To be successful, the UFW had to discover new cracks in the growers’ armor. The failure to bring ethnic and family-oriented growers to the negotiation table through either the strike or the boycott signaled the long battle ahead. The union leadership discovered, however, that compared to the strike the boycott had made growers more uncomfortable about their position. “The whole strategic premise,” Ganz remembered, “was … that you didn’t have enough power in the local labor market to win.” The strike had drawn attention to the problem of farm worker wages and living conditions, but the union had a hard time maintaining a constant presence in the fields without a substantial strike fund to pay workers to walk picket lines or prevent growers from replacing them with scab labor. When Governor Pat Brown ordered investigators from the state department of employment to confirm the existence of a labor dispute, they had to rely on testimony from only forty-nine farm workers who remained in Delano long enough to confirm their participation. This number was far below the thousands of workers Chavez asserted had participated in the strike. Most farm workers moved on to seek work elsewhere in order to feed their families, thinning the picket lines in the fields.
The anemic display in the countryside forced Chavez to invest more time, money, and hope in the boycott. For all of their publicity, union officials had done little to stop the harvesting of grapes at the point of production. The secondary boycott, however, showed no signs of weakness, drawing new recruits in ever increasing numbers as the urban civil rights and antiwar movements became more violent and fragmented at the end of the 1960s. Although the boycott decentered the movement from its traditional base of power in Delano, where Chavez had more control, it also transferred the battle away from the stronghold of the growers and into an arena that gave the union a better chance of winning. According to Ganz, “By shifting the turf [to the cities] … we could successfully fight them.”31
WORKING THE BOYCOTT
By 1968, as the union moved against the core group of table grape growers, the farm workers had three proven strategies in their arsenal: the strike, the march, and the boycott. Among the three, the boycott offered leaders the least control, given their dependence on other unions to block shipments and on consumers to avoid purchasing grapes. In addition, the boycott required organizers to move away from the cradle of the movement to live in far-flung cities with few connections to Delano. The union’s standard compensation of $5 per week did not go as far in metropolitan areas, where it took organizers more time to locate allies who could offset their expenses with donations of food, shelter, and transportation. In some cities, such as New York, the union spent precious dollars to rent a boycott house where volunteers slept and worked. At the time, most in the labor movement thought these expenditures were risky since the boycott had long been regarded as a tool of last resort.32 The success against Schenley, DiGiorgio, Perelli-Minetti, and Gallo, however, had encouraged union leaders to continue experimenting with the tactic.
The UFW built support for the boycott among urban consumers with the effort of a small but committed cadre of organized farm workers and youthful advocates. Drawing inspiration from Fred Ross and the CSO, Jim Drake applied the same approach to organizing volunteers for the boycott houses as he had in recruiting farm workers to the union. Drake shared the UFW philosophy: “If you try to spread yourself among all the workers … then you are going to do about 5% of organizing of maybe 20% of the workers. Forget about it, you are just never going to make it.” Instead, the organizers put 100 percent of their time into organizing between 2 and 5 percent of the total population of farm workers. From this group came the “really organized [and] committed,” argued Drake, who would “stick it out for 20 years” and “see to it that you win.” For Drake and others, the number of farm workers involved was less important than the quality and commitment of those who carried the message of social justice to the general public. “We made it look like [there were] thousands of grape pickers out on strike,” recalled Drake, “because we moved people around real fast.” Once the boycott came into play, the UFW’s central organizers applied this same tactic on a national scale. “[These workers] would think nothing of giving up their homes and everything to go to New York or Chicago for the boycott.”33
As the boycott intensified in early 1968, Chavez asked his longtime friend and mentor, Fred Ross, to run a tutorial on organizing for fifty farm workers and volunteers in New York City, the largest and arguably most important market for grapes. Organizers ranged from teenage novices like Eliseo Medina to seasoned veterans like Gilbert Padilla and Dolores Huerta. Ross, however, treated everyone equally, employing a philosophy of “on-the-job” training, as Jerry Brown described it: “Ross never lectured about organizing. He believed that one could only learn to organize by doing it. He would point out that there was nothing romantic about organizing, and that it required mainly common sense, meticulous planning, hard work and a great deal of self discipline.”34
From this group, Eliseo Medina, an eighteen-year-old native of the Coachella Valley, traveled to icy Chicago in the midst of winter with the usual $100 start-up funds, a handful of local contacts, and a bag of union buttons. Another farm worker, Marco Muñoz, established an effective house in Boston despite not speaking a word of English. In New York City, Dolores Huerta was called in to organize the boycott house on Eighty-sixth Street, while LeRoy Chatfield went to Los Angeles, and Gil Padilla started a house in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Chavez made the boycott international from the beginning by assigning Ganz to Toronto and Jessica Govea, a twenty-one-year-old farm worker’s daughter from Bakersfield, to Montreal.35 The union also maintained houses in several big cities throughout the United States, including San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, Seattle, and Cleveland.
These were the boycott houses with which Jerry and Juanita Brown communicated in 1968. Chavez expected the couple to connect all spokes of the emerging network to the “pink house,” a little, three-bedroom cottage on the outskirts of Delano that served as the headquarters for the union. There, Chavez introduced the Browns to the “boycott room,” where he gave them minimal instructions. On a map of North America pinned to the wall, Chavez drew his finger down through Chicago and the Mississippi River and said, “Jerry, you take the East. Juanita, you take the West.” Even then, Jerry and Juanita split their time by walking the picket lines in the fields in the morning and working the phone lines and writing letters to boycott organizers in the afternoon. Given Juanita’s college-level Spanish skills, Chavez also had her translate depositions with immigrant farm workers acquired by the head of the UFW legal team, Jerry Cohen, to be used in cases against the growers. For an upstart union representing poor farm workers, such division of labor was necessary, although for the Browns, it also indicated that the boycott played a secondary role to the maintenance of the strike.36
Out on the front lines of the boycott, organizers had to be resourceful if they were to succeed. Jerry Brown recalled, “Each boycott organizer was like a brilliant campaign strategist that figured out what the key to their particular city was.… It was really, you know, on-the-ground organizations.”37 In New York, Ross’s emphasis on community organizing gave way to establishing contact with labor unions that controlled the movement of produce in and out of Manhattan. During the spring of 1968, UFW vice president and chief negotiator, Dolores Huerta, appealed to the Central Labor Council, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union, and the Seafarers Union to establish a total blockade of California grapes. The unions agreed to cooperate in time to interrupt the first grapes of the season from making their annual trip across the Hudson River by barge. As the grapes rotted in New Jersey, grape growers filed an injunction against the New York and New Jersey unions for violating federal regulations against secondary boycotts and demanded $25 million in compensation for lost sales. Although the Taft-Hartley Act did not apply to farm workers, it did restrict the Seafarers Union from participating in such actions. It eventually released the grapes, but the pause in shipments had reduced the overall number of car lots for 1968 to a record low of 91, down from the industry norm of 418.38
In mid-July Huerta and the extremely efficient New York City house shifted to a consumer boycott, picketing stores throughout the city. Huerta pursued the same logic in organizing against supermarkets that the union had used in the campaigns against the corporate producers: the larger the organization, the greater its vulnerability. In the New York area, the A&P