We worked with short-handled hoes and were paid by the hour. The crew was about half men and half women, old and young, all Mexican, except for my friend and me and a Puerto Rican. “Puerto,” as he was called, was the elected shop steward and seemed to have more power than the two company foremen. Every day after lunch, the crew slowed down together, talking and visiting as we worked, as if to say to the foremen, “We have already done a day’s labor; now it is time to rest.” In that first summer the crew twice refused to enter fields that smelled of pesticides. Once, the foreman tried to give a warning ticket to someone who he claimed was leaving two small lettuce plants where he should have left one. The foreman beckoned the shop steward, who by contract rule had to co-sign the ticket; three warning tickets, and a worker could be fired. Puerto listened to both sides and then tore up the ticket in the foreman’s face. Nothing happened to Puerto or the accused worker. The foreman was fired several weeks later because “he couldn’t control the crew.”
I was astounded. I had been part of the wing of the New Left that considered the working class hopelessly reformist, bought off by post–World War II prosperity. Part of what made us New Leftists, and not old ones, was our disagreement about the role of the traditional working class as the main enemy of capitalism. The working-class jobs I had had before—as a janitor, an usher at a race track, a beer vender at Raiders games—had given me some appreciation for the resiliency and militancy of black culture but had not shaken my view that the Old Left had put too much hope in the working class. But here I was now, witnessing, almost by accident, a level of sustained militancy among workers that I had never known in twelve years of New Left politics.
It gave me pause. I had left Berkeley despairing of the future of youth culture politics, thinking I might restore my political faith by getting deeper into antiwar work. But the coffee house was also pretty much a disaster, as we dedicated white antiwar activists didn’t have too much to say to the black soldiers who had just returned from Vietnam and were awaiting their discharges. We lived through a series of bad misunderstandings over drugs, sex, and politics. By the time I got to the fields, I was politically washed out.
It was the people in the fields who revived my political zeal. But did I want to be a farm worker? I went back and forth on that question. The work was hard, and the pay was low. And as a farm worker I would always be different, a stranger, a sport, almost, for among the 15,000 farm workers in the Salinas Valley less than a dozen were Anglos. But there was an upside: I liked the physical challenge of the work. It was hard but not impossible. Also, the political life of the crew was almost always interesting, and sometimes exhilarating. And then there was the UFW. As a student at Berkeley I had gone on one of the union’s marches, but I knew little about its struggles. Now, working in the fields, I became interested in the union, thrilled by the possibility that the militancy on the crew was reflected in the politics of the union. Finally, there was Spanish. I had never been able to learn a foreign language. In the fields, swimming every day in a sea of Spanish, I slowly began to learn. So slowly that I exasperated my farm-worker teachers, who had to spend a couple of days teaching me my first words: Mucho trabajo y poco dinero—a lot of work and a little money.
I wanted to stay in the fields, and when the thinning crew’s work ended and we were laid off, I tried to deal with the poco dinero by making the mucho trabajo into a whole lot more work. I figured if I could make it onto a piece-rate crew, I could earn a reasonable amount of money. I worked out in preparation, lifting weights and running.
Trying to make that first piece-rate crew in the celery, after only six months’ experience as a farm worker, was one of the more ridiculous things I have ever done. When I got to the field the first day and gave the foreman my dispatch, he asked me if I had any experience cutting or packing celery. I said no, but I was willing to give it a try. He gave me a funny look, handed me a celery knife, and put me in a row. I watched the person next to me cut for a short while before trying it myself. Five minutes later he took the knife away, saying he was worried I was going to cut myself. Making me a packer, he explained, was out of the question as it requires very quick sizing of the celery, and it appeared that maybe I had never even seen a piece of celery let alone tried to size one. He decided to give me a chance as a cajero, one of two people who make and distribute the empty celery boxes to the fifteen packers.
Although it was by far the least skilled job on the crew, there were various tricks to unfolding, fastening, and carrying the wood and wire boxes. The other cajero, an experienced worker, was eager to teach me, but I was too slow; we could not keep up with the packers, who shouted for more and more boxes. Many had to run up to us and carry their own boxes back to their rows. As we fell further behind, some packers had to unfold and fasten the boxes themselves. I could have been fired after three days. The workers graciously granted me a couple more, but after a week I was out.
Over the next eight years I worked short stints in the Spreckles sugar factory near Salinas, as a laborer on a large housing project and in road construction, as a lumper (truck loader) at Watsonville’s frozen food plants, and as an adjunct lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz. But I never found anything like the ambience of the fields. Like Maniz, I particularly hated the factory work; it was noisy, hot, dirty, lonely, oppressive. So I found myself during those same years back in the fields again and again. In the spring and summer of 1972 I returned to thinning lettuce. In 1975 I thinned some more and harvested cauliflower, broccoli, and lettuce. In 1976 I finally made it onto a piece-rate crew at West Coast Farms in Watsonville, where I met Pablo Camacho. The car pool years, when I worked in the celery at InterHarvest, were 1977 and 1978. When you count them up, it is six seasons in the fields between 1971 and 1979.
By the time I was part of the car pool, I felt very much like a farm worker, a rather bizarre Anglo one but a farm worker all the same. It was hard on my body—I had already had two back incidents—but it was an okay job. I felt like I was part of a poorly paid athletic team, absent the cheers of the crowd. The work was seasonal: at InterHarvest we began work on the summer solstice, June 21, and ended on the winter solstice, December 21, and we collected top unemployment for the other six months. My wife, Julie Miller, managed to get jobs in the fields, apple sheds, and frozen food plants around Watsonville and Salinas for stretches of time that did not overlap with mine, and we took turns working and being at home taking care of our young children.
Although politics did not bring me into the fields, politics drove me out. In the early 1970s I had worked closely with a handful of would-be Maoists (including my friend from the coffee house) who were working in the fields. But I didn’t last long as a card-carrying Maoist revolutionary—less than a year. I was a strong supporter of the union, went to the meetings, participated in the life of the crew, but was not deeply involved in the internal life of the UFW. Then the 1979 strike came, and it was impossible not to be caught up in union politics. During the strike, some UFW staffers moved against the people in my old collective, roughing up my friend and prohibiting the distribution of their newspaper on the picket line. Those people were all UFW members, and although I disagreed with much of what their newspaper said, I thought they had the right to pass it out at union events. That was too subtle a distinction in the middle of a strike, and as far as the staff was concerned, I was an unwelcome member of the union.
I wasn’t excluded from the strike, but when it ended in a victory I was among those who were not called back to work. The company and the union had agreed to cross some people off the seniority lists. I didn’t fight it. I figured in the long run it was going to be hard to be an Anglo farm worker and at the same time be free to express differences with the union leadership. That was too tight a jacket, so I left the fields.
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