Losing his father’s land was just the latest in Librado’s long series of losses. When the Depression first hit, another Anglo, a lawyer, had swindled him out of the title to his own forty-acre ranch. As the bad times got worse, Librado lost the grocery store, pool hall, and garage that he had bought in the prosperous twenties. Broke, he moved the family back to his father’s original homestead, where he tried to make a go of it growing corn, squash, chilies, and watermelon. But the Gila River, which irrigated the farm, was unreliable. Twenty years of overgrazing had destroyed the native grasses along its banks. Often it was dry, but in wet years it flooded.2 Librado’s first harvests were hampered by drought. Then, in the midst of his troubles, the rampaging river broke through the irrigation ditches his father had built. Librado couldn’t sell the crops he managed to salvage. By the time the boys saw the tractor crush the corral, the family had spent one last year on the homestead after a wasted season working in the California fields in hopes of raising money to pay the taxes. Now they would have to go back to California.
Until the family hit the road, Librado Chavez’s problems had barely registered on his oldest son, Cesar. It had been mostly good times in the North Gila Valley: playing in the grocery store that had doubled as the family’s first home; learning about horses from his father and charity from his mother; catching gophers, feeding them to the cats, and selling their tails for a penny a piece to the local irrigation district; playing pool with Richard on the table that sometimes doubled as their bed; gathering chicken eggs and bartering them for bread or flour with neighbors and relatives; listening to the old people’s stories at summer barbecues at night; playfully teasing his nearly blind grandmother, who was almost one hundred and who taught him prayers in Latin and instructed him in the lives of the saints.
For the young Cesar Chavez, the California fields were a disaster. He saw his father, a master horseman, tricked and humiliated. He went hungry for the first time and joined the family to search for wild mustard greens to have something to eat. Alongside his father, he walked out of the fields in informal strikes, losing every time. His world of play, interrupted only by chores on the family farm, was replaced by a world of unrelieved work on other people’s land. “Unlike the ranch, the work was drudgery,” he told Levy. It was hard, unbearably hard. He remembered working with the short-handled hoe as a kind of crucifixion. He had lost the corral, the horses, the dogs and cats; the pool table had been left behind. He had lost the community of the North Gila Valley, peopled by relatives, friends, other Mexicans. Now home, or what passed for it, was the family’s 1927 Studebaker. He slept in a series of tents, shacks, hovels. He traveled among strangers in unknown places, victim of a new set of rules. When he went to the store, he was cheated. He was beaten by older boys. When he left his toys outside, they were stolen.
This is a familiar story: a family hits the road to California when the old homestead is lost to unpaid taxes, lawyers, and the Depression. But it is more familiar as an Okie story, and the Chavez family—Librado, his wife, Juana, the children, Rita, Cesar, Richard, Vicky, and Lenny—were clearly not Okies. They called themselves Mexicans; sociologists today probably would classify them as Mexican Americans. Cesar and his siblings had all been born in Arizona. Librado had been brought across the border when he was only two; Juana, when she was six months old. Cesario had voted in Texas elections before the turn of the century and had carved the homestead out of the Colorado desert three years before Arizona became a state. But despite the three generations in the United States, the family did not “hyphenate” itself. People didn’t start doing that until after World War II. Speaking Spanish, living in close contact with new immigrants who had firsthand news from home, settling in a territory they knew had been taken from Mexico in a war of conquest, they remained Mexicans and were proud of it.
Only in school did Cesar feel that there was anything suspect about being Mexican; teachers in the North Gila Valley punished him for speaking Spanish, but what had been occasional in the valley was normal in California.* There, Cesar first saw a sign stating “White Trade Only.” There, he was denied service at a restaurant, was stopped by the migra, and for the first time felt somehow diminished because his skin was dark and he was Mexican.
The California fields robbed the young Cesar of almost everything that was good in his life except the love and comfort of his family. “I was like a wild duck with its wings clipped,” he said.3 Farmwork for wages was an affliction. It took his youth. It hurt his back. It humbled his proud father. Everything about it was wrong. He could know it was wrong because he had lived right: “Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on the land, and I knew a different life.”4
The Chavez family hit the migrant circuit in what arguably were the hardest times in California agricultural history. It wasn’t just that wages were low. What made matters worse was that the sweeping farm worker upsurge of the early 1930s had passed. As the Studebaker carried the sometimes-hungry Chavez family from job to job, the strikes that had raised both wages and spirits in the fields in 1933 were long gone, replaced by losing battles directed by disheartened union organizers who would soon leave the fields to focus their attention on cannery workers rather than farm workers.
No sophisticated economic analysis is required to understand the melancholy that dominated the California fields at the exact moment that the young Cesar Chavez picked up a short-handled hoe. Too many workers were chasing too few jobs. In cotton, where most farm workers were employed, acreage had climbed steadily, from 130,000 acres in 1924 to 670,000 in 1937. In the next two years, though, under the provisions of Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, California cotton acreage was cut nearly in half, to 340,000 acres, just as displaced people from Oklahoma, southern Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas were pouring into the state.5 Some 400,000 of these Okies came to California between 1935 and 1939, and many of them headed directly for the fields, where they competed for disappearing jobs with the 200,000 mostly Mexican farm workers who were already there. It was a competition that only the large growers won.
For those entering the fields in 1939 it would have been easy to regard the natural condition of farm workers exactly as it was depicted in the documentary art and literature of the period. In that one remarkable year, three books of photographs of farm workers and dispossessed small farmers evoked a wave of sympathy among large swaths of the American public: You Have Seen Their Faces, with photographs by Margaret Bourke and text by Erskine Caldwell; An American Exodus, with the photos of Dorothea Lange and a text written by her husband, Paul Taylor; and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans. These books were stared at, studied, worried over, looked at again and again by millions of people, most of them far from the California fields. Steinbeck’s magnificent Grapes of Wrath became an immediate best-seller that year. Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field also was published in 1939, and became popular at the same time that hundreds of witnesses in a sensational few weeks of testimony were telling the U.S. Senate Labor Committee and its chair, Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr., about the systematic, well-organized, usually brutal, and often legal repression of California farm workers.
This was more than a coincidence or an inexplicable agreement among diverse artists and journalists about what was important and how to present it. It was a campaign with an agenda. As Arthur Rothstein, the first photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and Lange’s colleague, put it: “It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them.”6 McWilliams’s book was a straightforward call for farm workers to be covered by the protections of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and to be granted the same rights as factory workers. Steinbeck, whose purpose and art were more complicated than the others’, nonetheless fully affirmed the overall agenda, and made it clear directly in his pamphlets and indirectly in his novel, that the migrants deserved government help because they were true American whites. La Follette, the professional politician, could be most direct. His introduction to the transcript of the hearings called for farm workers to receive the full range of federal protections and benefits.
The campaign failed to achieve its immediate aim, as concern for farm workers was pushed aside by the approaching world war, and as the white migrants who were featured in the photos and the prose moved out of the fields