ONE
Birth of a Movement
FARM WORKER ADVOCATES have often contrasted visions of rural California as the land of milk and honey with the gritty reality of farm workers’ lives. This, in part, was the approach that novelist John Steinbeck, photographer Dorothea Lange, and other agrarian partisans used in the 1930s to arouse the nation’s appetite for reform. Their ability to undermine growers’ idyllic impressions of the California countryside led to the creation of programs that brought temporary relief to field hands. Although the New Deal ultimately fell short, artists and union organizers proved that they could counter advertisements celebrating the bounty of nature and, for a time, shift the balance of power in favor of workers in the long struggle to end rural poverty in the Golden State.
Such a tactic was at the heart of a 1948 film, Poverty in the Valley of Plenty. A coproduction of the National Farm Labor Union and Hollywood filmmakers, the film drew attention to the anti-union practices of the DiGiorgio Fruit Company located in the lower San Joaquin Valley. An Italian immigrant, Giuseppe “Joseph” DiGiorgio, began modestly, growing fruit on 5,845 acres in 1919. By 1946 he had expanded production on thirty-three square miles worth $18.2 million, becoming the largest grape, plum, and pear grower in the world.1 According to NFLU organizers, much of this wealth had been built on the backs of laborers who lived in substandard housing. With the film and their activism, they sought to make the DiGiorgio Fruit Company more accountable to its employees.
In 1947 union organizers at DiGiorgio petitioned for a 10 cents per hour raise, seniority rights, and a grievance procedure. The company promptly responded by expelling striking workers and replacing them with several hundred Filipinos, undocumented workers, Tejano recruits, and 130 Mexican guest workers, known as braceros. The employment of the last group violated the agreement between Mexico and the United States that stipulated no foreign workers would be used during labor disputes. Members of the Hollywood film unions regarded DiGiorgio’s reaction as so hostile that they waived all wage and pay contracts to get the film made.2
The collaboration between the NFLU and filmmakers marked a new phase in the evolution of farm worker activism. Besides evoking the contrast between growers’ wealth and farm workers’ poverty in the title, they portrayed the stark differences between the natural beauty of the fields and the ramshackle homes of employees. The first thirty-seven of fifty-seven scenes accentuate this contrast, offering viewers a visual context for the last portion of the film, which is focused on the DiGiorgio strike. In terms of activism, the union paired Poverty in the Valley of Plenty with highly public appeals to consumers across the nation not to buy DiGiorgio’s products. The first large-scale consumer boycott of its kind, the strategy worked, cutting deeply into the company’s profits and provoking angry clashes between loyal employees and strikers on the farm.3
If the NFLU’s film and boycott signaled a new level of sophistication among farm worker activists, it also demonstrated the resolve of DiGiorgio to maintain the status quo. In addition to hiring a photographer and filmmaker to produce a visual counter to Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, the company unleashed a legal torrent on the NFLU, suing them for libel and fighting to suppress any further screenings of the film. Although an independent investigation by CBS News and Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas revealed the company’s version to be false and the repression of workers to be real, DiGiorgio simply overwhelmed its opposition with images and lawsuits. Unable to match the wealth and power of the company in the courts, the NFLU agreed to destroy all copies of Poverty in the Valley of Plenty and end the strike and boycott in exchange for DiGiorgio’s dropping charges against the union leaders. The settlement brought an end to the NFLU, which ceased to exist by the summer of 1950.4
DiGiorgio achieved its intended goal of destroying the NFLU and ending the circulation of the film, but the episode signaled a core truth about agriculture: consumer opinion matters. The union’s ability to engineer a boycott demonstrated to both sides that the conflict extended well beyond the fields, and that simply replacing workers at the point of production could not solve the conflict. Indeed, DiGiorgio’s suppression of Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, even at the expense of free speech, demonstrated how seriously the company took this challenge. Although DiGiorgio won this battle, growers remained susceptible to such campaigns as long as they refused to take responsibility for solving the problem of rural poverty.
It took time for activists to recover from the collapse of the NFLU. Although Ernesto Galarza, a labor intellectual and the former director of education and research for the union, reconstituted the NFLU as the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU), the new union struggled as a consequence of the bracero program. Throughout the 1950s, the single goal of ending the program consumed farm worker advocates, delaying the use of tactics briefly employed by the NFLU. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, new voices emerged that revived some of the hope in the fields, where conditions remained as difficult, if not worse than they had been in the 1940s. Armed with new research and imbued with a sense of purpose, these grassroots activists hit the countryside intent on making a difference.
RURAL CALIFORNIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Those wishing to tackle the thorny issue of rural poverty have often begun their fight in the Imperial Valley. Its location in the most southern portion of the state made it the first destination for desperate Mexican immigrants crossing the border to apply their substantial knowledge to the state’s massive agricultural economy. The tumult of the Mexican Revolution and the recruitment of Mexican workers by labor contractors during the first three decades of the twentieth century made Mexicans the preferred group in a racial-caste system that remained in flux until World War II.5 The flood of Mexican workers generated a surplus of labor that facilitated competition among a diverse population segmented by race and enabled growers to pay their employees below subsistence wages. As the first to employ farm workers for the season, Imperial growers often established the going rate for many crops in the state. The desert climate aided this process. An inversion of the typical North American growing season from a spring-to-summer to a winter-to-spring trajectory meant that Imperial growers could deliver warm-weather, drought-tolerant crops such as cotton, peas, melons, and lettuce to the market at a time of the year when such products were rare. When cultivation moved northward, so did wage levels and workers.
A researcher studying social stratification across agricultural sections of the United States in 1959 found that the Imperial Valley had a two-class system: a few farm managers in the middle class and a mass of laborers, mostly Mexican, in the lower class. These conditions strongly resembled those in the Deep South, where white landholding elites and farm managers profited from the labor of African Americans. In Tunica County, Mississippi, and West Baton Rouge County, Louisiana, for example, “lower class farm personnel,” defined as “all those who perform only the labor function on the farms, plantations, and ranches in the United States,” constituted approximately 80 percent of the workforce. By comparison, Imperial Valley farms employed 87 percent of their laborers at this level. Moreover, while all three counties employed a small middle- and lower-middle-managerial