WHAT CAN ONE MAN DO?
Q. Is there any fast way to make wages and working conditions improve?
A. No. For people to learn their own value and to learn not to be afraid takes a long time.
Q. What is the way it can be done?
A. Through many small strikes and a final grand strike, the people will become strong enough to tell the growers how much they are worth and to get it.
Q. But what can one man do?
A. Everything! The roots of this country, and the roots of the Mexican Revolution, were established by a very few men. It is always a very few men who are responsible for the great social changes in the world. It was one man, for example, Gandhi, who led the huge country of India out of slavery. You, also, are one man.
Q. Exactly how can one man do what needs to be done?
A. One can first learn how to fight and then find ways to struggle against the system that keeps the farm worker poor. For example it was one man that started the action in the Rose Strike this year that led to big wage increases for all the workers in an entire crop.
Q. Where can one man start?
A. By joining together with his fellow workers in the association, which is working toward the big strike.13
“We were the malcriados, the bad boys,” Bill Esher said years later, “and we were thrilled by the strike wave. But Chavez went back and forth. Some days he was the very spirit of the Mexican Revolution, but other days he was a conservative man running a small business, worried about its survival. His Mexican Revolution side welcomed the strikes; his conservative side was worried about them.” Esher acknowledged that Cesar’s concerns were legitimate, but he himself wasn’t much worried by the growing farm worker rebellion:
By the summer of 1965, there was no uniform strategy. Things were out of control, completely. I didn’t worry about that. I was excited by the growth of the movement. I knew the history, that the growers had crushed big farm worker movements in the past, and that the same thing could happen to this one. But at the same time I loved all the action, all the rebellion, and I wanted to encourage it. Cesar was tremendously excited too, but he was also afraid. He was working on two levels: he wanted people to move, to be willing to take on the growers, to strengthen their own self-respect by taking things into their own hands, but at the same time he didn’t want people to do things that would lead to defeats.14
A few months before El Malcriado’s declaration of neo-Wobblyism, the newspaper had moved a few houses down the street, and was no longer being written and laid out in the NFWA office. Chavez was not writing many of the articles and was no longer the translator. Esher still talked over the coming articles with Cesar before he wrote them up; he almost always followed Chavez’s suggestions, and never defied any of his clear directives. But by mid-summer of 1965, Esher was clearly the person most responsible for the content, and Chavez and the executive board didn’t really know what was going to be in the paper until it came out. Sometimes Chavez would criticize an article after he read it, but Esher doesn’t remember any particular criticism of the two neo-Wobbly calls to action. Esher thinks those two articles were possibly influenced by the presence of Eugene Nelson in Delano. Nelson, an old friend of Dolores Huerta’s, stopped by Delano with his daughter that summer on his way to Mexico, and stayed for the next couple of years. Esher and Nelson got along well:
I was familiar with the Wobblies from my old Catholic Worker days, but Gene was the first card-carrying Wobbly I had ever met, although he was a revolutionary artist rather than a worker. He was really enthusiastic about the strikes, as they fit perfectly with his ideas about change. I was talking to him a lot, and those articles sound a lot like him. Of course, you can see Cesar’s influence, too, with the mention of Gandhi. At the time, Cesar and I were both reading the same book about Gandhi, passing our one copy back and forth, and talking it over whenever we got a chance.15
Chavez’s mixed reaction to the growing strike movement would soon not matter at all. Farm workers were not waiting to see on which side of the fence he finally landed. Their strikes increased, in number and intensity. In September they tumbled into Cesar’s own backyard, less than two miles from the NFWA’s office door. Chavez faced a stark choice: would he seize the opportunities created by the growing movement or seek a safe haven where he could wait out what he feared would be that movement’s ultimate ebb and probable defeat? Although Chavez chose hope, his fears were well founded. For the NFWA, as conceived by its founder, could not survive the crucible of the strike. The association was transformed—nay, doomed. A union was in the birth canal. And Chavez, despite all the years of struggle and effort he would give to nurturing this new creation, was never entirely satisfied with what became of the new child.
August to November ’65
It takes a lot of people, working much of the year, to grow table grapes. Grape vines left to themselves do not produce uniform bunches of grapes suitable for shipping, unlike, for example, lettuce seedlings, which grow into heads of lettuce with a minimum of weeding and thinning. Vines have to be pruned, tied, and girdled. The developing grapes must be thinned and tipped. Finally, just before the harvest, some of the leaves must be pulled off so that the grapes will be exposed to the sun and become sweeter. People with tools in their hands do all of that work. None of it has ever been successfully mechanized. Without this extensive pre-harvest demand for labor, large numbers of farm workers would not have been able to establish permanent residency in the area around Delano, and the two large communities of nonmigrant, professional farm workers—the Mexican Americans of the barrios and the Filipinos in labor camps, which the NFWA and AWOC were trying to organize—would not have existed.
Table grapes require not only a large number of workers but, at various points in the growing cycle, a significant supply of relatively skilled ones. In the Delano area, pruning extends from December to March and involves 2,000 people at its peak, usually in January. Before 1970 all of this work was done by men; now some women prune. How a vine is pruned goes a long way toward determining the quantity and quality of the grapes it will bear, as well as what the viticulturists call the “vigor” (rate of growth) of the plant. Nothing can be done to make a poorly pruned vine produce enough good fruit in the upcoming season, while an especially bad job of pruning can ruin a vine for years. One grower estimates that a pruner makes 200 difficult decisions in any eight-hour workday; learning to prune “comes best and most easily from years of pruning along with older workers, in the comforting shade of their years of experience.”1
Pruning is followed by spraying (sulfur, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers) and careful irrigating, neither of which is labor-intensive. A large amount of labor is then needed to tie the spurs to the trellises. This work is done by men and women and requires stamina and patience but not any specialized knowledge. Girdling and thinning come next, in the spring. Girdling is particularly difficult. Workers cut through the hard bark of the vine, completely encircling the stalk, usually down low at the trunk. This cut, when done correctly, forces the sap of the plant to remain in the upper part of the vine and increases the amount of sugar that the vine stores in the grapes, as well as the actual number of grapes. The cut is a delicate one: if too shallow, the sap won’t rise; if too deep, the vine will die. And the surgical use of the special knife has to be done while bent over, by men who are working as fast as they can, because girdling is always done by individual piece-rate workers. Thus, the girdlers are the most skilled of the grape workers, and when they learn the job well enough to do it quickly, they are the best paid. At the same time that the girdlers are working, many men and women thin and tip the grapes. Left to themselves, grapes come in odd-shaped bunches, with the berries so densely packed that they impede on one another’s growth and remain small. Thinning and tipping produces the characteristic shape and size of the bunches that end up at supermarkets. About 3,000 people are needed for thinning and tipping, which continues into the early summer. Large numbers are also