For the California growers, the end of the Bracero Program had become the worst kind of concession: the growers’ defeat, rather than dampening farm workers’ enthusiasm and channeling their battles into more acceptable venues, as concessions often do, only encouraged workers to fight, and with a more threatening set of demands. Rarely has the age-old fear of appeasement turned out to be more prophetic: the growers gave an inch, and farm workers took a mile.
The rose strike was part of a general rebellion that broke out in the fields in 1965. The California Department of Employment officially acknowledged that there were sixty-three agricultural “labor disputes” that year.8 It is certainly a low estimate. The on-the-ground battles between farm workers and their employers in 1965 have become part of farm worker lore—and one of the reasons workers remember that time so well is that they won many of those fights. Officially, wages rose from an average of $1.33 an hour in 1964 to $1.50 an hour in 1966, but again, the official figures seem to have underestimated the change. All the farm workers I talked to who were in California in 1965 remembered the general upheaval after the termination of the Bracero Program, and many reported that wages rose sharply. Pablo Camacho, for example, remembers that in 1965 his boss not only raised his wages but also began to pay his rent and give him gas money so that he would not move to another job.
The strikes and accelerating wages were largely a consequence of the labor shortage that followed the shutdown of the Bracero Program. The growers and the INS had anticipated the problem and had done what they could to head it off. Starting in 1961 the Immigration and Naturalization Service began a massive distribution of green cards to Mexican farm workers. The agency kept no record of how many cards they gave out, but estimates go as high as 100,000; by 1969 the INS figured that there were 750,000 Mexican with green cards in the United States. In addition, between 1960 and 1969 the INS issued more than 2.2 million “white cards,” designed as temporary permits but used by farm workers to immigrate illegally to the U.S.9
But green cards and white cards weren’t enough in 1965. California growers, especially those far from the border, still had to scramble for workers. They tried to use Los Angeles County welfare recipients, members of the Lakota Sioux tribe from North Dakota, Navajos from New Mexico, high school football players, and housewives, but they still couldn’t find enough experienced workers to get the job done.10 Knowing they had the whip hand, farm workers once again moved onto the offensive. The galloping farm worker movement interfered with the plans of the NFWA, which was concentrating on self-help programs and was not prepared for mass activity. But the NFWA was flexible enough to change course, and it began to endorse the strike activity. Chavez—suffering from a bad case of pneumonia—did not have too much to do with this new direction, although he gave it a critical, lukewarm endorsement. (He had to go to the hospital in Bakersfield soon after the rose strike ended, and then spent a few weeks home in bed.) It was mostly the Migrant Ministry—sponsored staff, supported by enthusiastic articles in El Malcriado, who aligned the NFWA with the quickly ascending farm worker movement. Nobody voted on the policy change; it just seemed to happen, as if the organizers had stumbled into a small stream, liked the feel of the water, and got swept into the rapids.
The NFWA’s next battle was a rent strike over bad conditions in a labor camp that Migrant Ministry organizers learned about while going door-to-door passing out contraceptive foam to farm worker women. The Woodville and Linnell camps, built by the Farm Security Administration in 1938, contained 400 structures, the majority of which were small one-room shacks, made completely out of heavy tin, or wood siding with tin roofs. For ten years the FSA had provided these “houses” to farm workers free of charge. In 1950, the FSA gave the camps to the Tulare County Housing Authority, which charged rents—$18 to $38 a month by 1964. In 1965, the authority wanted to raise the rent by as much as 47 percent. The increase was especially steep for farm worker families that had to rent several structures so that all of their children would have a place to sleep. As an added insult, the rent was being raised for shacks that had already been condemned by the Tulare County Health Department. To keep the inside temperatures bearable during the summer months, tenants had to find heavy carpets or old mattresses, throw them over the roofs of the hovels, and keep them soaking wet day and night. After hearing the residents’ complaints, Gilbert Padilla, David Havens of the Migrant Ministry, and Jim Drake decided to try to organize some kind of rent strike.11
One of the main complainants was Pablo Espinoza, who was occasionally employed by the housing authority to do some work in the camps, and was a member of a large extended family that rented several shacks in the Woodville camp. Espinoza, who later became a farm worker leader in the UFW, was the fourth of twelve children in a family that in the 1940s and ’50s had followed the sugar beets from the Rio Grande Valley to Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Ohio, moving from one labor camp to another. Everywhere they went, blacks, whites, and Mexicans lived in different areas but usually shared the same toilet and shower facilities, when they existed. In Mississippi the family stayed in former slave quarters. Pablo was born in one camp, learned to read Spanish in another, fell in love in a third, and lost his mother in yet another temporary home, to severe hemorrhaging that followed the birth of her last child.12
As Pablo came into early manhood, the family’s migratory route shifted from south–north to east–west: three generations traveling together began to follow the cotton from the lower Rio Grande Valley to West Texas, Arizona, and California. In 1960 the entire family came to Tulare County, where most of them settled, working in the wine grapes, tomatoes, and sugar beets. Only Espinoza’s father continued his yearly travels, by this time almost a pilgrimage, back to the lower Rio Grande Valley.
Pablo was quick to pick up on Gilbert’s way of thinking, as he was quick to pick up on everything. Having no more than a fourth-grade education, he had learned mathematics and English while working in a cotton gin, and now he learned politics from Padilla, whom he called “our first professor.” He became a primary spokesman for the rent-strikers. Their strategy was simple. The tenants, organized into formal camp committees, refused to pay the rent hikes. Instead, they paid the old rates into a special escrow account. Next, they organized a seven-mile march from Linnell to Visalia; a couple of hundred people walked in mid-summer heat: residents of the camp were joined by various supporters, including representatives of the American Friends Service Committee (John Soria was one), Citizens for Farm Labor, and Students for Farm Labor, one Sister Immaculada, clad in an all-white habit, and Brother Gilbert, a member of the Christian Brothers order who taught at Garces High School in Bakersfield. A farm worker march of that size, and with that kind of broad support, stirred some liberal California politicians to sponsor an investigation into the Tulare County Housing Authority. Before the summer was over, the rent increases were formally rescinded, and promises were made (and eventually kept) to rebuild the camps.
That summer of 1965, El Malcriado began to promote strikes openly. In its first six months, it had championed the self-organization and self-respect of farm workers, and had encouraged workers to unite and fight for a better life, but its primary focus was on the benefits of NFWA membership. The overwhelming weight of cascading events, however, shifted the paper’s focus. First the rose strike, then a victorious strike of grape pickers, represented by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, in the Coachella Valley, next the rent strike and march, and finally another (unsuccessful) walkout of grape workers. El Malcriado enthusiastically featured them all—and called for more. “How to Strike” read a bold headline in early August, with the following suggestions:
1. Talk to your crew: make sure everyone is with you.
2. Make a strike committee.
3. Come to the association for advice and help.
This method of linking up with rank-and-file militants had been used by AWOC in the strike happy years between 1959 and 1961, but had been explicitly opposed by the NFWA at its founding convention and throughout its first three years of existence. The next issue of El Malcriado made an even greater departure, promoting strikes as the main way of gaining power, and even resurrecting the old Wobbly idea of “one big strike” that would transform the whole relationship between