As powerful as the movement was, it did not establish a stable union that might have consolidated farm worker victories. That was partly a result of ideological disposition. The Wobblies were anarchists, trying to build an anticapitalist culture among workers rather than a formal union, and even at the conclusion of successful strikes they refused to sign contracts, as they opposed any agreements with the boss class. But the failure to build a regular union was not only a product of IWW ideology. Just as conditions in the fields made growers vulnerable, they also made building a regular union extremely difficult—so much so that it wasn’t even an important goal of most striking workers. Moving from one part of the state to another, working for several employers in any given year, farm workers did not build up a commitment to any particular place or job. Why fight for a contract with an individual boss when you might work for that boss for only a few days, weeks, or months? Workers were willing to fight for an immediate upgrade in wages or working conditions but were less willing to engage in an extended battle for union contracts. For their part growers might grant short-term raises to get the harvest in, but they did not want their periodic vulnerability to be converted into long-term gains for the workers. So the workers fought hard and often, sometimes winning and sometimes not, but they were unable to make their victories stick.
Federal and State power abruptly ended IWW farm worker organizing in 1917, as the United States entered the Great War. The attack on the Wobblies was only partly prompted by the Wobbly opposition to the war; in California it was mostly motivated by IWW’s strength in the fields, where they had about five thousand card-carrying members and many thousands of sympathizers. Raids began at the IWW’s two most powerful farm worker locals, in Stockton and Fresno. They continued until about half the California IWW membership was in jail, with more than a hundred doing hard time in San Quentin.11
Among contemporary farm workers the IWW is forgotten, but what the Wobblies called sabotage—quick harvest strikes, slow-downs, purposely damaging the crop while picking it, burning barns and sheds—reoccurs regularly whenever farm workers do battle. The tactics are linked to the character of agricultural production, and each generation of farm workers is fully capable of figuring out where its leverage lies. Nevertheless, the tactics do have a lineage, and among militant Mexican workers they have long been associated with the name Ricardo Flores Magón.
Flores Magón was the leader of the PLM, a sort of half-sister to the IWW in California. His interest was not primarily California farm workers. Flores Magón was an early opponent of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, and published a weekly newspaper, Regeneración, for which he wrote political and social commentary. He and a small band of comrades fled Mexico in 1904. They resumed publishing their newspaper in the United States and smuggled it back into Mexico, often hidden between the pages of Sears, Roebuck catalogues. As the crisis in Mexico intensified, Regeneración became the main tribunal of the Mexican Revolution, distributed clandestinely throughout the country, and, famously, read out loud by campfire light to the troops of Emilaiano Zapata.
Flores Magón, who is celebrated in Mexican secondary school textbooks as a “precursor” of the revolution, remained in exile in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life. Although Ricardo Flores Magón, his brother Enrique, and a substantial number of displaced Mexican revolutionaries focused primarily on political developments in Mexico, they also set up a series of PLM clubs in the Southwest and California. Those clubs attracted Mexican migrant workers, some of whom began to call themselves Magonistas. The clubs were linked through Regeneración and several other local, less regular PLM newspapers. Club leaders read the newspapers out loud to assembled groups of workers, who then discussed the situation in Mexico and their own troubles in the United States.
The hub of PLM power was Los Angeles, which was still an agricultural town in 1907 when the Flores Magón brothers settled there, and already was the center of the Mexican community in the United States. The PLM’s LA clubhouse became a center of multilingual, multiethnic activity where socialists and Wobblies famous and obscure mixed with Magonistas. Regeneración, its back page printed in English, built up an LA circulation of 10,000, making it both the first bilingual paper in California and the largest Spanish-language newspaper in town. The PLM club, which was also considered a Spanish-speaking IWW local, had 400 active members, most of whom were farm workers.12
Elsewhere in California, Spanish-speaking IWW locals were filled with people who were also Magonistas. San Diego had a joint IWW-PLM local, and the highly active Fresno Wobbly local had a large number of Mexican workers. Given the loose attitude of the two anarchist groups toward questions of formal membership, among the rank-and-file the primary differences between Wobblies and Magonistas were language and nationality rather than ideology or practice.13
The PLM clubs and IWW locals were not just debating societies and places to hang out. In San Diego in 1910, a joint IWW-PLM local organized a strike at the local gas and electric company that won equal pay for equal work. That same year a fight for free speech that ultimately did so much to popularize the IWW among California farm workers, began in Fresno in the midst of a battle to organize Mexican workers who were being contracted to build a dam on the outskirts of town. In hop fields, vineyards, sugar refineries, and citrus orchards, many farm worker walkouts were joint Wobbly-Magonista efforts.
The PLM and the IWW went down together. In 1918, Ricardo Flores Magón, along with other PLM and IWW leaders, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 1918 for “obstructing the war effort.” At Leavenworth Penitentiary, in Kansas, he had a cell next to Ralph Chaplin, a prominent Wobbly poet, cartoonist, and songwriter. They did their time translating the poetry of a slain Magonista soldier, Práxedis Guerrero. For Ricardo, it was the last time of his life. The new Mexican government offered its help, but he declined because he deplored the government’s conduct following the revolution. He died in jail, in 1922.14
The IWW and PLM, along with most other anarchist groups, did not survive as effective organizations after World War I. The Bolshevik victory in Russia seemed to confirm that Communist parties, not anarchist ones, were the best vehicle for fighting capitalism. But Magonismo never totally disappeared from the California fields. Remaining underground in unfavorable times such as 1939, Magonismo has reappeared whenever farm workers have had an opportunity to fight. It is there when they slow down on the job, sabotage the crops, or strike at the beginning of a harvest. Magonistas played a part in Imperial Valley melon and lettuce strikes in the late 1920s. They worked together with other militants when California farm workers shook the state in the early 1930s. A generation later a few Magonistas would play a small role as the movement that produced the UFW was getting under way. And in 1979, the ghost of Ricardo Flores Magón would make a cameo appearance at one of the most dramatic moments in UFW history.
For the young Cesar Chavez, in 1939, that was not only an unknown future, it was an unknown past. The Chavez family was unconnected to any political tendency. More than that, families like the Chavezes were, in a sense, at an angle to history. Displaced Mexican homesteaders were only a tiny part of the great migration made famous by Steinbeck. In fact, across the 1930s, Mexicans who hit the road with all their worldly possessions were overwhelmingly headed not west, but south, to Mexico, driven by a combination of necessity, nativist attacks, and Mexican government inducements. Unacquainted with established farm worker traditions and communal networks in California, the Chavez family might easily have regarded isolation and loss as the steady state of people who work for wages in the fields.
More typical of the Mexican experience in California is the story of one of the other founders of the UFW, Gilbert Padilla.* Padilla was born the same year as Chavez, 1927, but unlike the latter he was “born into the migrant stream,” in the Hamburg labor camp in Los Banos, Merced County, located in central California, where his family was picking cotton. Gilbert’s parents, his paternal grandmother, and three uncles had come to the United States from Mexico in 1917, traveling on a troop train carrying revolutionary soldiers to Juárez. After crossing the border at El Paso, the Padilla clan went to Needles, California, worked on the railroad, and lived in railroad camps. In 1920 the family moved to Azusa, a town in East Los Angeles County. Gilbert’s father built a house, and most of the family worked in the nearby fields and orchards. They started migrating