They had a weekend to prepare. The staff called the Oakland Catholic Worker collective and the Bay Area Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and two SNCC organizers came down immediately. Certified letters were sent to the growers, asking for negotiations. Chavez approached Delano’s mayor and a friend in the California State Mediation and Conciliation Service, hoping that they could convince the growers to talk, but the growers rejected all offers. Picket captains were appointed and assigned to various ranches. Huerta met with Itliong, who dropped his request that the NFWA join AWOC, and welcomed its direct participation in the strike.
All that remained was a meeting with AWOC’s Al Green. Hartmire set it up, with himself as the mediator. Chavez and Drake represented the NFWA; Green came alone. Chavez, whose NFWA had little money, proposed a joint strike fund to Green, who had access to plenty. AWOC was paying as much as $40 a week to the Filipino strikers. Green said no, he wouldn’t share funds. Nor would he agree to a joint strike committee or sign a mutual nonraiding pact. He did agree that the two groups should make the same strike demands and cooperate fully in what, technically, would be separate strikes. After the meeting, Green and Chavez stood together to have their pictures taken.
Green left town immediately afterward. He was still disdainful of the NFWA and “that Mexican,” as he called Chavez. He was not interested in the strike; Itliong could run it. He was confident that his backing from the AFL-CIO and his close relations with West Coast Teamster leaders meant that he held all the important cards in AWOC’s rivalry with the NFWA. In fact, everything had been worked out by those below him, and the meeting had done little more than fill him in on the news. His hand was far weaker than he assumed. The AFL-CIO money would do him little good. That Mexican, the little man he had just brushed off, was several jumps ahead of him, about to become a darling of history. And although history often chooses her darlings capriciously, this time she did not. Her favors were bestowed on the one who best understood her current passions and inclinations.
The first day of the strike, Monday, September 20, about a hundred people showed up at the NFWA office ready to picket. Most of the others who had voted to strike four days earlier went back to work. Were they really on strike? No official union offering even minimum benefits had called this strike, nor had there been a spontaneous walkout to set it off. The doubt was so pervasive that even Teresa Fabela, Helen Chavez’s sister and sometime babysitter, went to work at the Mid-State Vineyards. This wasn’t a serious familial betrayal; it was just a reflection of the general confusion.22
People may have gone to work not knowing whether the strike was on, but once the pickets appeared, many walked off the job. Enough people joined in the first two weeks—several hundreds for sure, perhaps thousands—so that production was seriously reduced. The NFWA leadership transformed the quickly escalating number of volunteers, both farm workers and student, church, and labor supporters, into an effective organization. They drew a tight circle with a nine-mile radius and declared it the official strike zone, where no on could work.23 Beyond the circle, work could proceed as usual. This had always been a common, informal strike tactic among farm workers; now, the skilled, experienced organizers of the NFWA formalized it by organizing car pools to take workers to other jobs away from the strike area. The organizers also got official strike certification at some thirty ranches within the strike zone. State certification came with documentation that showed that at least one worker at the ranch had gone on strike, which prevented the state employment service from legally sending workers to those ranches and also made it more difficult for the growers to claim that no strike existed. The NFWA organized a set of “flying squadrons,” which, just like the roving automobile picket lines of the cotton strike thirty-one years earlier, set out in the early morning, armed with the workers’ knowledge of picking patterns and their own informal intelligence reports, to find and harass the remaining scabs.24
The first great triumph of the strike was the newfound warmth and solidarity between the Mexican and Filipino strikers. The AWOC was supposed to picket certain ranches and the NFWA others, but from the beginning the Filipino and Mexican picketers intermingled, stood up to the police and growers together, and jointly tried to convince the workers to leave the fields. Gilbert Padilla’s experience was representative. “For the first time I began to talk to the Filipinos as brothers and friends. Before that we never talked to them, and they never talked to us.”25 Out of conversations like that among hundreds of workers came the invitation from the Filipinos to the Mexican strikers to come eat at Filipino Hall. Food was free there for AWOC strikers, paid for by the AFL-CIO. Meanwhile, the NFWA pickets had been trying to get by on baloney sandwiches from the association hall or on the small amounts of food they could afford to prepare at home. Neither sufficed, and many NFWA strikers came to the picket lines hungry, a fact not lost on the Filipino strikers. The invitation to Filipino Hall came without prior approval from either Green or Itliong and without the knowledge of the NFWA leadership. This was just the kind of cooperation that Green had denied Chavez at their meeting just before the strike. But looking at it from the bottom up, how could there be any objection? There seemed to be plenty of food. Letting the Mexicans eat at the hall did not mean that the Filipinos would have any less. And what better way to strengthen the bonds of solidarity? Two sets of strikers sitting down to eat together, the Filipinos sharing one of the most prized parts of their culture, unable to hide their pleasure as some Mexicans began to appreciate the Filipino food they had long ridiculed. Those meals made Filipino Hall into Strike Central, and the memory of that shared pleasure would endure long after most of the Filipino and Mexican strikers had gone their separate ways.
But Chavez had been right; this time his pessimism about strikes proved to be well grounded. This was no little skirmish that the growers would be inclined to settle quickly. They were reluctant to give ground on wages and even more opposed to recognizing either of the two organizations as official representatives of the workers. Through an extensive network of labor contractors, the growers recruited strikebreakers from outside the area—first from Tulare, Stockton, and Bakersfield, later from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and finally from as far away as Oregon, Texas, and Mexico. Local judges issued injunctions that set limits on the picketers’ ability to gather in large numbers or get close enough to talk to the scabs. The Delano police and California Highway Patrol faithfully enforced the injunctions, and were quick to arrest aggressive strikers but slow to constrain equally aggressive foremen and supervisors. The police were particularly reluctant to take on the growers, some of whom drove their cars dangerously close to the picket lines or threatened strikers by firing shotguns in the air. Other growers quietly met the strikers’ wage demands, encouraging people to come back to work and allowing those who did to argue in their own defense that the main demand of the strike had been won.
As many local Mexican strikers returned to their jobs, the Filipinos began to waver. Their biggest concern was the possible loss of their homes, as the growers began housing strikebreakers in the old Filipino camps. At what point would they lose their place in the camps indefinitely? Where else would they live? They couldn’t live in the Filipino Hall forever. In the first weeks of October, when it seemed clear that the strike would not be strong enough to force the growers to capitulate, the Filipinos started to return to the camps. The foremen, who were often the authentic leaders in the Filipino bachelor community and intermediaries between the men and the bosses, led the return. Pete Velasco, who later became a member of the UFW Executive Board, was one of only two foreman who did not go back to work. Although the AWOC officially