—Pablo Espinoza, grape worker and NFWA volunteer, 1995
Epifanio Camacho caused a little stir in the NFWA office in the spring of 1965. “A dark-skinned, jovial, high-spirited man whose remarkable body and movements suggest the grace and strength of a panther” is how an early chronicler of the UFW described him. Bill Esher, too, noticed him right away. Camacho had walked into the Delano office looking for help, but he was not helpless himself. He approached Cesar Chavez as an equal, not a supplicant. Chavez was both intrigued and wary. Esher watched them, listened to some of their conversation, and saw Camacho’s “power and emotion” matched by Chavez’s “presence and cunning.” Esher marveled at the skill with which “Chavez cooled him down without losing his respect.” It was, he thought, another measure of Chavez’s organizing genius. Gilbert Padilla saw the encounter somewhat differently. Camacho, a rose grafter in the nearby town of McFarland, had come with a plan for a strike, and Chavez didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but he was happy to sign up a new recruit to the National Farm Workers Association. “Chavez was just playing around,” keeping Camacho on board, without taking what he said seriously. But Camacho kept coming, kept insisting, talking up his plan to everybody in the office. And it sounded like a good plan to Gilbert Padilla. The rose workers were highly skilled; it would be hard to replace them. Padilla told Camacho that if they could get it well organized, they should go ahead and strike.1
There was nothing of Don Sotaco in Epifanio Camacho. A few years older than Chavez, he had been born into poverty on a small ranch in Tamaulipas in rural Mexico.2 At eighteen, both of his parents dead, he had joined the Mexican army as a way of getting off his brother-in-law’s ejido and out of small-town life. He had had only a couple of years of schooling, but he had learned to read, and he remained picado—hungry for more. He liked army discipline, but for reasons he didn’t understand back then, he could barely bring himself to salute his superiors or the Mexican flag. He stayed in the army no longer than he had to, worked for a while as a carpenter, and then, motivated by the cheap detective novels he favored, joined the police force in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas. He liked the tough-guy, macho ethos of police work, and as he believed what he had been reading in the paperback novels, he also saw it as a way of serving the Mexican people. He was not prepared for the petty corruption of the Victoria cops, and when the opportunity came, he moved on to the Tamaulipas State Police, hoping to find there the desired combination of public service and heroic action. What he found instead was more corruption and utter contempt for poor people. Most disturbing was the routine torture of prisoners, through which the police extorted confessions and bribes. His complaints only brought suspicion down on his own head, and soon he felt completely isolated at work. He quit and ran for the border.
In Matamoros, just shy of the Texas border, he scrounged for work and food. A couple of times, arrested as an indigent, he saw the inside of the city jail. Once he spent three days in solitary after he refused the two other choices: pay a small bribe to the guards or clean the jail toilet. In the early 1950s he regularly crossed the border for work, was picked up a couple of times by the migra, and taken back to Matamoros. Once the Border Patrol picked him up in Corpus Christi, where he was digging graves in a Catholic cemetery. His boss, a priest, was so upset at his being hauled away that when Epifanio returned, the priest went back with him to Matamoros and signed the papers that made Camacho a legal immigrant. On June 6, 1955, Epifanio crossed the border legally for the first time.
For three years he dug graves and picked cotton in Texas and more cotton in Arizona. Loaded lettuce in the Imperial Valley. Picked peaches, apricots, and plums—the ladder crops—in the northern Central Valley, raisins outside of Fresno, wine grapes near Delano. Finally, he worked in the roses in what would become his home town, McFarland. Never partnered up with anyone, as most farm workers do, he remained a bit of a loner. His old pickup truck, with its hand-painted Spanish slogans—“To Wander Is My Destiny”; “Don’t Take Me Lightly”; “I Was Once a Virgin, Too”—were puro Mexicano, as was his conviction that his wife should not work outside the home, as well as his romantic, revolutionary rhetoric.3 He was also anticlerical, a viewpoint he shared with many other farm workers—but his complaints against the papacy and the Catholic Church were somewhat more developed than most. His opinions, which had been shaped by that significant strand of Mexican revolutionary ideology that sees the Catholic Church as a central reactionary institution, were reinforced by the strong anti-Catholicism of his wife, Salome, who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Together, the two were different from most of their neighbors: very Mexican and in some ways more culturally conservative. And while Salome was aggressively Protestant, Epifanio was just plain aggressive.
Always willing to fight for what he felt was right, or to defend his acute sense of honor, he frequently found himself in disputes with his bosses. That had started way back in Mexico, when he was barely an adolescent and had hired himself out to a neighboring farmer. The wages were supposed to be one peso a day, but he received only fifty centavos because, according to the foreman, he was only a child. Camacho had been doing as much work as the men beside him, so he went directly to the farmer to ask for the full wage. The boss said nothing. Instead, he reached into the belt behind him, pulled out a pistol, and fired it into the air. Epifanio the boy turned and ran. Camacho the man would never again be naive about the power of his employers. But the gun blast had worked only temporarily, as Camacho’s fear passed, and he continued to petition his bosses for the wages he thought he had coming to him.
That is how the problem started in the roses, and that is what led Epifanio Camacho to Cesar Chavez and the NFWA. Camacho had become a champion rose grafter, paid by the number of stalks that he and a fellow worker could cut and and then graft with the desired variety of rose. Since the stalks were less than a foot above the ground, the work had to be done while squatting, or on your knees, or completely bent over. The graft had to be inserted carefully or it would not take. Since it was piece work, it had to be done as quickly as possible in order to make decent pay. Only a few people managed to become good at it, but for those who did, the wages were relatively high. An accomplished rose grafter such as Camacho could make $30 or $40 a day, which in the early 1960s was three or four times the minimum wage. Officially the pay was $10 for every thousand plants to the man who cut the stalk, and $8.50 for the man who went behind him and tied in the new rose, but there was a catch: $2 of that piece rate for every man was held back, not to be paid until the following year on the condition that 90 percent of the grafts took. In practice, that $2 was almost never paid, and so the real wage for even the most skilled and efficient workers was effectively 20 to 24 percent below the official wage. Like that Mexican farmer’s pistol shot in the air, the withheld $2 was a naked expression of the bosses’ power, as everyone knew that it had nothing to do with the success or failure of the grafts. Some workers went back to the fields the next year and checked the plants to see how they were doing. Not too many people did that, though, because once they saw that the plants were thriving, there was nothing they could do with the information; it was just bitter proof of how badly they had been cheated.
Camacho decided he would no longer put up with the yearly insult. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to get his fellow grafters to go with him, he went directly to his boss at Montebello Rose and demanded to be paid his full wage. Camacho had to threaten to change companies before the boss eventually relented. He would mail the money directly to Camacho’s house, on condition that he not tell his fellow workers. The boss lived up to his end of the bargain, but not Camacho. He told the others, and even showed them the first year’s check, but the following years he stopped, because the others still weren’t ready to demand their own back wages.
What ultimately led him to the NFWA began with a couple of weeks’ work at Konklyn Nursery in 1964, after the season was over at Montebello. The next year, after checking that the grafts had taken, Camacho got ten other grafters together, and they went to see Mr. Konklyn about their back pay. Konklyn said that they hadn’t hit the 90 percent mark and refused. Epifanio called him a liar. The dispute