According to Brown’s research, supermarket sales in chain stores were $22.7 billion out of the total $68.3 billion spent on groceries in North America, an amount that constituted 33 percent of all grocery sales. In the eight of the top selling cities for table grapes, chain stores controlled over 50 percent of grocery sales. Brown and Chatfield argued that by taking a few key stores in the largest chains in the United States and Canada hostage, they could influence sales more quickly than if they targeted independents. Given that the boycott had already moved into the peak harvest months of July through November, when 71 percent of all table grapes entered the market, use of the “hostage stores” tactic became crucial to salvaging an effective effort for 1968. Huerta had pursued this strategy intuitively; the boycott coordinators now had worked up a rationale for its success and a justification for its use elsewhere.
When the duo finished, Chavez walked to the front of the room, convinced of the boycott’s importance to achieving overall victory. Offering his own interpretation of the strategy, he referred to the idea of targeting chain stores as “capitalism in reverse.” “We will picket the stores,” Chavez announced, “until we turn enough customers away to make the management realize that it is more profitable to stop selling grapes than to sell them.”52 On the question of how to do this, neither Chavez nor Brown nor any of the veterans of the boycott had a definitive answer, but examples abounded around the room. Marshall Ganz, who had flown back from Toronto for the meeting, shared both his diplomatic approach with cooperative owners as well as his acts of “creative nonviolence” against those who remained stubborn. Marco Muñoz, back from Boston, generated a laugh from the room when he reported on how his house held a “Boston Grape Party,” in which they dumped cartons of grapes into Massachusetts Bay in order “to liberate the farm workers from the tyranny of the growers.”53 Chatfield and Serda shared their experiences in Los Angeles as a way to learn from mistakes made in cities where a more hostile climate prevailed. Through it all, the group developed a sense of camaraderie, forming a bond that would inure them to the difficulties that awaited them as they moved forward, now with a clearer sense of their mission.
Chavez announced a redeployment of boycott workers to the cities, sending his best organizers to the front lines and accepting volunteers to lead boycott houses. Jerry Brown, who had remained in Delano in hopes of eventually launching his Ph.D. research, now set aside the dissertation indefinitely for an assignment to coordinate the boycott from Toronto. “They had given a lot to us,” he remembered. “They were accepting [our challenge to] really put in place a strategy to win.” Within the month, Jerry and Juanita moved into a four-story brownstone in Toronto with Chavez’s compadre, Manuel Rivera, and began orchestrating the new, improved boycott network from there.
Before adjourning the meeting, Chavez asked everyone to answer a straightforward, yet until now deceptively difficult question: “What is the key to the boycott?” Going around the room, participants offered a variety of answers: effective picket lines, raising money, countering the propaganda of the Teamsters and the growers, and getting the churches involved. “All of these answers have some truth in them,” Chavez responded, “but the key to the boycott is people.” In a tone that instilled confidence in every volunteer sitting in the room, he elaborated: “You’re building an army of supporters, and you need to find a way to get the people on your side. An organizer will find a way to do the boycott. You can tell me the boycott’s difficult. You can tell me they’re spitting on you in L.A.; that they’re telling you to go back to Mexico, that they’re calling you a Communist. You can tell me it’s cold in Toronto. I understand that. But don’t tell me it can’t be done. ‘Si se puede!’ Your job as an organizer is to find the key.”54 Chavez’s endorsement of the boycott signaled an important turn of events, even if he had not indicated as much prior to the meeting. More than the convincing argument put forth by Brown and Chatfield, the results of the boycott spoke for themselves, demonstrating that the tactic could instill fear in the growers in ways that the strike had not. Whether it could actually bring the most stubborn of them to the bargaining table remained to be seen, although Chavez’s support gave volunteers the confidence to try. His encouragement of a free exchange of ideas also contributed to their collective knowledge, making the group a more effective team. As they embarked on their new assignments, each volunteer carried the belief that he or she was about to make history.
THREE
Workers of the World, Unite!
ELAINE ELINSON HAD NEVER VISITED the headquarters of the United Farm Workers union, nor had she ever met the president of the organization, Cesar Chavez, despite having served in the movement for more than a year. Yet in 1969, as soon as she stepped onto the stage at Filipino Hall in Delano, California, the mostly Mexican and Filipino audience greeted her as a long-lost sister. Farm workers and activists alike honored her with the traditional farm worker “clap” that started slowly and built rapidly to a crescendo and cheers of “Viva la Huelga.” Elinson, like many boycott workers, had skipped a process of initiation in the trenches of the grape strike in favor of serving where she was needed most: on the front lines of the consumer boycott in urban centers around the world. For her, the notion of an international boycott became a reality on the docks and in the union halls of London, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, where she combined asking consumers not to buy grapes with the more traditional appeal to fellow unionized dock workers not to unload them. She recounted her experience that evening in Delano after the long battle abroad:
And as I stood there before this huge, curious, and open-hearted crowd, I realized I was one of the luckiest people in the world. I had been the link between the courageous, tenacious, spirited farm workers of the UFW and the committed, internationally minded transport workers of Britain and Scandinavia. Though they didn’t know each other, they were ready to fight together for La Causa. Together, they had pulled off an amazing feat of solidarity. The cheers that I heard in the Filipino Hall mixed with the cheers I had heard on the docks at Tilbury, Malmo, Birmingham, and Liverpool. So this is what they mean by “Workers of the World, Unite!”1
Relying on a London pay phone and the advice of the boycott coordinator Jerry Brown, Elinson had stopped grapes from reaching the European market. For those on the ground in Delano, this achievement earned her a degree of respect equal to workers and picketers in the fields and in front of markets in the United States. Her success proved to the faithful in the movement that consumers and workers around the world had the capacity to care for farm workers in rural California.
Events in Europe also provided evidence that the union’s investment in the boycott at midharvest 1968 had been a wise one. Growers disputed the effectiveness, but the shift in sales of table grapes away from traditional markets to smaller cities, rural areas, and overseas signaled an industry in crisis. Table grape growers repeatedly pointed to the increases in their production—up 19 percent in 1969 from 1966 totals—while ignoring the fact that use of these grapes for table consumption had declined by 12 percent. Increasingly, growers designated grapes for crushing to salvage any value from their crops.2 The Grape & Tree Fruit League attempted to disguise losses in sales of the popular Thompson seedless grapes by announcing the record sales of other varieties, while ignoring that growers earned between 50 cents and a dollar less per box than in 1968. Such media efforts failed as desperate Coachella growers, dependent on the substantial profit margins created by being the first on the market, publicly disputed the rosy picture painted by the league. Among them, Lionel Steinberg, owner of the David Freedman Ranch, worried aloud about falling grape prices, rising production costs, and the declines in Thompson sales that threatened to put him out of business. “We are not selling in normal quantities in major markets such as Chicago and New York,” Steinberg complained, “and