At the hearing, Konklyn argued that there never was any agreement to pay $2 per thousand for a 90 percent success rate. Rather, he occasionally tipped workers whose previous year’s grafting had turned out to be particularly successful, and he had come to Bakersfield that very day with a check of $30 for Mr. Camacho, who was, indeed, an excellent and careful worker. Camacho, who was owed $62 for the two weeks’ work, threw the check to the ground, exclaiming that he had never taken an unearned penny in his life, and he wanted no tips, only what was owed him. The commissioner reproached him for ungratefulness and declared the hearing closed. Camacho refused to leave; the commissioner called the cops who carried Epifanio out of the office and released him. He did not feel defeated. It had been a matter of principle. But when he returned to Montebello, the foreman refused to let him start work. He had been fired. No other rose company nor any other agricultural outfit in the area would hire him. He couldn’t even get a job in the sugar beets, the absolute worst-paid job around, paying as little as $3 a day on bad days. He was on the bola negra, the blacklist. In the spring of 1965, he had to steal food from the fields at night so that he and his wife and their two daughters could eat.
Meanwhile, he kept talking to other rose grafters about the back pay. His story got around. Someone told him to look up Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association. He had never heard of either one, but he had no trouble finding the association’s storefront office in Delano. Cesar was courteous enough, interested in Camacho’s life and his work (they even went out to the roses together, so that Chavez could see how the grafting was done), but Chavez insisted up-front that the NFWA wasn’t set up to organize strikes. Camacho pressed Chavez: Just what was the strategy of his group? Chavez explained that eventually they might get involved in strikes, but now they had to focus on building the organization, making it so big and strong that the members could truly help one another, and so powerful that they could force the politicians to pass laws that would give farm workers the same benefits that other workers already had: a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, good pensions. Camacho was not convinced, but neither was he easily deterred. He paid his $3.50 and joined the association, in hopes that he could change Chavez’s mind. In turn, Chavez suggested that Camacho set up a meeting of workers at his house, and promised to come and listen to their stories, and see what he could do to help.
Only four workers came to Epifanio’s house for that first meeting, but Camacho was still eager and Chavez always liked to pyramid house meetings, so together they scheduled another one. This time, Camacho focused his efforts on a single company, Mt. Arbor, and almost all the grafters, about thirty men, showed up. After a long discussion, they decided they wanted to strike. Chavez did not oppose their decision. A third meeting was scheduled, both to see if the men’s resolve would hold and to decide the details and demands of the strike. Camacho had won Chavez over. The NFWA dropped everything else and prepared for its first strike.
One last pre-strike meeting was held at Guadalupe Church. All of Mt. Arbor’s rose grafters came. The NFWA contingent included Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and Jim Drake. Cesar chaired the meeting. The workers set their wage demands, agreed to hold out for a contract, and decided that the NFWA would represent them in negotiations with the company. They also agreed that a picket line was unnecessary, as there weren’t enough skilled grafters to scab effectively. By not picketing, they would also be less exposed to potential blacklisting if it turned out that they lost the strike. They would simply not go to work, an old farm worker tactic used by the Wobbly-Magonistas, who had given it various names: walk-away, fade-out, stay-at-home.4 At the end of the meeting, Huerta handed Chavez a ten-inch wooden crucifix with a broken cross piece. Cesar held it in the air before the small assembly. He wanted the workers to swear on the cross that they would honor the strike and not go back to work until there was a contract. He passed it back to Huerta, who handed it to one of the men. He swore fidelity and passed the crucifix to the next man. Camacho was shocked. He believed in God, but didn’t believe that politics and religion should be mixed like this. He wondered what Jim Drake, the Protestant minister, thought. Camacho didn’t want to complicate the proceedings with a public refusal, so when the crucifix reached him, he also swore that he would be loyal to the strike and the other men. But he was angry at Chavez for not checking with him on this particular tactic before the meeting. And he believed that it was only a tactic, meant to extract the deepest possible commitment from the grafters, as Chavez had not talked to him about religion in the thirty days that they had been working together.5
The strike lasted three days. The workers had been right about the incompetence of scab workers: when the Mt. Arbor management brought in a small crew of Filipino strikebreakers, they couldn’t do the work. And the other grafters in town—about two hundred men, almost all known to one another—were not interested in breaking their compatriots’ strike. The company’s only hope was to get the strikers to return to work. For all three days of the strike, the NFWA leaders were up before dawn, scouting the workers’ homes, knocking on the door of any house where the lights were on to make sure that the grafter who lived there was not preparing to go to work. Once, when Dolores Huerta doubted the word of one of the strikers, she blocked his driveway with her truck, locked it, took her key and left. Dolores’s bold act, prefiguring many to come, was much celebrated inside the NFWA, and later became one of the main stories told about the rose strike—the heroine organizer preventing a reluctant worker from scabbing. The story, however, inverted the actual trajectory of the struggle, because it had been a bold worker, Camacho, who had activated the reluctant NFWA organizers.
The day the strike started, the NFWA tried to begin negotiations with the company. Huerta went to the local Mt. Arbor office, where a company official called her a Communist and briskly escorted her out of the building. The parent company, Jackson & Perkins, was more polite to Chris Hartmire, but it also refused to negotiate. Its representatives were curious about the nature of the NFWA, though. They pressed Hartmire on whether it was a union.
On Wednesday, day three of the strike, company foremen visited many of the striking grafters. Their message was both an offer and a threat. They would accept all the wage demands, including dropping the 90 percent scam, but they would not sign a contract. Anybody who did not show up for work on Thursday would never work for the company again. That night Chavez, Jim Drake, Gil Padilla, Bill Esher, and Wendy Goepel were in a little trailer behind the office talking about the strike; they were divided on how to respond to the company’s offer. When a small group of grafters knocked on the door and asked Chavez to come outside, Padilla, who advocated holding out for a contract, suspected that these workers wanted to go back to work. He urged Cesar not to talk to them, to tell them to wait until the next day when all the strikers could have a formal meeting to discuss what to do. But Chavez, who favored accepting the wage concessions without a contract, went outside and gave the workers his permission to return to work without a general meeting. Padilla was furious. He knew the strike was over. After the group of night visitors went back to work on Thursday, everybody returned on Friday. The company backed down on its threat, accepted all the men back, and kept its promise on the wages. And within a couple of weeks, all the other companies had been forced to raise their wages, as they did not want to lose their best grafters to Mt. Arbor.6
El Malcriado hailed the victory, and the NFWA organizers assessed its meaning. Jim Drake thought that they might possibly have won a contract and was disappointed when the strikers went back to work, but ultimately he agreed with Chavez: “It was premature, we didn’t have enough people, we didn’t have the masses of farm workers. It was a very special situation; Epifanio was a very special person. It was better to get the raise and get out.”7 Padilla saw the incident as a lost opportunity, and an example of the NFWA’s confusion over its own goals. If the association had been a union, if Hartmire could have said to the parent company, yes, we are a union, then the company might have negotiated with them. Camacho, he argued, had been exactly right about the situation in the fields: nobody who was capable of doing the work was going to scab. If the men had held out, and if the NFWA had been unequivocal, the strike might have been a total victory. But Camacho was not at all discouraged. The workers had won the full raise they demanded. He wasn’t even