At the time, Camacho was living in the house he had bought in 1973 with a $3,000 down payment; a three-bedroom home in what passes for the industrial section of Watsonville, next to the city’s recycling center. His wife had worked at Green Giant for more than twenty years before it moved to Mexico. She then went to work at Del Mar Frozen Foods. They were family-proud, with reason. Of their five children, the three oldest had graduated from college and were working, one in Watsonville, and two others a hundred miles away in San Francisco. Their two youngest children were still in school.
Camacho is a responsible man. The three seasons we packed celery together, he never missed a day of work. His reliability, combined with his outspoken, militant support for the union, made him among the first people nominated for crew shop steward, a post he held on various occasions.
When Pablo came to my house to be interviewed, it was the first time I had put a tape recorder in front of him. It was not the first time I had heard his stories, whose major theme was how bad it was before the UFW arrived. The Bracero Program was one of his favorite targets. Under this friendly arrangement between the U.S. and Mexican governments, which lasted from 1942 to 1964, a total of five million Mexican men were contracted to work in the United States—mostly in the Texas and California fields—under strict conditions that limited their freedom of movement and kept farm workers’ wages artificially low. Camacho had been a bracero, and the bad old days seemed to get worse as he told the stories over and over. At my kitchen table, Camacho recounted one of my favorites:
My first job was in the desert in Borrego Springs, picking grapes. We used to wake up at three in the morning, eat breakfast, and start working in the warehouse at four. We worked there until it was light enough to see outside. In the morning light we started picking grapes, and we worked until about two in the afternoon, stopping only to eat lunch. Then we had a two-hour break, when most people returned to the bunkhouse to rest. At around four it was back to the warehouse, where we worked until ten at night, with a break for dinner. In bed by eleven, for four hours’ sleep. Six days a week, seventy-five cents an hour. It wasn’t bad—except for the rattlesnakes.3
Pablo was born on a little ranch near Novolato, a town of maybe 25,000 people in Sinaloa, Mexico. His father was a campesino, a small farmer who grew and harvested sugar cane to send to the Novolato sugar refinery, built and owned by the local hacienda owners. Soon after Pablo was born, in 1933, the local campesinos organized themselves into an ejido—the system of communal land tenure that was a main achievement of the Mexican Revolution—and took the land away from the hacendados.
President Lázaro Cárdenas had already proclaimed that every campesino should have his own piece of land to work. My father became president of the ejido. He grew sugar cane for the refinery. But you know how it is, after a few years the refinery owners didn’t pay the ejiditarios a good price for the sugar cane, and there were seasons when the campesinos couldn’t make it. People continued to grow corn, garbanzos, chilies, but it wasn’t enough, and the bank wouldn’t give them credit unless they agreed to grow cane. So even though they had their own land, they fell into debt and remained poor and under the power of the bankers and the old landlords, who still owned the refinery.
Camacho had a rude introduction to politics. His father was assassinated by local political rivals when Pablo was ten, and the boy had to leave school and work full-time. He started as a human scarecrow. Armed with a slingshot, he guarded the newly sown fields from the birds. He graduated to a helper in the cane fields and finally became a regular cane cutter. When he was fifteen, he got a job in a sugar factory.
Refinery work is seasonal, so in May of 1954 Camacho traveled to the United States as a bracero. Only the hardest and most efficient workers, about a third of those who signed on to the program, made it. After three months battling the rattlesnakes Camacho was sent to Chula Vista, near San Diego, to work in the tomato fields. There, the workforce was thinned out some more. Camacho and a few others were made “specials,” braceros who carried a plastic card (called a mica by the workers) that allowed them to work for the same employer year after year without going through the formal contracting procedures. Being a special was a privilege, reserved for model workers. Camacho described his first several months in the United States:
I was a young man and I have always liked adventures. I had heard about the U.S., but I never dreamed I would be able to go. The work was not as hard as the work I had done in Mexico. I cut sugar cane in Mexico. No work I have ever done has been as hard as that. And ever since I was a kid I have liked to work. I like the companionship. I like the activity. When I was young I didn’t like games where you sat down. I liked soccer and boxing. When I worked in Chula Vista thinning celery, I would grab the short-handled hoe out of pure pleasure and race the other young men. We raced for the fun of it.
In Chula Vista, Pablo raced through tomatoes, celery, squash, and cucumbers. He bought his 1949 Ford, rented a room in a Tijuana hotel, paid board at a local restaurant, and using his mica, commuted across the border every day but Sunday. He worked for the same Japanese boss—all the bosses in Chula Vista were Japanese back then, he said—for six years, from 1954 to 1960, returning regularly to Mexico in December to work a few months at the sugar refinery. In 1960 his boss in Chula Vista gave him the documentation he needed for a visa. He never went back to the refinery.
In 1964, Pablo married Bertaliza Lopez, a woman from Culiacán, Sinaloa. After having two children, the family dropped out of their car pool and made the apple, strawberry, and lettuce town of Watsonville their permanent home. Bertaliza went to work with Pablo in the strawberries while Pablo’s sister took care of their kids. “Bertaliza had never worked outside the house before. In Mexico in the old days we didn’t have the custom of the women working. The man worked and the woman stayed home and took care of the household. But Bertaliza wanted to work. She was stubborn about it.”
It is tough to begin farmwork in the strawberries, not only because the plants are so low to the ground but because of the way people are paid—by how many flats of berries they pick individually. Bertaliza, with no agricultural experience, ignorant of the tricks of strawberry picking, and unaccustomed to bending over or squatting all day long, worked harder than she ever had, without making much money. Farm workers say that people who work for an individual piece rate “die alone.” A friend of mine from Vera Cruz, a city boy who also tried to begin life as a farm worker in the strawberries, quit after three days. “That’s not work,” he said. “It’s a punishment from God.”
The Japanese owner of the strawberry farm paid half the Camachos’ rent even after Pablo moved on to a celery crew. It was 1965, the braceros were gone, labor was scarce, and the strawberry farmer wanted to make sure that Pablo would return the next spring, after the celery was finished. But it was still the bad old days in the celery:
There were two foremen, one was a Filipino and the other was a Mexican. They would put names of people on the work list who were not working. We called them muertos, dead men. Since the whole crew was being paid by the number of boxes we cut and packed, the muertos were getting part of our money. It was a perfect scam. The rancher was still paying the same amount, so he wasn’t upset, but the foremen were taking part of our earnings.
And we had to work hard. There were times we worked so long that they had to turn on the lights of the trucks so that we could see the celery. We worked ten, eleven, twelve hours a day. The Filipino used to tell us at the end of the day that we had done a good job and probably made thirty or forty dollars. But when we got our checks all we had made was a hundred or a hundred twenty for a six-day week. People were angry, but we never went beyond complaining.
In 1970, Chavez arrived. I got a dispatch for a job in the celery that very first year and began working with a union contract. The difference was tremendous. They paid well, but the main thing was they couldn’t rob us anymore. They had to give us