Most of that is gone. One estimate has it that 4 percent of the original landscape remains. The lakes of the Tulare Basin vanished, victims of successive irrigation systems. Even the idea of the Tulare Basin as a separate region has been largely forgotten, as the area has been merged into the San Joaquin to its north or the Central Valley as a whole. No comparable area in the world was transformed so quickly, for the valley was settled by Europeans while they were perfecting their electrical and petroleum-driven technologies of destruction. They hunted the animals and fished out the rivers and lakes. They cut down the trees, diverted the rivers and streams, pumped out the aquifers, and loaded the land with insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, biocides, and chemical fertilizers. And they built the monumental system of dams and canals that remade the valley into a farm factory floor.8
What drove those settlers was profit, not farming. The people who directed the transformation of the valley sought quick fortunes as surely as the miners who preceded them. New names had to be coined for what they were up to: wheat mining, vandal agriculture, bonanza farming, shopkeepers with crops, and, finally, the one that stuck, agribusiness. Although they were in competition with one another, these agribusinessmen knew how to cooperate when necessary. They worked together in irrigation districts to capture the water and distribute it among themselves. They formed marketing associations to restrict production and publicize their products. They funded lobbying associations to protect their interests. They formed labor associations in attempts to fix the price of the men and women they employed to maintain their property and to tend and harvest their crops.
By the early 1960s, these men had already beaten back many attempts to organize the workers on whom their agricultural empire depended. It had not been an easy victory. People were more resourceful than rivers, lakes, and animals. The sixties brought new opportunities that allowed the farm workers to deliver a series of astounding, unprecedented defeats to these virtually undefeated men. It took awhile for them to recover—but only awhile.
Agribusiness is not a single industry, like the auto or steel industries. It is more like the garment industry, a series of separate but related businesses that specialize in different products. The men who grow grapes differ from those who grow lettuce, each possessing particular, specialized knowledge about how to produce and distribute the commodity. The industry as a whole shares a common infrastructure that is largely subsidized by federal, state, and local governments. Various irrigation districts deliver water at scandalously low prices: growers in Kern County, in the San Joaquin Valley, have paid as little as $10 per acre foot while Northern California households were paying $1,000 for the same amount of water.9 The state and national highway systems, improved and expanded with large amounts of public money in the 1950s, freed growers from their dependency on railroad oligopolies. The University of California does much of the industry’s research at public expense. Nevertheless, the men running the whole operation do not sit on a single board of directors, or even a group of interlocking boards. They have their capital invested in particular crops and separate regions, and do not often mix in one other’s businesses.
The farm workers who made UFW history also specialized in particular crops. Typically they were either grape pickers or vegetable workers, people who spent most of their time in either the Central Valley or in Salinas. Some of them lived side-by-side in Mexicali or worked together in the Imperial Valley, but once the desert harvest season ended in March, they went their separate ways. Some people who worked the winter lettuce followed the harvest through the desert towns of Yuma and Blythe and then to the Central Valley town of Huron, before cutting through the Coast Range at Pacheco Pass on Highway 152 and dropping down into the lush San Benito Valley, to enter the Salinas Valley from the north. But many skipped the small intermediate harvests, took time off, and traveled from Mexicali to Salinas by taking Highway 10 to the edge of Los Angeles, and then 101 up the California Coast. There, along the edge of the continent where the vast majority of Californians live, the traveling workers passed some of California’s picture postcard sights: missions, surfers, citrus orchards near the sea, gentle hillsides, the affluence of Santa Barbara, and the weekend party town of Pismo Beach.
Some eight hours after leaving Mexicali, they entered the Salinas Valley. On this western side of the Coast Range, rain-bearing winter storms arrived irregularly from the Pacific Ocean, and so water did not have to be transported long distances for agriculture to thrive. The temperature is mild and the feeling is rural, even bucolic, with oaks shading the nearby foothills and red barns scattered through the countryside.
Only the long rows of crops signal that this, too, is an altered landscape. Its black earth, once hidden below the Pacific, was grassland, swamp, and river bottom for thousands of years. Small groups of Indians lived off the land, fishing its waters and gathering its acorns, and the Spanish and Mexicans pastured their cattle wherever it was dry enough. Not until Chinese workers in the 1870s dug out the tules, cattails, and sedges, uprooted the willows, cottonwoods, elders, and sycamores, and used shovels, spades, and steel forks to dig the ditches that drained the water away could this rich land be ravaged by commercial agriculture.10
The Salinas Valley was, throughout the UFW years, the leading producer of fresh vegetables (other than tomatoes) in the United States. It carried most of the marks of agribusiness: much of the land was in the hands of absentee owners, and a small number of big growers made most of the money and almost all of the basic decisions about what to grow and how. Farm managers lived in ranch-style homes, not farmhouses, and bought their food at the supermarket. And even in this valley rich with water, so many wells were pumping the aquifer that the ocean itself was being sucked underground, seeping inland, and driving coastal acreage out of production.
Although the Salina Valley is a tiny piece of real estate compared with the vast acreage of the Central Valley, Salinas’s combination of soil, water, and a Mediterranean climate provided as much as ten months of work for local farm laborers, and throughout the UFW years many of them settled in, traveling to Mexicali less and less and making parts of Salinas into outposts of Mexico, more than four hundred miles north of the border. Here, the UFW’s support among farm workers was strongest and most long-lasting. That was not unrelated to topography. Salinas’s particular place on the map was a key to its long harvest season, a partial explanation of why so many farm workers could make it their permanent home, a base from which they were comfortable enough to fight. But the militancy of the Salinas workers, their undeniable power, was not encoded in any map. It had to do with the particular way so many of them did their jobs, with the nature of the work itself.
* Readers may want to refer periodically to the maps on pp. 837–40.
Behind every fruit and vegetable for sale in the supermarket lies an unknown world of toil and skill. Broccoli is one of the easiest vegetables to harvest because it grows on plants that are about waist-high, so workers don’t have to bend over completely to cut the unopened, densely compacted flower buds that people eat. The plants grow two rows to a bed in lush fields that extend for hundreds of acres. From a distance, workers, organized into crews of a few dozen, clad in bright yellow rain slickers to ward off the morning dew, seem to be plodding through the plants, hunched over, tiny specks of gold too few to make an impact on so much green. Up close, any illusion of sluggishness dissolves before the athletic spectacle of the broccoli cut.
The heads of green compacted buds, three to six inches in diameter, shoot off the main stalk of the plant, sheltered by the broad leaves at the top and hidden among the long leaves that surround the buds before they flower. Not all the heads mature at the same time, and only through keenness of sight can the harvesters—most of them are men—quickly find the ones that are ready to cut. The harvester grabs the head with one hand while with the other he thrusts the short, broad knife downward, cutting the leaves away from the stalk. Then with a sideways stroke of the knife he cuts the head off the plant, leaving just the right length of stalk below the wide unopened flower. He stretches his fingers to grab another head with the first still in his grip and cuts a second stalk. Depending on his quick judgment of the