Ultimately grape workers and their supporters reawakened the country to the power of the boycott. Their example spurred the Chicana-led boycott of the Farah Pants Company from 1972 to ’74, which was consciously modeled on the farm workers’ efforts. After Farah capitulated, the National Council of Churches launched an unprecedented worldwide boycott of the Nestlé Company for its aggressive marketing of baby formula to third world mothers. When the church action forced Nestlé to back off its attack on breastfeeding, the boycott became a standard weapon in contemporary social struggles, finally picked up by organized labor in the early 1980s as a part of its anticorporate campaigns. But in 1965, a boycott did not quickly come to mind as a way of spreading a union fight. It took NFWA leaders a full six months of experimentation and discussion before an unexpected victory made the boycott their primary strategy. Even then it wasn’t so much that the leaders chose the boycott—it was more like the boycott chose them.
When Drake first floated the idea of a boycott, picket lines were still active in the grape strike, and the NFWA was asking supporters to send them money, food, clothing, and endorsements, or to come to Delano and help build the strike. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the left was thriving, filled with energy, and quick to respond. Ann Draper, a socialist official of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and a member of the Executive Board of Citizens for Farm Labor, organized a food and clothing caravan to Delano in the first weeks of the strike. She also brought $6,000 in cash. Students from the Bay Area who had just lived through the victorious Free Speech Movement and were now building the antiwar movement at full bore, came to Delano with their enthusiasm and sleeping bags. Many young radicals driving between LA and San Francisco made a semi-obligatory stop at the Delano picket lines. Independent union militants stopped by. Priests, rabbis, and Protestant clergy from all over California spent time picketing and issued statements and decrees. So much used clothing arrived that the strikers could pick and choose, and finding a place to store the extras became a problem. These moral and physical contributions were important in holding the strike together in the early days, but they were not a dramatic enough extension of the scope of the battle to make a significant difference in its outcome.
The major news outlets ignored the strike: the big papers ran a few small paragraphs, but there was nothing on TV outside of the Central Valley. The only regular newspaper reports were from Ron Taylor of the Fresno Bee and from a few left and labor publications: The Valley Labor Citizen, a weekly publication of regional labor and trade councils, edited by the brilliant photographer George Ballis; The People’s World, published by the California Communist Party; and The Movement, put out by the Friends of SNCC, which publicized and analyzed developments in the rapidly changing black and student movements. “How to get the story in the news” was a common topic of conversation in Delano, just as it was becoming a major consideration in the bourgeoning antiwar movement, and among all U.S. political actors. Portable video cameras, first introduced in the early 1960s, had changed the nature of TV news. Live radio reports were becoming increasingly popular. A large group of liberally inclined young newspaper reporters were out looking for stories. Those they did pick up could have a national impact many times their local weight. If the strike could be presented in a way that pricked popular interest, shutting off the news from the Central Valley would require much more than closing down the local telegraph office.
Chavez’s original idea of promoting the strike as a civil rights struggle provided a basis for winning sympathy from the general population and the rank-and-file producers of the news, but it didn’t automatically guarantee coverage. Farm workers were more unknown to the rest of the country than were the South’s young blacks, whose consistent courage in the face of brutal repression had pushed them into the headlines. Farm workers didn’t speak English, were not yet servants in other people’s homes, did not have the African Americans’ deep, twisted historical ties to their white neighbors. They were considered aliens and sojourners, as well as subordinates. Their labor camps were more isolated from rural communities than the typical black section of a southern town. The farm worker strikes that followed the end of the Bracero Program were big news in farm communities but hardly mattered to anyone else. The NFWA had to make them matter if they were going to win.
Originally, only two people in the NFWA leadership had any extensive experience with the media: Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. In her years as a lobbyist in Sacramento, Huerta had talked to many newsmen and participated in scores of press conferences. She was smart, fiery, and beautiful. She was good copy, and she learned how to use herself to promote her causes. Chavez’s style was completely different, but even in his role as the behind-the-scenes Alinsky organizer of the CSO he had built good relations with farm town reporters, so that he had a feel for what those reporters wanted and how to make as big an impact as possible.
Early in the strike, Cesar started talking to Gilbert Padilla, Jim Drake, Dolores Huerta, his cousin Manuel Chavez, and Chris Hartmire about what he called “moral jujitsu,” which he offered as a tactical solution to the problem of spreading the word and getting the story into the news. Chavez attributed the idea to Gandhi: the Mahatma had used it to defeat the English in India, and the NFWA could use it to beat the growers in Delano. Several degrees more subtle than Alinsky’s “dirty tricks,” moral jujitsu was a tactical approach that allowed Cesar to give full rein to his strategic sensibility and avoid the difficult political calculations of ends and means, the problem of doing bad in order to achieve the good. The growers had more strength than the NFWA, but just as the jujitsu expert with subtle feints and skillful shifts of weight can take advantage of his opponent’s thrusts, Cesar proposed to turn the growers’ power back upon themselves. Such a strategy seemed to present no moral danger, and although it might prove difficult to execute, it was not conceptually complicated.
One of the growers’ main strengths was their influence with the Delano and Kern County police, sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges, who had a legal monopoly on the use of violence and could be quite discriminatory in how they applied the law. Police harassment didn’t make the difference between winning and losing, but it made life more miserable for the picketers, and it was a measure of the growers’ local power—power that Chavez proposed to turn against them.
His first opportunity came in the form of the overzealous Kern County sheriff, who, seemingly on his own, decided in mid-October to interpret the court injunction that banned any disturbance of the peace on the picket lines to mean that strikers could neither use the word huelga—strike—nor shout at scabs over a megaphone. There was no need to shout at the strikebreakers, he explained, because they had heard it all already, and, anyway, huelga was not an American word.3 Such tactics had worked before. In the 1930s, several rural judges had made the use of Spanish on picket lines illegal. But what had worked in the 1930s simply set up the police and growers for a jujitsu move in the 1960s. The day after the sheriff ’s announcement of the new policy, Reverend David Havens of the Migrant Ministry tested the lawman’s willingness to enforce the order by standing in the back of Epifanio Camacho’s pickup truck and reading Jack London’s description of a scab: “a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone of jelly and glue.”* Havens, dressed in a coat and tie, was arrested. An excited group of picketers returned to the NFWA headquarters. The sheriffs were nibbling at the baited hook; maybe they would swallow it whole.
Chavez chaired an open strategy meeting that night at the crowded NFWA hall on Albany Street. Animated speakers assessed the situation. What about free speech? What about the Constitution? Didn’t it cover us, too? As a consensus emerged to challenge the sheriff ’s order, Cesar asked how many would be willing to go to jail for the right to say “huelga” on the picket line. All hands shot up amidst a tumultuous chant of the forbidden word. People were ready to act; now it was a matter of doing it right. Chavez had already asked Wendy Goepel to schedule a Bay Area campus tour to Berkeley, Mills College, San Francisco State, and Stanford University. Why not synchronize Cesar’s tour with civil rights–style civil disobedience in Delano?4
Chris