Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers

Copyright

PROLOGUE

The Car Pool

Most California farm workers do not ride to work alone. They travel in company buses and vans, or squeeze together in private cars with other workers, who often are also their relatives or lifelong friends. For three-quarters of a century, people have been driving their cars up and down and across the Golden State looking for work. Caravans of cars—perhaps the most essential agricultural implements in California—loved and hated by mechanically skilled Joads of all nationalities, who intimately knew the carburetors and fuel pumps and transmissions of the Studebakers, Fords, and Chevys, and now struggle with the injection systems of the popular Toyotas that may also be their homes, death beds, and birth beds. Cars are so vital to the internal relations of farm workers that the Farm Placement Service, faithful servant of California agribusiness, had as one of its policies in the 1950s and ’60s to break up car pools and disperse their members to separate farms, as the bosses knew from bitter experience that the bonds of solidarity built from traveling and living together often spilled over onto the job.

Pablo Camacho remembers every car. In his first car pool, from 1961 to 1967, we started with my ’49 Ford; next we got a ’55 Ford, but after that it was all Chevys. In 1977 and 1978, Camacho drove two identical 1969 Impalas, and I was in his car pool. We were part of a crew that cut and packed celery for InterHarvest in the Salinas Valley, a region made famous by the travails of some of Steinbeck’s protagonists, and still one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. Those were the high days—among the last high days, as it turned out—of the United Farm Workers. Just a little more than ten years earlier the union had been born, improbably, in a grape strike in a dusty town in California’s Central Valley, and, decisively, amid a mass movement in America that, for a very brief time, made everything seem possible. By 1968, Cesar Chavez¹ was being hailed as a hero in a country quickly running out of them, and the union was making its name outside the fields with the most powerful boycott in U.S. history. In Salinas, where the union was most successful in the fields for the longest time, and where farm workers’ wages were the highest, piece-rate vegetable workers such as Camacho formed the core strength of the United Farm Workers union (UFW).

We worked on one of the several dozen piece-rate vegetable crews in the valley. Piece-rate crews are paid collectively. Each member gets an equal share of the price the company pays for each box or bin of lettuce or celery or broccoli. Those were the three main crops harvested by piece-rate crews when I worked in the fields; other crops were harvested by the hour, by individual piece rate, or by machines. At InterHarvest we were paid about $1.40 for each box of celery we cut and packed, which we split thirty-eight ways. It worked out to about $12 an hour, more than $48 dollars in today’s money. The four loaders were paid separately, and they made even more. Positions on these crews were greatly prized in farm worker communities, and the workers were highly skilled, tightly organized, and deeply loyal to the UFW. They were hard to replace during strikes except with similarly skilled workers, and in nonstrike periods they wielded their power through slowdowns, work stoppages, and mild forms of sabotage.

For anyone who was not there, it may be hard to imagine that celery workers in the 1970s made what would be about $50 an hour in today’s economy. Piece-rate lettuce cutters and melon pickers made even more. People who tied rubber bands around cauliflower leaves to protect the flowers from the sun made quite a bit more. These people, working seasonally, earned annual incomes comparable to those of other well-paid unionized U.S. workers. Although piece-rate vegetable workers were a minority of farm laborers, they were not a tiny one. In the 1970s they constituted about 10 percent of all California farm workers who worked at least six months a year.

Such crews earned substantially more than other farm workers, but even the lowest-paid fieldworkers in the late 1970s made more than one and a half times the minimum wage. There is no better measure of the UFW’s success than the formidable ranks of those well-paid vegetable workers who once dominated their industries, and no better measure of its defeat than a list of current wages. Union membership, mostly vegetable workers, had hit 50,000 by the end of the 1970s. By 1985 it had collapsed to around 6,000, where it has hovered ever since.² Today, entry-level farm workers make just above the $8.00 California minimum hourly wage; celery workers make about the same per box that they made thirty years ago, meaning their real wages are about one-third of what they once were; and most lettuce workers—once the princes of their communities—no longer work by the piece and are lucky if they make $9.00 an hour.

The full history of the UFW, then, is not just a tale of how Cesar Chavez came out of obscurity to lead his new farm worker union to victory, although it is authentically that. It is also the story of the farm workers who were at the center of the union’s strength in the fields, and of how, once Chavez lost their support, the UFW was doomed.

When I found him again in 1994, Pablo Camacho, at sixty-one, was a short, plump man five feet two inches tall and 180 pounds. He had a full head of dark hair and an unlined face, and he was still packing celery. I walked onto his crew early one morning, cutting across the harvested rows where the loaders were just beginning to throw the first celery-filled boxes onto a large pallet being driven through the field on a tractor. Camacho was at one of the burros, the three-wheeled carts on which the men pack celery into cardboard boxes. Three people work on each burro, picking up, sorting, and packing the celery that has just been cut by three men working ahead of them. This is a regular-size crew: six burros, thirty-six cutters and packers, two closers, four loaders, a couple of tractor drivers, two foreman, and a few other men hanging around.

Camacho introduced me without interrupting the work. I explained to the handful of men nearby that Camacho had taught me how to pack some twenty years earlier, and I began to pick up some celery in his row, trying to remember how it went in the various boxes. We continued to chat: reporting on kids, wives, mutual friends. I was doing less than half of one job. It was a cool December morning on California’s Central Coast, yet within ten minutes I was in a heavy sweat.

I worked along for an hour, eventually telling Camacho that I was going to write a book and I wanted to start by interviewing him and the three other men from our car pool.

What’s so special about us? he asked.

Nothing. That’s almost the point.

Well, what’s the book about?

Farm workers and what happened to the UFW.

When I mentioned the union, Ismael, one of the other packers, looked around to see where the foreman was. So far, the field foreman had not been bothered by my presence. People often come by a crew to visit and give a hand; the only thing unusual about me was that I am not Mexican. But mentioning the UFW was something else. I had made a mistake—I had figured that because the union had been so thoroughly defeated in the California fields nearly ten years before, it would be okay to mention it on the job now. Ismael didn’t think so. Camacho, too proud to show any fear of a foreman, refused to acknowledge that I had said something wrong, but quickly arranged to come by my house and talk to me later.

At the time, Camacho was living in the house he had bought in 1973 with a $3,000 down payment; a three-bedroom home in what passes for the industrial section of Watsonville, next to the city’s recycling center. His wife had worked at Green Giant for more than twenty years before it moved to Mexico. She then went to work at Del Mar Frozen Foods. They were family-proud, with reason. Of their five children, the three oldest had graduated from college and were working, one in Watsonville, and two others a hundred miles away in San Francisco. Their two youngest children were still in school.

Camacho is a responsible man. The three seasons we packed celery together, he never missed a day of work. His reliability, combined with his outspoken, militant support for the union, made him among the first people nominated for crew shop steward, a post he held on various occasions.

When Pablo came to my house to be interviewed, it was the first time I had put a tape recorder in front of him. It was not the first time I had heard his stories, whose major theme was how bad it was before the UFW arrived. The Bracero Program was one of his favorite targets. Under this friendly arrangement between the U.S. and Mexican governments, which lasted from 1942 to 1964, a total of five million Mexican men were contracted to work in the United States—mostly in the Texas and California fields—under strict conditions that limited their freedom of movement and kept farm workers’ wages artificially low. Camacho had been a bracero, and the bad old days seemed to get worse as he told the stories over and over. At my kitchen table, Camacho recounted one of my favorites:

My first job was in the desert in Borrego Springs, picking grapes. We used to wake up at three in the morning, eat breakfast, and start working in the warehouse at four. We worked there until it was light enough to see outside. In the morning light we started picking grapes, and we worked until about two in the afternoon, stopping only to eat lunch. Then we had a two-hour break, when most people returned to the bunkhouse to rest. At around four it was back to the warehouse, where we worked until ten at night, with a break for dinner. In bed by eleven, for four hours’ sleep. Six days a week, seventy-five cents an hour. It wasn’t bad—except for the rattlesnakes.³

Pablo was born on a little ranch near Novolato, a town of maybe 25,000 people in Sinaloa, Mexico. His father was a campesino, a small farmer who grew and harvested sugar cane to send to the Novolato sugar refinery, built and owned by the local hacienda owners. Soon after Pablo was born, in 1933, the local campesinos organized themselves into an ejido—the system of communal land tenure that was a main achievement of the Mexican Revolution—and took the land away from the hacendados.

President Lázaro Cárdenas had already proclaimed that every campesino should have his own piece of land to work. My father became president of the ejido. He grew sugar cane for the refinery. But you know how it is, after a few years the refinery owners didn’t pay the ejiditarios a good price for the sugar cane, and there were seasons when the campesinos couldn’t make it. People continued to grow corn, garbanzos, chilies, but it wasn’t enough, and the bank wouldn’t give them credit unless they agreed to grow cane. So even though they had their own land, they fell into debt and remained poor and under the power of the bankers and the old landlords, who still owned the refinery.

Camacho had a rude introduction to politics. His father was assassinated by local political rivals when Pablo was ten, and the boy had to leave school and work full-time. He started as a human scarecrow. Armed with a slingshot, he guarded the newly sown fields from the birds. He graduated to a helper in the cane fields and finally became a regular cane cutter. When he was fifteen, he got a job in a sugar factory.

Refinery work is seasonal, so in May of 1954 Camacho traveled to the United States as a bracero. Only the hardest and most efficient workers, about a third of those who signed on to the program, made it. After three months battling the rattlesnakes Camacho was sent to Chula Vista, near San Diego, to work in the tomato fields. There, the workforce was thinned out some more. Camacho and a few others were made specials, braceros who carried a plastic card (called a mica by the workers) that allowed them to work for the same employer year after year without going through the formal contracting procedures. Being a special was a privilege, reserved for model workers. Camacho described his first several months in the United States:

I was a young man and I have always liked adventures. I had heard about the U.S., but I never dreamed I would be able to go. The work was not as hard as the work I had done in Mexico. I cut sugar cane in Mexico. No work I have ever done has been as hard as that. And ever since I was a kid I have liked to work. I like the companionship. I like the activity. When I was young I didn’t like games where you sat down. I liked soccer and boxing. When I worked in Chula Vista thinning celery, I would grab the short-handled hoe out of pure pleasure and race the other young men. We raced for the fun of it.

In Chula Vista, Pablo raced through tomatoes, celery, squash, and cucumbers. He bought his 1949 Ford, rented a room in a Tijuana hotel, paid board at a local restaurant, and using his mica, commuted across the border every day but Sunday. He worked for the same Japanese boss—all the bosses in Chula Vista were Japanese back then, he said—for six years, from 1954 to 1960, returning regularly to Mexico in December to work a few months at the sugar refinery. In 1960 his boss in Chula Vista gave him the documentation he needed for a visa. He never went back to the refinery.

In 1964, Pablo married Bertaliza Lopez, a woman from Culiacán, Sinaloa. After having two children, the family dropped out of their car pool and made the apple, strawberry, and lettuce town of Watsonville their permanent home. Bertaliza went to work with Pablo in the strawberries while Pablo’s sister took care of their kids. Bertaliza had never worked outside the house before. In Mexico in the old days we didn’t have the custom of the women working. The man worked and the woman stayed home and took care of the household. But Bertaliza wanted to work. She was stubborn about it.

It is tough to begin farmwork in the strawberries, not only because the plants are so low to the ground but because of the way people are paid—by how many flats of berries they pick individually. Bertaliza, with no agricultural experience, ignorant of the tricks of strawberry picking, and unaccustomed to bending over or squatting all day long, worked harder than she ever had, without making much money. Farm workers say that people who work for an individual piece rate die alone. A friend of mine from Vera Cruz, a city boy who also tried to begin life as a farm worker in the strawberries, quit after three days. That’s not work, he said. It’s a punishment from God.

The Japanese owner of the strawberry farm paid half the Camachos’ rent even after Pablo moved on to a celery crew. It was 1965, the braceros were gone, labor was scarce, and the strawberry farmer wanted to make sure that Pablo would return the next spring, after the celery was finished. But it was still the bad old days in the celery:

There were two foremen, one was a Filipino and the other was a Mexican. They would put names of people on the work list who were not working. We called them muertos, dead men. Since the whole crew was being paid by the number of boxes we cut and packed, the muertos were getting part of our money. It was a perfect scam. The rancher was still paying the same amount, so he wasn’t upset, but the foremen were taking part of our earnings.

And we had to work hard. There were times we worked so long that they had to turn on the lights of the trucks so that we could see the celery. We worked ten, eleven, twelve hours a day. The Filipino used to tell us at the end of the day that we had done a good job and probably made thirty or forty dollars. But when we got our checks all we had made was a hundred or a hundred twenty for a six-day week. People were angry, but we never went beyond complaining.

In 1970, Chavez arrived. I got a dispatch for a job in the celery that very first year and began working with a union contract. The difference was tremendous. They paid well, but the main thing was they couldn’t rob us anymore. They had to give us a piece of paper for every truckload of celery that left the field. We now had proof of how many boxes we had cut and how many people were working. And so the muertos—the dead men—were dead forever.

The union was the best thing that ever happened to California farm workers, Camacho maintained. Most farm workers old enough to remember agree, as do the people who study them. Phillip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis, calls the high years of the UFW, 1965 to 1985, the Golden Age for California farm workers. But some farm workers give the union mixed reviews. After all, the union rose and fell twice: in the early 1970s, when membership fell from about 50,000 to 6,000; and ten years later, after it had been rebuilt in Salinas, when its power finally collapsed. Nevertheless, the worst thing that most farm workers say about the UFW now is that it eventually got beat, and that wages and working conditions quickly deteriorated once it did.

How it got beat, and to what extent it was responsible for its own demise, are the biggest questions posed in this book. I asked Camacho what happened. He had his answer ready:

The main thing that went wrong was that the Republicans won the governorship in 1982. And the governor put the friends of the growers on the Agricultural Relations Board. And they wouldn’t pay any attention to our grievances. Also, the peso collapsed, and more people had to come here to work. We were swamped with workers from Mexico.

I didn’t argue with Camacho’s answer, not on that occasion, as we sat in my kitchen drinking coffee, sixteen years after we had last worked together. His was the answer of a good chavista, and it has some truth to it. And I agree that the UFW was the best thing that ever happened to California farm workers. But did the union happen to California farm workers, or did California farm workers make the union happen? It is not just a question of the Spanish language’s proclivity for the passive voice. What led to the demise of the UFW is not the kind of question that has a straightforward answer. Rather, if this were a detective story, it would be a question for the reader to ponder. Think about it long enough and hard enough, and perhaps the fog will clear.

But if this is a detective story, it is a modern Mexican one, in which, as Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the master of the form, says, the main issue is not who did it but the context in which it was done. The mystery of the UFW’s rise and fall cannot be solved without understanding the fighting tradition of California farm workers, the character of farmwork itself, the history and opinions of some of the people who do that work, the nature of the UFW staff and the internal life of the union, the political weight of the union’s friends and supporters measured against the weight of its enemies and how that relationship changed over time, and, finally, the character, background, and ideas of the UFW’s leader, Cesar Chavez. Learn that context, and perhaps the mystery will dissolve. At least the story will have been told.

No one has told it yet, despite the appearance of a fair number of books about the union. The early ones were mostly hagiography, tales of how the wise and saintly Cesar Chavez miraculously built the UFW. More recent works blame Chavez for the union’s fall, citing his personal demons and his periodic purges of the UFW staff, especially the dismissal of his highly skilled top aides. In almost all accounts, the history of the union is essentially a story of Cesar Chavez and his staff, in which farm workers provide little more than background color as either the beneficiaries of his genius or the victims of his faults.

Pablo Camacho, who considers himself one of the beneficiaries agrees that it was Chavez who built the UFW and made history, and that farm workers only helped out. Pablo is proud to have been one of Chavez’s soldiers, and what a soldier he was! Once, during a 1979 strike, we were on a picket line together on the edge of a struck lettuce field. We had homemade slings, the kind that Camacho had used as a boy in Mexico to scare away the birds. They require some skill. You spin the piece of leather around your head and then let one end go; if you do it correctly, you can send a good-sized rock hurtling toward your target at a respectable speed. We were mostly fooling around, trying to see how close we could get our rocks to a helicopter spraying the middle of the struck field, some hundred yards away. Not very close—that was part of the joke. Suddenly, Camacho ran into the field, directly toward the helicopter, screaming a warrior’s roar and twirling a rock the size of a baseball in the sling above his head. The rest of us were astounded. Who knows what the pilot thought as he yanked the helicopter straight up and away from our little David’s attack.

Pablo Camacho did his job on the picket lines, went to the membership meetings, argued forcefully with his fellow workers about the importance of the union. Even the official historians of the UFW acknowledge that without people like Pablo Camacho there would have been no union. The union just didn’t happen to them. That much is clear.

But there was another level of farm workers’ involvement in the union, almost exclusively in the Salinas Valley, that was deeper than Camacho’s. Scores of farm workers, many of whom had been active in farm worker struggles before the UFW arrived in 1970, some of whom came from backgrounds in Mexico more radical than Camacho’s, and almost all of whom worked on piece-rate vegetable crews, became the leaders of the UFW in the Salinas Valley. Some of them, not all, called themselves chavistas, and throughout the 1970s they worked in alliance with Chavez and some of his staff. But they never became an official part of that staff until 1980, and when they did, differences between them and Chavez quickly arose. Chavez united most of the staff against them, trampled them, and pushed them out of the union. One might say that for ten years they made the UFW happen in the Salinas Valley, and then the UFW happened to them. Once they were gone, the union lost its authority in the fields, and the growers discarded their UFW contracts without serious opposition. The golden age was over.

I talked to another of my old car pool mates to see what he thought had happened to the UFW. In 1994, Raúl Medina, universally called Maniz, lived with his wife, son, and brother in one of Watsonville’s more solid working-class neighborhoods. They had no phone. It was not worth the money, he said; if you wanted to see him, you could drop by his house. Each time I did, Maniz and his brother, Samuel, were entertaining. They prepared and served food: hot tea with brandy, honey, and lemon one morning; freshly cut salsa with beans and corn tortillas one afternoon; and the next day, pork blood sausages served on a plate with more tortillas and salsa. Each dish was delivered with an elaborate explanation of how and why it was good for you, and although no one said grace before the meals, the food was prepared and eaten slowly, joyfully, with reverence.

The TV was always on, but the only time anybody paid any attention to it was during Telemundo’s live coverage of opening statements in O. J. Simpson’s murder trial. Maniz, suspicious of the official version of everything, thought O. J. was being framed and argued his position so forcefully that we all said nothing in response. Most often, the talk was about work: where to find it, how much the rains would delay it, the overall prospects for the coming season.

Maniz, although very much a Mexican, spoke English well and was the only person I met while working in the Salinas fields who could have been mistaken for a second-generation Mexican American farm worker. He followed U.S. sports more closely than the others and was a big Jackson Browne fan. Without being as deeply involved in the UFW as Pablo Camacho, he was an even more devoted follower of Chavez, joking in the car at the time of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978 that he was with Chavez right up to the Kool-Aid. He was of unfailing good humor, and performed the greatest single feat of farmwork I ever heard about: one day he dropped acid and cut celery.

Maniz, what was it like? I asked him.

Green, Frankie, green, green, green.

Maniz came to the United States from Jacona, Michoacán, in November 1963, when he was fifteen years old. The very damn day I arrived was the day they killed Kennedy. We were at the house of one of my aunts in the Imperial Valley, and we saw it on television. Kabluey. Bang. Bang. On my very first day.⁴

Maniz settled in Hollister, California, and enrolled in high school. What he remembered is:

fights, all the fights, that was the worst thing about the United States. There were more fights at Hollister High than I had ever seen in Mexico. Hey, there was every kind of person you could name at Hollister High. Tejanos, Michoacanos, people from other Mexican states, Chicanos, blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos. Son-of-a-bitch, if there were any Martians around, you could find them at Hollister High. Nobody would leave you alone. It was war, all against all. Every race had to prove who was the toughest. Back in Jacona there were fights but only now and then because we all knew each other. Everybody was somebody’s cousin; everybody spoke the same language. But at Hollister High there were fights every day. I couldn’t stand it, so I went to work.

Maniz’s father had been a fieldworker in Jacona, a small city in Michoacán. He worked on other people’s land for wages, or sometimes he was paid just with food. He claimed that he paid fifty centavos (about twenty-five cents) to cross the border to the U.S. in 1944. He worked his way up the coast: Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Salinas. In 1950, he went to work for an Italian named Joe Felice in Hollister, who let him live rent-free in a house next to one of his orchards. Felice had apricots, plums, and walnuts. Maniz’s dad pruned, irrigated, sprayed, thinned, and harvested. Soon Joe Felice fixed Maniz’s father’s papers. He was working for Felice on the day he died.

Maniz joined his dad on Felice’s farm in the late 1960s. The bracero program was over, and there was no shortage of work:

The growers grabbed everybody: drunks, cripples, drug addicts. If you were a Mexican and you could stand on your own two feet, they tried to put you to work. There wasn’t any trouble with the migra [immigration authorities] back then. I went to work with my dad and some of my other brothers in 1967 in the apricot orchards. We all picked together and a few of us pruned together. We all thinned. When picking time came, the women worked in the sheds while we picked in the fields. And when we finished on Joe Felice’s farm, we would go work on the ranches owned by Felice’s friends. All those Italians passed us around. They didn’t pay much. They started at a dollar and change an hour. But you could buy a pair of Levis for six or seven dollars. Gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon. At that price you could drive forever.

Drive they did. Maniz and his brothers followed the harvests into the Central Valley for a few years, but then Maniz settled down in Watsonville and got a job in a frozen-food plant, stacking boxes at Green Giant. He didn’t like it. The machines were so loud he couldn’t talk to anyone. He missed the fellowship of the fields. In 1974, one of his brothers invited him to learn the celery and brought him to the UFW union hall in Oxnard.

Celery was the hardest job I had ever done. When you entered the celery with a union dispatch they gave you three days to learn. They couldn’t fire you in the first three days for not being able to keep up with the crew. But, really, if you didn’t have anybody helping you it was impossible to make it. People just walked off the job, sometimes in the first hours. Lots of times they would just not show up the second day. But you know, at that time, they needed celery cutters, so the foremen themselves would cut in your row for you. The foremen wanted you to make it. And the people would encourage you. Go to it, Maniz, don’t give up, you can make it. Here is where you can make the money. Or some people would scream, Oh, you will never make it, as a way of encouraging you. Most people who come out to learn the celery don’t make it. The best thing is to have relatives or friends on the crews helping you. Afterward, you are even closer to your friends. You drink beers together, you become compadres, you look out for each other the rest of your lives.

Once Maniz learned to cut, he worked year round for a while, on the circuit from Salinas to Oxnard and back to Salinas. The men who did that made as much as $25,000 a year. The good times lasted from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s. Apieros, celery workers (from the Spanish word for celery, apio), bought homes and established small businesses in Mexico. A few rented land in the U.S. and tried their hand at farming, usually in the strawberries. Maniz wasn’t really careful with his money, did not buy a house, and had no desire to become a small businessman. Then, in 1981, he got hurt.

He was packing. There was a ditch in the middle of the field. It was a muddy day, and he and two fellow packers had to get the burro, or packing cart, over the trench. They took the partially filled boxes off the burro, and lifted it over the ditch. Then Maniz picked up one of the boxes and jumped over the trench with it in his arms. When he hit the other side he couldn’t move. He had injured his back.

I was like a dried-out mummy. I knew it was bad. Ever since then it has been one doctor after another. I damaged a disc is what they tell me. They wanted to operate, put me under the knife. But I have seen a lot of people come out of those back operations worse than before they went in. So I said forget it. Then they wanted to send me back to work, but I refused. Eventually I got a thirteen-thousand-dollar settlement and the promise of a free doctor for my back.

In 1994, Maniz was getting $660 a month from Social Security for his disability. That barely paid the rent. His wife, Beatrice, who worked as a bilingual aid in the local school district, covered the rest of the bills. Their son, Carlos, went to nearby Cabrillo Community College, and Maniz’s brother Samuel lived with the three of them. Samuel still worked in the fields, making about $7 an hour, less than he had made twenty years earlier.

I asked Maniz what happened to the union. How did it fall so far so fast? He did not hesitate:

We got sold out. Some gabacho* working for the union, he was supposed to be representing us. He and a woman they called the Golden Parrot, they both sold us out and then disappeared. They left us for the grave. They had a whole lot of secret meetings with the company, and signed a short-term contract that let it go out of business. They told us about it at the union office. By the time Cesar found out what happened, all the papers had been signed and there wasn’t anything the union could do. The gabacho pretended to be our friend, and then he left with the money. They divided up the sweets among themselves, that gabacho—I can’t remember his name—and the Golden Parrot.

So we not only lost our high wages but also our benefits, our vacations, our seniority, our pensions. We lost everything. They had their whole scene together: the contractors, the scabs, the new companies, the police. And what did we have? Traitors in our midst.

I argued with Maniz for a while, but it was no use. Nothing I could say would dissuade him. This story, which he had been told in the union office, is a wild fabrication, but it’s interesting because it was part of a concerted UFW campaign to blame the union’s demise on what Cesar Chavez would call malignant forces inside his organization, forces that Dolores Huerta, a cofounder of the UFW, still claims were led by Marshall Ganz, the union’s lead organizer from 1970 to 1980.

What to make of such charges is one of the concerns of this book, as are the various internal purges and debates that preceded the attacks on Ganz. Who were the traitors and who were the loyalists, and what was being betrayed? Where did farm workers fit in these internal troubles? How important were these battles in the crushing defeat suffered by the UFW, and all California farm workers, in the 1980s?

There are not too many peasants in my family tree. The closest I can come is my paternal grandfather. A nonreligious Odessa Jew, he became a devoted Tolstoyan, believing that Russia’s redemption lay in a prosperous peasantry and a return to the cultural values of the countryside. Depending on which family story you believe, he either borrowed and never paid back or stole a large sum of money from some distant in-laws in Manchuria, and then, in 1910, he, his wife, mother, and four younger brothers left Vladivostok for Alberta, Canada. There they tried to put their ideals into practice, homesteading a farm, but the Bardackes were city folk who knew nothing about farming. They lost the farm and most of the money.

Unlike my grandfather, I didn’t go into the fields for political reasons. I was a New Leftist, but not one of those who consciously set out to proletarianize myself as a way of reaching out to the working class. I just needed a job. It was 1971; I was in my thirtieth year and was living in Seaside, California, renting a house right next to the fence that separated the Fort Ord army base from the local community. I had been working at the GI Coffee House in Seaside, one of a string of coffee houses around the world where antiwar activists tried to talk with U.S. soldiers about Vietnam. I made my money as a physical education teacher at an elementary school, but was fired after the school learned I had been arrested six times in Berkeley and Oakland during various demonstrations. I was out of work and down to my last dollars when I picked up a hitchhiker who told me he had gone to the UFW hall in nearby Salinas, where he joined the union and was dispatched to work on a lettuce-thinning crew.

I decided to give it a try, and convinced a friend, who also worked at the coffee house and was in a small Maoist group, to go along with me. Nineteen seventy-one was quite a time to enter the Salinas fields. The previous year farm workers there had fought one of the biggest strikes in California agricultural history, and the UFW had come out of that strike with a few contracts, including one at the transnational giant United Fruit, which had recently changed its name to United Brands, and called its Salinas subsidiary, InterHarvest. On the thinning crew at InterHarvest, where we were dispatched, the workers were still celebrating their victory, as well as testing its limits. It wasn’t as dramatic as stumbling into a Detroit automobile factory in 1937, one year after the victorious sit-down strike. But it had some of the same flavor.

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.

I went back to loading trucks at the frozen-food plants. I did that for a couple of years, and helped form a Watsonville branch of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which got me blacklisted from loading trucks. I got a job on an assembly line at Hansen’s Bottling Plant for another year as a way of staying in the Teamsters local, but I hated it and eventually managed to get laid off. By 1983, my sojourn in the traditional working class was over, and I got a job teaching English as a second language at Watsonville Adult School, where I worked for the next twenty-five years.

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.

The Founding

1

The Territory

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 Southern California possible and allowed people to settle in fully arid Arizona. The dam’s electrical power fueled the development of Southern California’s industrial base just in time to make the state a major platform for military production during World War II and a center of military research and spending in the Cold War.

But those who simply wanted water for the old Colorado Desert—the dam’s first proponents—were among its main beneficiaries. They received the bulk of the dammed water, now 80 percent of the allotment, at highly subsidized prices. The All-American Canal, eighty miles of concave concrete laid through the sand dunes on the U.S. side of the border, allowed big growers and absentee landholders to solidify their control over the old Valley of the Dead, as Imperial County became the first place where the federal government allowed Bureau of Reclamation irrigation water to be used on farms over 160 acres. The project also freed the men who ruled Imperial County from the compromises that had been required when sections of an earlier canal ran through Mexico, and turned the once-fertile lower Colorado Valley, on the Mexican side of the border, into a salty desert.³

Farm workers making their way through Mexicali after the bracero program ended came upon one more residue of irrigation history. Its Chinese-owned bars, whorehouses, restaurants, and small shops were a reminder of one of the earliest water schemes, one engineered in 1901 by General Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, the powerful owners of the Los Angeles Times. The first cut along the western bank of the Colorado River had diverted water to the desert through Baja California, allowing the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz—advised and probably bribed by the two newspaper moguls—to demand that half the flow be assigned to Mexico. Otis, Chandler, and other officials of the Times then bought 860,000 acres of Baja California land, at 60 cents an acre; they planned to hire Mexican peons to farm it.⁴

But few Mexicans were around. Mexicali is far from the interior of Mexico and there was no settlement on the southern side of the border. Agents for Otis and Chandler recruited some Mexican tenant farmers from among the railroad workers who had been laying Southern Pacific tracks in the U.S. Southwest, but there were not enough of them. New Japanese immigrants were also recruited, but Japanese workers had better opportunities in the San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Salinas valleys. The Chinese became the perfect choice. Run out of California cities in the 1870s, out of the fields in the 1880s, first banned from immigrating in 1882, and permanently banned in 1902, many Chinese laborers had already moved south to Mexico. A fair number had settled in Tijuana. Mexico was both a refuge and a convenient base from which to smuggle newly arrived immigrants into California. Accordingly, the U.S. Border Patrol was set up, not to stop Mexicans but to keep out Chinese.⁵

Mexicali became a classic sin city: a fortuitous combination of border town and Chinatown serving the recreational needs of a male frontier settlement built only to extract wealth. The town was the moral complement of what was happening across the border. The earliest water imperialists were also semi-utopian dreamers and moral reformers. In each of Imperial County’s little towns they passed antiliquor, antigambling, and antiprostitution laws. Subsequently the Women’s Christian