediately after Perelli-Minetti capitulated.

      Table grape growers undermined the assumption that such a strategy worked in all circumstances. Rather than dividing and conquering all grape producers, the boycott had the unintended consequence of moving a diverse group of ethnic and family-based table grape growers toward greater cooperation. Forged in the crucible of class conflict, the South Central Farmers Committee (SCFC) became the leading self-help organization for growers.

      The SCFC grew out of early affinities among Slavic pioneers, such as Jack Pandol and Martin Zaninovich, but it also included a handful of non-Slavic growers from the Delano area. By the 1960s, European ethnic growers had fully embraced Armenians as equals, but Japanese American small farmers remained conspicuously absent from the membership. According to the SCFC’s first president, Martin Zaninovich, the organization incorporated on August 26, 1960, in anticipation of union organizing. When the union did come, the SCFC became more organized and leased an office in downtown Delano in early 1966. According to Zaninovich, “The primary function of the committee at that time was to serve as the public relations arm of the agriculture in the area.”²² Members also met routinely to plot strategy and strengthen their common bonds, if necessary through threats. In one case, a beleaguered grower confessed to having grown weary of constantly searching for workers and battling the union. “The next time you come, bring your pink slip,” a peer responded, suggesting that he would buy him out rather than see his farm end production because of the unions. “Unionizing of farms was simply not accepted,” Zaninovich remembered.²³

      Early on, the SCFC responded to the strike by denying its existence. The arrival of the boycott, however, generated bad publicity at the point of sale, hurting the grape growers’ reputation with customers and forcing them to abandon their bunker mentality. In January 1966, the SCFC formed a speakers’ bureau to circulate growers who were willing to make their case to urban consumers. It also reversed its position of refusing to communicate with the media and initiated a campaign through the Council of California Growers to win back the public. The Council channeled all inquiries through the SCFC office in Delano and hired a young ex-navy pilot, Bruce Obbink, to serve as the full-time director of education. Obbink had originally come to the Council in 1962 to help fight against the termination of the bracero program. With that battle lost, Obbink and the Council focused on the new challenge of defeating the United Farm Workers. He received a budget to hire an office manager for the SCFC, Eleanor Schulte, who coordinated communication among the Council, the growers, and the public.²⁴

      In spite of these efforts, the growers continued to lose the public relations war. Most of the growers attributed their losses to biased journalists who came to Delano with preconceived notions. “A lot of people who come here think they are experts on farm labor,” Schulte observed. “They come armed with what they consider to be the facts, and this puts us in a defensive position right off the bat.”²⁵ Rather than admitting the well-documented problems in farm labor housing and wages, the SCFC aggressively denied any discontent among workers. On behalf of grape growers, SCFC president, Martin Zaninovich, reported to a packed audience of journalists in San Francisco, “Over the years, we have developed and maintained a keen personal interest in each and every one of our employees.… Many growers provide superior housing free of charge.” This flew in the face of popular accounts of the lives of farm workers depicted in programs like Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, broadcast in 1960, and the attention drawn to the problem by the union. Although some growers supplied better housing than others, the trend toward day-haul workers rather than the type of worker settlements described by Zaninovich undermined his paternalistic stance toward employees. The work of photo-journalists and documentary filmmakers transported images of unrest from the fields to urban consumers that served as visual rebuttals to Zaninovich’s constant protestation that worker deprivation and discontent were a “myth.”²⁶

      Unlike their corporate peers, the local ethnic and family-oriented growers refused to see the strike or the boycott as a business matter to be dealt with through negotiations. Of the corporate growers Ganz observed, “A lot of them had union contracts [in] other places; they weren’t invested in their standing in the grower community; they weren’t a part of that local scene; they didn’t go to the Slav club and the Elks club and the same church.”²⁷ Members of the SCFC, on the other hand, saw the union’s campaign as a personal affront to their integrity that had to be resisted at all costs. For them, the struggle against the UFW was more than a business matter; it embodied a wider cultural struggle that threatened a way of life. Zaninovich, in particular, harbored deep resentment toward student volunteers, whom he characterized as “far left of left” and “very young, probably naïve, and obviously idealistic,” who did not recognize that “they were being manipulated by a few unobtrusive but effective leaders.” His dismissal of both these volunteers and Chavez placed him and his fellow growers on the other side of a new generation that now began to question the war, the treatment of racial minorities, and the responsibility of the educated class to society.

      Buoyed by their defeat of the corporate growers, in 1968 Chavez and UFW leaders agreed to take the fight to table grape producers rather than consolidate their gains in the wine industry.²⁸ As in the battle with wine grape producers, union leaders decided to start with a campaign against the biggest producer. Giumarra Vineyards Corporation was the undisputed leader in table grape production, with $12 million dollars in annual sales from production on 12,170 acres of premium farmland.²⁹ This time, however, the leading company did not concede defeat, nor did its peers show signs of weakening in the face of pressure from the boycott. Unlike the corporate growers who cared about labels, table grape growers rarely marketed their products by brand names that were conspicuous to customers in supermarkets, thus making the boycott difficult to enforce at the point of sale. Table grape growers frequently used multiple brands to market a variety of grapes at different points in the season. When the union finally succeeded in distinguishing Giumarra’s brands from those of other producers, fellow grape growers loaned Giumarra their labels to frustrate boycott organizers. As a consequence, rather than defeating the table grape growers during the 1968 season, the UFW found itself in a protracted war with the industry, no closer to winning the strikes on their farms or the boycott campaigns in the city. The union responded by declaring an industrywide boycott