The substantive data flowing from the nerve center of the boycott confirmed the momentum experienced in the field. Whereas Brown and LeRoy Chatfield had established the goal of having effective boycott houses in ten of the forty-one leading cities, by early 1969 the union had established boycott houses in thirty-one cities and was about to open new ones in the South and Mountain West, places formerly thought to be impervious to farm worker appeals. In the traditional markets, organizers stepped up their efforts to overcome impediments to the boycott, while news of their success encouraged volunteers elsewhere to implement boycotts of table grapes in their cities. Through it all the UFW maintained no budget for publicity, relying exclusively on coverage from eager journalists.
Yet despite this success, the union struggled to make ends meet. Beleaguered growers maintained the economic advantage by hiring a San Francisco–based public relations firm, Whitaker and Baxter, to counter union claims of worker exploitation and pesticide use.4 Members of the South Central Growers Association also began to see beyond their ethnic divisions to organize twenty-six growers into a new coalition. The growers’ group secretly financed the Agricultural Workers Freedom to Work Association, a parallel labor organization that failed to attract meaningful support among workers. The UFW quickened AWFWA’s demise by exposing the organization’s general secretary, Jose Mendoza, as an anti-Chavez labor contractor on the growers’ payroll.5 Still, countering the growers’ moves depleted resources as the union stretched its budget to meet the commitments made to the boycott during the July 1968 retreat. Chavez, who privately worried about “the tremendous drain on the [union’s] treasury,” saw 1969 as a critical year to the overall success of the movement. “At this point,” he told Ganz as the union prepared for its fourth and most serious year of the boycott, “it’s either them or us.”6
SUCCESS IN NORTH AMERICA
The game plan prepared by Jerry Brown and LeRoy Chatfield produced results as boycotters returned to houses across the country for the remainder of the 1968 season and through the 1969 harvest. Chatfield, for example, adapted to the conservative environment of Southern California. In October 1968, seventeen Los Angeles stores, led by Safeway, successfully sued to limit to four the number of picketers outside the entrance of their markets. Rather than resist the new laws with civil disobedience and boisterous protests, Chatfield chose a more labor-intensive approach that involved well-dressed union representatives working ten hours a day, six days a week. Each representative adopted a calm, business-like demeanor and made appeals to shoppers on an individual basis. Chatfield recruited sixty new, full-time volunteers and concentrated their efforts on thirty stores in the Arden-Mayfair chain, a major competitor of Safeway. “It was grueling work, but it did the trick,” Chatfield reported to Brown. “At first, people didn’t pay much attention to us. But after they saw us several times, they’d stop to talk. Eventually, many of them agreed to shop elsewhere. The ones who did really understood the issue and would often talk to the manager and tell him why they were switching to another store.”7 By the end of the 1969 harvest, Chatfield’s tactics had succeeded in convincing Arden-Mayfair to remove table grapes from their stores. Although Los Angeles continued to be a challenge, the boycott reduced overall shipments to the second largest market for table grapes in the United States by a respectable 16 percent.8
The boycott swept over the continent, garnering support from consumers and politicians alike. In Toronto, the mayor declared November 23, 1968, “Grape Day” and announced the city government’s decision not to buy grapes in recognition of the farm workers’ struggle. In Chicago, Eliseo Medina organized a boycott campaign that persuaded the leading supermarket chain, Jewel, to stop carrying table grapes at every one of its 254 store locations. For this feat, Mayor Richard Daley, a pro-labor Democrat, recognized Medina as “Man of the Year” and endorsed the boycott. Similarly, in Cleveland, Mayor Carl Burton Stokes, the first African American to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city, ordered all government facilities to cease serving table grapes. Mack Lyons, the only African American on the National Executive Board of the UFW, made the appeal to Stokes and organized one of the strongest boycott houses in the network. In San Francisco, five major agribusiness organizations canceled their annual meetings in the city in response to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ endorsement of the boycott. At the annual meeting of the National League of Cities, the mayor of Delano, Clifford Loader, tried to stem the tide of city governments’ support for the boycott by introducing a resolution requesting mayors not to take sides in the grape dispute. To Loader’s dismay, his peers soundly defeated his proposal.9
Support from religious leaders extended the appeal of the boycott to patrons ordinarily more reluctant to weigh in on labor matters. From the beginning individuals from a range of organized religions supported the movement, volunteering their time to the union, occasionally in defiance of their church’s orders. By 1968, however, organized religion began to see the moral dimensions behind the farm workers’ modest demand for collective bargaining. That growers resisted this basic right shared by many working-class churchgoers permitted men of the cloth to take a position in favor of the union.
New reports of farm workers suffering from exposure to pesticides also moved religious and secular consumers alike. Jessica Govea, working in the new union Service Center, received complaints from many women who experienced dizziness, nausea, and sweats after working in the fields. As a former field worker in Bakersfield, she knew the symptoms associated with exposure to pesticides and immediately appealed to Jerry Cohen to see what could be done about the problem. When Cohen asked the agricultural commissioner, C. Seldon Morely, for reports of pesticides use on grapes, the growers went to the courts to block access. When the matter finally made it to a Kern County court, the judge blocked access to the records on the grounds that the union would use it in the boycott. Eventually, Cohen succeeded in winning access to several “little green booklets” listing the days in which growers sprayed, but limited information on what exactly had been used. The lack of clarity on the subject inspired the union and Senator Walter Mondale, a Democrat, to aggressively pursue a farm worker’s right to know the contents of the pesticides, and provided boycott volunteers another talking point on the picket lines.10
The momentum of the boycott carried it north, where shipments of California table grapes arrived at a fruit terminal in Detroit before being distributed throughout Michigan, Ohio, and Canada. The UFW initially tried to shut off the corridor by targeting the fruit terminals run by a director known only as “Mr. Andrews.” During the 1968 campaign, the Detroit boycott house, managed by a Catholic nun, Sister Lupé Anguiano, and an L.A. boycott veteran, José Serda, appealed to Andrews to cooperate with the boycott, but the terminal director showed little regard for the union. Appearing to have reached a dead end in Detroit, Chavez shuffled the leadership by bringing in Hijinio Rangel to run the house.
Rangel moved his entire family to the Motor City from Portland, Oregon, in December 1968. Within a few weeks, the Rangels mobilized a group of 5,000 volunteers composed of students, religious leaders, and fellow unionists to march from Ann Arbor to Detroit. The former Delano labor contractor and tortilleria owner followed this show of force with quiet but persistent appeals to Andrews to rethink his opposition to the boycott. As Rangel recalled in his memoir, Andrews responded with disdain, boasting, “I sent José Serda and Lupé Anguiano back to California, and the same is going to happen to you. You will go back on your knees.”11
Rangel accepted the insult as a challenge to devise a successful strategy. Rather than continue his appeals to Andrews, he took his case to Detroit’s leading supermarket chain, Kroger’s. Flanked by nuns on one side and a priest on the other, Rangel asked store managers not to carry California table grapes. When these efforts failed, he directed volunteers to enter the markets with their protest, provoking managers to call the police to arrest them. As protesters filled the city jail to capacity, court officials quickly arranged arraignment hearings on a Saturday to deal with the deluge of cases. Rangel recalled, “[The] judge arrived still in his shorts because he had been cutting his lawn.” In advance, Rangel made contact with local leaders in the AFL-CIO, UAW, and steelworkers, carpenters, and electrical