Maniz’s father had been a fieldworker in Jacona, a small city in Michoacán. He worked on other people’s land for wages, or sometimes he was paid just with food. He claimed that he paid fifty centavos (about twenty-five cents) to cross the border to the U.S. in 1944. He worked his way up the coast: Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Salinas. In 1950, he went to work for an Italian named Joe Felice in Hollister, who let him live rent-free in a house next to one of his orchards. Felice had apricots, plums, and walnuts. Maniz’s dad pruned, irrigated, sprayed, thinned, and harvested. Soon Joe Felice fixed Maniz’s father’s papers. He was working for Felice on the day he died.
Maniz joined his dad on Felice’s farm in the late 1960s. The bracero program was over, and there was no shortage of work:
The growers grabbed everybody: drunks, cripples, drug addicts. If you were a Mexican and you could stand on your own two feet, they tried to put you to work. There wasn’t any trouble with the migra [immigration authorities] back then. I went to work with my dad and some of my other brothers in 1967 in the apricot orchards. We all picked together and a few of us pruned together. We all thinned. When picking time came, the women worked in the sheds while we picked in the fields. And when we finished on Joe Felice’s farm, we would go work on the ranches owned by Felice’s friends. All those Italians passed us around. They didn’t pay much. They started at a dollar and change an hour. But you could buy a pair of Levis for six or seven dollars. Gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon. At that price you could drive forever.
Drive they did. Maniz and his brothers followed the harvests into the Central Valley for a few years, but then Maniz settled down in Watsonville and got a job in a frozen-food plant, stacking boxes at Green Giant. He didn’t like it. The machines were so loud he couldn’t talk to anyone. He missed the fellowship of the fields. In 1974, one of his brothers invited him to learn the celery and brought him to the UFW union hall in Oxnard.
Celery was the hardest job I had ever done. When you entered the celery with a union dispatch they gave you three days to learn. They couldn’t fire you in the first three days for not being able to keep up with the crew. But, really, if you didn’t have anybody helping you it was impossible to make it. People just walked off the job, sometimes in the first hours. Lots of times they would just not show up the second day. But you know, at that time, they needed celery cutters, so the foremen themselves would cut in your row for you. The foremen wanted you to make it. And the people would encourage you. “Go to it, Maniz, don’t give up, you can make it. Here is where you can make the money.” Or some people would scream, “Oh, you will never make it,” as a way of encouraging you. Most people who come out to learn the celery don’t make it. The best thing is to have relatives or friends on the crews helping you. Afterward, you are even closer to your friends. You drink beers together, you become compadres, you look out for each other the rest of your lives.
Once Maniz learned to cut, he worked year round for a while, on the circuit from Salinas to Oxnard and back to Salinas. The men who did that made as much as $25,000 a year. The good times lasted from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s. Apieros, celery workers (from the Spanish word for “celery,” apio), bought homes and established small businesses in Mexico. A few rented land in the U.S. and tried their hand at farming, usually in the strawberries. Maniz wasn’t really careful with his money, did not buy a house, and had no desire to become a small businessman. Then, in 1981, he got hurt.
He was packing. There was a ditch in the middle of the field. It was a muddy day, and he and two fellow packers had to get the burro, or packing cart, over the trench. They took the partially filled boxes off the burro, and lifted it over the ditch. Then Maniz picked up one of the boxes and jumped over the trench with it in his arms. When he hit the other side he couldn’t move. He had injured his back.
I was like a dried-out mummy. I knew it was bad. Ever since then it has been one doctor after another. I damaged a disc is what they tell me. They wanted to operate, put me under the knife. But I have seen a lot of people come out of those back operations worse than before they went in. So I said forget it. Then they wanted to send me back to work, but I refused. Eventually I got a thirteen-thousand-dollar settlement and the promise of a free doctor for my back.
In 1994, Maniz was getting $660 a month from Social Security for his disability. That barely paid the rent. His wife, Beatrice, who worked as a bilingual aid in the local school district, covered the rest of the bills. Their son, Carlos, went to nearby Cabrillo Community College, and Maniz’s brother Samuel lived with the three of them. Samuel still worked in the fields, making about $7 an hour, less than he had made twenty years earlier.
I asked Maniz what happened to the union. How did it fall so far so fast? He did not hesitate:
We got sold out. Some gabacho* working for the union, he was supposed to be representing us. He and a woman they called the Golden Parrot, they both sold us out and then disappeared. They left us for the grave. They had a whole lot of secret meetings with the company, and signed a short-term contract that let it go out of business. They told us about it at the union office. By the time Cesar found out what happened, all the papers had been signed and there wasn’t anything the union could do. The gabacho pretended to be our friend, and then he left with the money. They divided up the sweets among themselves, that gabacho—I can’t remember his name—and the Golden Parrot.
So we not only lost our high wages but also our benefits, our vacations, our seniority, our pensions. We lost everything. They had their whole scene together: the contractors, the scabs, the new companies, the police. And what did we have? Traitors in our midst.
I argued with Maniz for a while, but it was no use. Nothing I could say would dissuade him. This story, which he had been told in the union office, is a wild fabrication, but it’s interesting because it was part of a concerted UFW campaign to blame the union’s demise on what Cesar Chavez would call “malignant forces” inside his organization, forces that Dolores Huerta, a cofounder of the UFW, still claims were led by Marshall Ganz, the union’s lead organizer from 1970 to 1980.
What to make of such charges is one of the concerns of this book, as are the various internal purges and debates that preceded the attacks on Ganz. Who were the traitors and who were the loyalists, and what was being betrayed? Where did farm workers fit in these internal troubles? How important were these battles in the crushing defeat suffered by the UFW, and all California farm workers, in the 1980s?
There are not too many peasants in my family tree. The closest I can come is my paternal grandfather. A nonreligious Odessa Jew, he became a devoted Tolstoyan, believing that Russia’s redemption lay in a prosperous peasantry and a return to the cultural values of the countryside. Depending on which family story you believe, he either borrowed and never paid back or stole a large sum of money from some distant in-laws in Manchuria, and then, in 1910, he, his wife, mother, and four younger brothers left Vladivostok for Alberta, Canada. There they tried to put their ideals into practice, homesteading a farm, but the Bardackes were city folk who knew nothing about farming. They lost the farm and most of the money.
Unlike my grandfather, I didn’t go into the fields for political reasons. I was a New Leftist, but not one of those who consciously set out to “proletarianize” myself as a way of reaching out to the working class. I just needed a job. It was 1971; I was in my thirtieth year and was living in Seaside, California, renting a house right next to the fence that separated the Fort Ord army base from the local community. I had been working at the GI Coffee House in Seaside, one of a string of coffee houses around the world where antiwar activists tried to talk with U.S. soldiers about Vietnam. I made my money as a physical education teacher at an elementary school, but was fired after the school learned I had been arrested six times in Berkeley and Oakland during various demonstrations. I was out of work and down to my last dollars when I picked up a hitchhiker who told me he had gone to the UFW hall in nearby Salinas, where he joined the union and was dispatched to work on a lettuce-thinning crew.
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