Most of the people who came to my classes were farm workers or children of farm workers. Watsonville is a small town, and I still see farm workers I used to know in the fields. Sometimes I run into Pablo Camacho as I walk my dog on the levee. Every once in a while I get together with Maniz. I am often asked if I miss the fields. I have a standard answer: Todavía siento el dolor en mi espalda, pero extraño el ambiente del fil—“I can still feel the pain in my back, but I miss the life of the fields.”
People know what I am talking about.
I have my own bag of fieldwork memories, but this book is not a memoir. It is my explantion of what happened to the UFW, my account of its rise and fall. It differs from what Camacho and Maniz have said, but it puts people like them into the story. Not as noble victims nor as adjuncts to the grand work of one great man, but as political actors who helped make their own history.
* Originally a derogatory Mexican word for a Frenchman, gabacho has replaced gringo as a favored farm worker term for an Anglo from the United States.
UFW history cascades over much of California’s famously diverse topography. A striker was shot dead in an irrigated patch of its immense Southeastern Desert. Petitioning pilgrims walked three hundred miles through the state’s great Central Valley. Boycotters raised money in the living rooms of its populous port cities. Farm workers controlled the pace and quality of their work in two of California’s narrow coastal valleys. The embattled union set up its headquarters in the foothills of the mountain pass that used to be the main gateway to the Golden State. Only the mighty Sierras lie outside the UFW saga—although it is their melted snows that, through marvels of engineering, make much of California agribusiness possible.*
But topography, like everything else under the California sun, is no fixed mark. It is a field of battle, a clash of contending forces. Grinding, jerking subterranean plates pushed the California coast up out of the sea, shaped its two massive mountain ranges, and still alter the contours of the state. Water rushed through hills, robbing them of their topsoil and depositing it in long valleys, boggy deltas, and an enormous bay. Fire raged through the prairies, destroying the old and making way for the new. Wind tore away soil, taking from one place and giving to another. Later on, people transformed a barren prairie into productive farmland; converted swamps and sloughs, once diverse in flora and fauna, into a homogeneous dry basin; rerouted, dammed, and nearly tamed the great rivers; and made one enormous lake disappear while creating several others.
Topography buckled before capital. The federal government funded the four dams along the Colorado River that transformed a large section of the Colorado Desert into the Imperial Valley. State and federal money financed the twenty-five dams in the Sierras that channeled water to the men who owned the grapes, cotton, tomatoes, and rice in the Central Valley. By the mid-twentieth century California was the most highly capitalized agricultural region in the history of humanity. People who threatened its returns could expect to be treated as harshly as any river, lake, or desert that stood in the way.
Three valleys figure most prominently on the UFW map: the Salinas Valley, west of the central coast range; the Central Valley, between the coast range and the Sierras; and the Imperial Valley, southeast of Los Angeles. The Imperial and the Central were constructed as intentionally as any theatrical set. Only in the Salinas Valley did agriculture come easily to the land. But even there, human labor shaped the stage on which the UFW actors played their parts, made their exits and their entrances. Typically that first entrance happened in a dark spot in the desert, at the Mexican border, about a hundred miles directly east of San Diego.
Farm workers didn’t talk much as they lined up at the Mexicali border crossing. They started arriving at about 2 am, and some stood with their eyes closed, as if to convince themselves that they could sleep standing up. Between November and March, thousands waited in darkness to show their papers to the uniformed men guarding the entry gates to California. They came to cut and pack lettuce and a few other crops in what was once the Colorado Desert, called the Valley of the Dead by Mexicans, and rebranded as the Imperial Valley by Anglos in an early-twentieth-century real estate scheme.
Mexicali has no twin city on the other side of the border, unlike Tijuana and Juarez, which are matched by San Diego and El Paso in size and heft. In the 1970s, midway through the golden age for California farm workers, more than half a million people crowded Mexicali’s streets, while all of Imperial County claimed a population of less than 75,000. The California town of Calexico, named as if it were a twin, had just a few thousand residents and was little more than a privileged Mexicali barrio with a U.S. postmark.1
People only come to the Imperial Valley to make money. It is not a valley—no river runs through it—and with no potable water of its own, only irrigation canals keep it alive. Only at its edges are foothills in sight, and they are less impressive than the twenty miles of sand dunes along Highway 8 on the Imperial’s eastern side, mountains of sand so desolate that in the nineteenth century the U.S. Army used camels to cross them.
Local postcards feature pictures of the border entry, as no natural sight is worth reproducing. The native plants are armed with thorns and the animals with fangs, claws, and poison. In the summer, the Imperial Valley is one of the hottest places in the United States, the July temperature averaging 107 degrees. An old joke has it that when people from Mexicali die and go to hell, they come back for their blankets.
Cheap labor and cheap water made the Imperial Valley into America’s winter garden, supplying most of the lettuce and cantaloupe consumed in the U.S. from December to March. Converting the desert for agriculture was not easy. It could not be done without tapping the wild Colorado River, nicknamed the Red Bull, which in most years bypassed the area and fed into the Gulf of California. The first men who attempted this feat—a small group of irrigation visionaries, Protestant teetotalers, land speculators, financiers, Indian killers, and engineers—failed. So did two of America’s richest men: E. H. Harriman, whose Southern Pacific Railroad built a series of inadequate floodgates and irrigation ditches in the early 1900s, and A. P. Giannini, whose Bank of America in the 1920s bailed out the Imperial Irrigation District, which had fallen into bankruptcy trying to keep up with the costs of irrigating the desert.2
Finally the federal government stepped in. In 1931, it contracted seven private companies to build what would be Hoover Dam, which, along with three other publicly financed dams farther down river, finally tamed the Red Bull. Starting in 1940, Colorado River water arrived on a regular, predictable basis to the Imperial Valley. Two years later the first braceros arrived.
All of the braceros were brought across the border from Mexicali, fumigated, and then sent to a holding station in El Centro, where growers’ agents checked their hands for calluses, sized up their ability to work, and took them away for their first contracted try-outs in the fields. Mexicans who were not part of the bracero program but still wanted to work the California harvests also came to Mexicali and, legally or not, made their way across the border, where labor contractors and farm foremen waited. Wives, children, and older men often remained on the Mexican side, where rent and food were cheaper, so Mexicali became not only a port of entry but a home base, the place where many farm workers returned after the seasonal harvests were over.
At the same time, Hoover Dam was changing the American West. Three of the construction companies that built it—Kaiser, Bechtel, and Utah Construction—used the money and contacts they made to launch themselves into the highest ranks of the coming military-industrial establishment. Water from the dam made some of the suburbs of semi-arid