In the aftermath of the strike, the NFWA leadership and the growers argued over how many people actually had participated. The growers claimed that no more than 500 people walked out in the first couple of weeks and that most of them subsequently returned. The NFWA claimed that 5,000 had walked out and that the vast majority never returned but were replaced by scabs, mostly people from Mexico. Great efforts were made on both sides to establish the validity of their own figures. But the debate was beside the point. In the long run, the number of people who originally left the fields and what percentage of them returned, mattered not one whit. The figure that counted in the battles to come was the number of loyalists who in the process of the strike were recruited, body and soul, to the NFWA and Cesar Chavez. Many of them were outside supporters, not farm workers, but the majority were exactly the people whom the NFWA had been trying to organize since 1962: the Mexican American farm worker families who had settled in the small towns of the southern Central Valley.
Although the strike’s first great accomplishment among farm workers was the solidarity of the Mexican and Filipino strikers, its most lasting achievement was that about a hundred original strikers, plus a few other militant farm workers who came to Delano to get in on the action, joined the farm worker families who had been fully committed to the NFWA before the strike. These people together, somewhat more than a few hundred strong, remained fully committed to the strike even as the growers managed to resume full production in October and November. They got up early in the morning and went to the picket lines, and often volunteered at the NFWA office in the afternoon and evenings. In the early days they survived on nothing more than the donations of food and clothing that poured into the Delano office, plus the once-a-day meals at Filipino Hall. Many of these people remained part of the union family over the next five years. Some of them turned their lives upside down, leaving the small towns that had been their homes and traveling to the nation’s largest cities to become the crucial players in what came next the biggest, most successful boycott in U.S. history.
* Depending on the conditions workers could usually pick two to four boxes an hour, so the twenty-five-cent incentive the workers wanted would add a minimum of fifty cents an hour. The previous year the wage was $1.25 plus ten cents a box, putting the hourly average at about $1.50. (See Dunne, Delano.)
* Law has it limits. Some Pinoys went to Arizona or Mexico where they could get legally married and others set up households with women and children in what I suppose could be called illegal families.
September ’65 to January ’66
Generations of California growers and police officials have done what they could to keep farm workers separated from their potential allies in the rest of the country. In the 1950s, the DiGiorgio Corporation managed to get a court order to ban and destroy all copies of a film about a farm worker strike. In the 1930s, reporters were arrested in rural California counties for filing harvest strike stories in big city newspapers. In 1934, Imperial County’s Sheriff Charles Gillett prohibited a Nation journalist from sending a cable to New York from a local Western Union office. Despite the sheriff ’s efforts, news did get to Los Angeles about the 1934 strike, and about twenty people set out for the Imperial Valley on what they called a “Good Will Tour” to bring aid to the strikers. The sheriff and his deputies stopped them at the Imperial County line, where everyone in the caravan was handcuffed and arrested.1
Even more than geographical distance, however, race and language separated farm workers from other people. With the brief exceptions of fruit tramps in the early 1900s and Okies in the late thirties, California farm workers have been primarily Asian or Mexican immigrants who were often monolingual in languages other than English. The fictions of race were hard enough to break through, but not being able to talk to other people made it especially difficult to reach out to them for aid. The isolation of farm workers was even codified in law. In 1936, farm workers were purposefully written out of the National Labor Relations Act, and between 1941 and 1965, a large percentage of farm workers were braceros legally separated from other U.S. workers.
But space and race were very different in 1965 than they had been thirty years before. Television, radio, faster cars, better roads, and both commercial and private airplane travel had shrunk the country and brought the California fields closer to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. World War II, the Jackie Robinson–led integration of major league baseball, and the early civil rights movement had transformed many people’s attitudes towards race. The fact that farm workers were mostly “nonwhite” was no longer a guarantee that other sectors of society would not support their struggles. Interracial solidarity had blossomed in the early sixties. Many white Americans had been willing to support African Americans, opening the possibility that they would also support Mexican Americans, and even Mexican immigrants.*
When farm workers first refused to go to work in Delano in 1965, they were still isolated, largely unknown to the dominant, citified American culture. But the conditions that had produced that isolation had changed. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the stage was set for farm workers to reach out to potential white supporters in American cities—but a set stage does not a drama make. Farm workers needed a strategy to connect them to their potential supporters in the cities. They needed someone to help them find a way out of their rural, racial, linguistic, and legal isolation. They found that someone, and he found the boycott.
Cesar Chavez first heard about the possibilities of a boycott soon after the grape strike began. Jim Drake was driving him to a fundraiser on the California coast, and in the relative calm of the drive, he told Cesar the story of the Irish campaign against Captain Charles Boycott, a story Drake had stumbled upon in a book whose name he had forgotten. In the late nineteenth century, Captain Boycott’s job was to collect rents from impoverished Irish peasants and turn them over to wealthy Anglo-Irish landlords. Led by a small-town priest, the peasants, some of them literally starving, decided to stop paying the rent and to ostracize the rent collector from the community in which he lived. No one would sell him anything, nor would anyone buy his goods. Laborers refused to work on Boycott’s small piece of land. He and his wife were isolated, shunned. The Irish government sent a regiment of troops to defend Boycott, but he didn’t need defending. No one had threatened him with violence. Useless, the troops quartered themselves on his land, chopped down his trees for firewood, and ate his livestock. The campaign became famous, not only in Ireland but in London and New York, and was promoted by the Irish Land League as a nonviolent alternative to the contemporaneous armed struggle for Irish independence. Boycott was ruined, a prisoner in his own home, and finally left town in disgrace.2
Drake could see that the story pleased Chavez. How could it not? The boycott required thorough organization. The peasants’ poverty and Catholicism had helped unite them. At the center of the story was an organizer, a small-town priest. But Cesar did not immediately take hold of the idea. The campaign against Captain Boycott had been a local affair. Local folks had made their power felt against a local enemy. Sure, other Irish peasants used the same technique against their own tax collectors—in that sense it had spread—but what Chavez was looking for was a way of involving other forces in the grape strike, not of moving the strike to other areas. He agreed it was an excellent story, but he would not commit himself.
At the time, labor boycotts—strangled by law and lacking appeal because of the general disdain toward AFL-CIO officialdom—had degenerated into the largely ignored “Unfair” lists in the back of union newspapers. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott repopularized the word, but in that case the people doing the