Only infrequently do apieros cut themselves. Usually the cut is bandaged in the fields, and the cutter goes back to work. During the UFW years, if the cut was bad, the worker was given another job not as demanding on the hand—making and carrying boxes, or packing, or even closing the boxes—and somebody else took the person’s place cutting. This slowed the crew down a bit, which meant everyone had to work longer to make that day’s quota of boxes, but it was done in good cheer. It was a decision made among the crew, not by the foreman.
On piece-rate crews the workers drive themselves hard. Celery crews in the 1970s raced through the day, starting slowly as they warmed up in the morning, hitting their fastest pace in the two hours between the ten-minute morning break and the half-hour lunch, and then slowing down in the afternoon. The faster they got the work done, the sooner the workday was over, and the higher the hourly wage. On many days crews worked six hours or less, which was the way the workers liked it. Foremen still gave workers a lot of grief. But, generally, they watched out for the quality of the pack, and tried to slow down the crews so that they would do a better job. Foremen also wanted workers to specialize as much as possible, as they thought this resulted in a higher-quality pack. But because rotating the tasks of cutting, packing, closing, and making and distributing the empty boxes is easier on the body, workers would often trade positions for a while among themselves.
The pain is why most apieros prefer to pack celery rather than cut it. Packing requires constant up-and-down motion, as the packer picks up pieces of celery off the ground and then straightens up and puts them in boxes that ride about waist-high on the large, wheel-barrow-like burro. Up and down all day long is not easy on the back, either, but it is easier than the near-constant bent-over position that cutting requires.
Celery is packed in five different sizes, as many as four sizes at a time. The biggest celery goes into boxes containing eighteen pieces, the next biggest into boxes of twenty-four pieces, then thirty, thirty-six, and forty-eight as the celery decreases in size. The boxes all have their special places on the burro, and particular ways that they are filled, so that the packers know where and in what direction (root end left or right) to put the celery, and can count in multiples of six, rather than one piece at a time. The basic problem is that lying on the ground, all the different sizes of celery are mixed together. The packer has to pick up the same size celery and place it in the right box as quickly as possible, keeping track of what goes where and when a box is full. Some cutters, unable quickly to master the intense concentration and careful counting, decide to stick with the job they already know, despite the pain. Others prefer cutting for what they consider the privilege of working alone.
Packers work three men to a burro, packing behind three cutters. The three have a highly coordinated routine. Two of them work less than an arm’s distance from each other, and the third not much farther away. If one man is slow, the others can help out, “carrying” him for a while, but the responsibilities of the three men are clearly defined and conscientiously executed, unless there are special circumstances—somebody is learning the job, or not feeling well for a few days, or hung over in the morning, or distracted by a problem at home. These trios often stay together for years, and sometimes are made up of close relatives. All sorts of informal adjustments and accommodations are made among them, as is required by the surprises of life and work. But bad trios do not last as long as bad marriages, as bickering packers damage the whole crew, and the squabblers return to cutting or trade places with other packers sooner rather than later.
During the UFW years, some piece-rate crews formed soccer teams and played in recreational leagues, at night or on weekends. Well paid, skilled, proud of their jobs and their abilities, they were greatly admired in farm-worker communities. The cooperative nature of so much of their work prepared them for various kinds of collective action. The dominant ethos of the crews, that combination of solidarity and competition that is essential to a successful sports team, had always been useful in coordinating harvest-time job actions, like slow-downs and short work stoppages. It was also useful in building a union. The piece-rate crews of Salinas were not the only workers who built the organization that ultimately became the UFW, nor even the first. In fact, in the beginning none of the people who founded the union were thinking much about the ways the jobs in the fields had already organized workers, and what that might mean for a union. Only later would it be clear that the character of the work itself was as pivotal in the story of the union as the workers who did it and as telling as the character and deep background of the founders.
’27 to ’39
The tenant sat in his doorway, and the driver thundered his engine and started off, tracks falling and curving, harrows combing, and the phalli of the seeder slipping into the ground. Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, footbeaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so that it fell sideways, crushed like a bug. And the driver was goggled and a rubber mask covered his nose and mouth. The tractor cut a straight line, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder. The tenant man stared after it, his rifle in his hand. His wife was beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.
—The destruction of the Joads’ house, John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath
I remember the tractor heading for the corral. I shudder now to think of it. It was there that Richard and I had fun together riding the horses and the young calves bareback . . . Now the tractor was at the corral, and the old sturdy fence posts gave way as easily as stalks of corn. It was a monstrous thing. Richard and I were watching on higher ground. We kept cussing the driver, but he didn’t hear us, our words were lost in the sound of tearing timbers and growling motor. We didn’t blame the grower, we blamed the poor tractor driver. We just thought he was mean. I wanted to go stop him but I couldn’t. I felt helpless.
—Cesar Chavez remembering the destruction of the family
homestead in Arizona, Jacques Levy, Cesar Chavez,
Autobiography of La Causa
Cesar Chavez was twelve years old in 1939 when he and his brother Richard watched the tractor destroy their childhood. It was the same year The Grapes of Wrath was published; a year later, moviegoers in theaters across America watched as a tractor smashed the Joad homestead on celluloid, and Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda) told enthralled audiences that wherever people were fighting against injustice that is where you would find him. By that time the Chavez family was on the migrant trail, sleeping in a leaky tent in Oxnard, trying to squeeze a living out of the California fields. Cesar and his younger brother, Richard, got jobs sweeping out an Oxnard movie theater every day after school. They earned a nickel each, which they gave to their mother, and a free movie pass. The young migrants soon became movie fans: Cesar told his main biographer, Jacques Levy, that he went to the movies so often that he saw almost every Lone Ranger serial.1 But he never said anything about seeing the popular movie version of his own family’s tragedy, even as he told Levy about an incident in his life that seemed to come right off the screen. Maybe he missed the movie. What he didn’t miss, what he knew in his soul, was the shocking difference between his Arizona homestead and the California fields: a family surrounded by a community of friends and relatives, working on their own plot of land; that same family uprooted, traveling among hostile strangers, working on large corporate-owned farms for other people’s profits.
The Chavez family’s doomed corral was part of their hundred-acre ranch outside Yuma, in Quechan Indian country. It had been homesteaded by the boys’ grandfather Cesario, a muleskinner from Chihuahua. Cesario laid claim to the land thirty years before the family lost it, and he was lucky not to live long enough to witness the disaster. Cesario’s son, Librado, had been unable to pay all the taxes on the farm. An Anglo absentee landowner