Chavez and Goepel, waiting in the Bay Area, received the news as soon as Jim Drake could get to a phone. It had all gone according to plan. Chavez knew about the arrests before his first speech, scheduled for the epicenter of the West Coast student movement, the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley. There, at noon, 500 students gathered to hear a strike report. As Cesar, in his quiet fashion, gave his straightforward account, Goepel dramatically interrupted him and handed him a piece of paper. Chavez read it to himself, and then to the crowd: forty-four people, including his wife, had just been arrested in Delano for shouting “huelga.” The response was immediate. “Huelga! Huelga! Huelga! ” the excited crowd shouted back at the farm worker leader. Later, at the other colleges, the smaller crowds had also taken up the chant, making the strike their own. As Goepel drove the VW bug back to Delano, Cesar counted the contributions: $6,700.6
But the money was not as important as the publicity. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Kansas City Star ran their very first stories about the strike.7 The arrests were featured on TV news programs throughout California. The NFWA finally made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Los Angeles Times ran a two-column picture on page three. The growers barely knew what had hit them, but the sheriffs got the drift. They never again tried to enforce the gag order. Eventually, the injunction was declared unconstitutional, and all charges were dropped. Too late. The strike had broken out of the Central Valley. Moral jujitsu had won its first victory. But the question remained: What was the best way to leverage the growing outside support to force the growers to sign a contract?
October slid into November, and rain came down hard in Delano. The strikers were relieved. The harvest was officially over. No need for picket lines now. Significant numbers of people wouldn’t be required in the fields until mid-January. The growers had held on to enough veteran workers and brought in enough new ones to collect a large harvest. For the next several months, the primary work of the industry would be to distribute its bounty. As far as AWOC director, Al Green, was concerned, the rains meant the strike was over. He cut off strike benefits and, in tune with standard farm worker practice, shifted his attention to the next stop on the farm worker circuit, the citrus harvest in Porterville.
It was the NFWA that broke farm worker custom. It refused to call off the strike, although no one—not even the top leadership—could say for sure what it meant to be on strike after the harvest was over. The strike was now like the word huelga. It had come to mean more than just collectively withdrawing labor power; rather, it was a general call to arms, whose very utterance, thanks to the Kern County sheriff ’s department, was a symbolic act of defiance. Huelga didn’t mean that to everyone yet, only to the strikers and their few thousand supporters in the student movement, labor unions, and the church. But it would soon come to mean that to millions of people. And it is one measure of the impact of Cesar Chavez and the farm worker movement that those millions came to recognize huelga before most of them knew what an enchilada was.
The baby steps that would lead to the grape boycott were taken by a few people, newly liberated from the picket lines, who attempted, on the fly, to make a crude map of the grape distribution system and to develop a strategy for disrupting it. They followed the grapes out of town, trying to figure out exactly where they went, and how they got to the supermarkets. Trains carried the grapes from Delano to the Roseville yard, outside Sacramento, and then traveled east. Most of the trucks leaving the warehouses went to the big wholesale produce markets, where the grapes were unloaded, and then distributed to retail stores, primarily big chains. Some of the trucks went to the docks in San Francisco, Oakland, San Pedro, Stockton, and Long Beach, where they were unloaded and then loaded onto ships for distribution around the world. What were the possibilities? The Roseville yard was a logistical disaster, eight miles long and fifty tracks wide. As the railroad cars were switched from engine to engine the farm workers couldn’t identify the trains that carried the grapes. Furthermore, federal laws against interfering with train travel were strong, and the several unions with jurisdiction in the yards almost always obeyed them. The big-city produce terminals looked more promising. The strikers could easily follow the trucks, and the Teamsters who loaded and unloaded the grapes had a lot of control over what actually happened at the terminals. Thus, the downtown LA terminal, a two-hour drive from Delano, became an early focus for activists.
But the first intimations of the future strategy came on the San Francisco Bay Area docks. Work there was entirely in the hands of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the large left-wing union that was born in the victorious 1934 San Francisco general strike. The ILWU had a unique historical commitment to organizing farm workers and cannery workers, starting with the 1937 “march inland,” which was intended to protect the gains of longshoremen by extending some measure of the 1934 victory to “inland workers.” That organizing drive had been substantially defeated by the Western Conference of Teamsters, which offered the bosses the carrot of a more friendly, business-oriented union. Nonetheless, as a few striking farm workers arrived on the San Francisco docks in early December 1965, top ILWU officials were still interested in bringing farm workers under their wing, and the rank and file was still vigorous and proud of its power and traditions.8
Two days after the first hard rain, Gilbert Padilla, a young striker named Tony Mendez, his wife, Socorro, and Sergio Tovar of the AWOC got into a car and drove to San Francisco. Gilbert can’t remember whose car they took, but it wasn’t his. He had lent his to Dolores the first week of the strike and never saw it again. Cars came and went in those days. This time, his car full of spirited young people was following a truck carrying 1,250 cases of scab grapes from the Pagliarulo warehouse in Delano. The pursuit ended at Pier 50, after dark; the truck got into a long line, apparently not to be unloaded until the next day. Despite the light rain, the four from Delano, armed with homemade signs that said “Don’t Eat Grapes,” started to march up and down in front of the pier. Almost immediately, longshoremen on night shift and truck drivers waiting to load and unload came over and asked them what they were doing. Many dockworkers encouraged them to remain, and one even brought them a couple of raincoats. Soon, Jimmy Herman, head of the clerks’ division and one of the most powerful officials in the ILWU, rushed to the dock. He took the four wet, enthusiastic people back to his office and gave them coffee. Padilla was surprised by how much Herman already knew about the strike. Then Herman got down on his knees and made up some new signs that said “Farm Workers On Strike.” He told them to return just before dawn and stand in front of the dock with those signs. Herman said that the bosses would throw an injunction at them, but it would be too late; they could stop the grapes from being unloaded first. “Don’t tell nobody about who gave you these,” he said, gesturing to the signs. “You just stand there. Don’t say a god-damn thing.”9
Padilla later declared that the next day’s surprise was “the most fascinating thing that ever happened to me.” Gilbert tends to dramatic speech, but that is still quite an assessment by a child of the labor camps, war veteran, father of eight children, and close compatriot of Cesar Chavez for twenty-six years before Chavez forced him out of the union in 1980. But in some respects, Padilla has it right. On that rainy morning and afternoon, clerks, longshoremen, and a few truck drivers took a first step in reversing the historical separation between California’s rural and urban workers. It was a major reversal: at