Many local activists were also angered by Kennedy’s refusal to heed the calls of the labor intellectual Ernesto Galarza to end the bracero program. Galarza, a former policy advisor for the Pan American Union, became involved with farm worker unions, although his main contribution came by way of his scholarship. Utilizing political connections and social science methods, he studied the effects of the bracero program on the wages and work conditions of all farm workers in California. In 1956, he published a short book, Strangers in Our Fields, and spoke critically about the program in public. His interventions initiated a quiet reassessment of the policy by the Department of Labor, and by 1960 the program began to fall out of favor with lawmakers.21 In 1961, Congress passed a two-year extension of Public Law 78 after tremendous debate, and the following year the Kennedy administration finally took a public position against the program. In 1963, Galarza published a longer, more critical book on the bracero program, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story, which helped push the contract-labor agreement to the brink of extinction. Although Congress and the president would honor requests from Mexico to gently wind down the program rather than cut it off immediately, lawmakers, growers, and activists acknowledged that the Mexican contract-labor program would soon come to a close.22
Studies such as those by Galarza and Fresno State College provided momentum for changes in the farm labor system as activists pressed the issue on the ground. Many reform advocates combined criticism of the bilateral agreement with a commitment to creating an institutional presence in rural California. The slow death of the bracero program allowed advocates to think about conditions after its demise, specifically how to reform a rural labor system dominated by disempowered migratory workers and day-haul laborers. In the early 1960s, both unions and community organizations vied with one another to assume leadership as the fight to end rural poverty moved into a new phase.
THE EVOLUTION OF FARM LABOR ACTIVISM
No one disputed the need to end the bracero program, although little consensus existed on what to do beyond this goal. In addition to assisting AWOC in the Imperial Valley, Miguel Figueroa worked with Ben Yellen, one of two physicians in the valley who had served braceros and saw firsthand the abuses of the program. Yellen distributed a self-published pamphlet known as the “yellow sheet” that criticized the bracero program and exposed local growers for their circumvention of the National Reclamation Act. Like Galarza, he campaigned for an end to the Mexican contract-labor agreement, but he saw it as a by-product of a larger problem related to the unequal distribution of public wealth in the form of irrigated land. Yellen believed that the problem of rural poverty could be eliminated by the enforcement of 160-acre limitation and residency requirements on megafarm owners who received federally funded water. He argued for the dismantling of these lands and their redistribution to farm workers, thereby achieving the novel solution of turning farm workers into farmers. Although Yellen counted among his supporters the University of California economist Paul Taylor, his was mostly a one-man crusade that had little support from labor unions and community organizations.23
Organizing workers was a far more common approach among activists, although not all agreed on the method. Union organizers like Al Green and Clyde Knowles believed that a union should be the ultimate objective, but their plans became mired in the conflicts between local workers and Mexican nationals. Consequently, prior to 1964, AWOC organizers and affiliates found themselves spending as much time campaigning against the bracero program as they did organizing workers for collective action. By the time the Mexican contract-labor program came to a formal end on December 31, 1964, AWOC had established itself as the most likely labor organization to lead a new union drive in rural California.
Members of another organization, the Community Service Organization (CSO), believed in the empowerment of communities to place demands on elected officials to improve living conditions and social services. During the mid-1950s, the CSO used its momentum from the election of Edward Roybal in urban East Los Angeles to expand into farming towns throughout California. The organization worked on issues affecting Mexican Americans, but its expansion into rural communities forced it to contend with Public Law 78 and the displacement of local workers by braceros. By the late 1950s, a rift had developed between middle-class professionals who wanted the CSO to remain politically agnostic on contentious issues such as the bracero program and members who wanted to align with labor organizations.24
The preference for organizing farm workers fell in line with the efforts of CSO founder, Fred Ross, and his protégé, Cesar Chavez. Ross had begun his activism in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, working with black and Mexican residents of citrus colonias to create Unity Leagues, community organizations built on the model of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation organizations in Chicago. The Unity Leagues served as a testing ground for Ross’s theory that one had to “organize people where they are, not where you want them to be.” When his efforts produced an organized citizenry and improvements in their communities, such as streetlights and school buses, Ross felt confident about doing similar work in more urban neighborhoods under the banner of the CSO. In 1952, he met and recruited Cesar Chavez, a young veteran of the U.S. Navy and a former farm worker living in the San José barrio of Sal Si Puedes. Born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927, Chavez understood the difficulties of rural life in the southern deserts. During the Great Depression, he had watched helplessly as the state took possession of his family’s farm, forcing them into the stream of itinerant farm laborers traveling throughout California during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Chavez’s wife, Helen Favela Chavez, also knew rural poverty; her family was dispersed throughout the Palo Verde, Imperial, and San Joaquin Valleys. Such intimate knowledge of rural California made Chavez sympathetic to the plight of farm workers and inspired him to move the CSO in the direction of farm worker justice.
As Chavez distinguished himself as a skilled organizer and became an officer within the CSO, he explored new solutions to the problems confronting rural communities. He began by recruiting members who shared his concerns and experiences, tapping activists in the many small towns familiar to him. Gilbert Padilla, who had been working part time as a dry cleaner and as a gleaner of onions and other crops grown in the Central Valley, was among his most important discoveries. Chavez found Padilla through his friend Pete García, a CSO affiliate who had invited him to a recruitment meeting at his home in Hanford. When Padilla declined out of a belief that the CSO was just another “social club,” Chavez and García met him after work, and the three men ended up talking late into the evening about their shared goal of improving farm worker conditions. Padilla appreciated Chavez’s desire to make community organizations more accountable to the needs of rural communities and agreed to become a member.25 Padilla and Chavez’s relationship would ultimately serve as the foundation for a new farm worker movement.
FIGURE 2. Members of the Community Service Organization, ca. 1950s. Second from right, Cesar Chavez; front row center, Fred Ross Sr.; far left, Saul Alinsky; third from the right in back, Helen Chavez. ALUA, UFW Collection, 330.
In 1959 Chavez exhibited his affinities with agricultural workers and unions by accepting a grant from the Packinghouse Workers of America to study the effects of the bracero program in Oxnard, California. He succeeded in forcing the Farm Labor Bureau to comply with a provision in the bilateral agreement that required growers to hire local farm workers before contracting Mexican nationals. He also helped local farm workers secure state unemployment insurance benefits during seasonal downturns. Such actions deviated from the CSO’s more familiar voter registration work and came closer to the services provided by unions.26 When Chavez became the national director of the CSO, he assigned Padilla to the CSO service center in Stockton, a predominantly farm worker community, and encouraged him to pursue grants like the one he held in Oxnard. To his delight, Padilla succeeded in securing a grant in 1961 from the Bishops’ Committee on Migratory Labor in Chicago to study housing conditions for local