On “Lettuce Wars”: Remembering the struggle of farmworkers
Bruce Neuburger (author of the recent book, Postcards to Hitler), wrote to MRP recently to remind us about the incredible efforts of Chicano farmworkers to gain their rights, described in detail in his book Lettuce Wars. The book describes a struggle most famously associated with Dolores Huerta and co-founder Cesar Chavez, who, along with several young girls, he is accused of raping. Such violations are both an assault on particular individuals, and the collective of freedomfighters that they are a part of. In moments like these we believe it is important to remind people of the social movements that these survivors were a part of–the larger struggles they gave their life force to. In this spirit, we are re-publishing an excerpt of Neuburger’s book today. Neuburger writes: The following segment is taken from Chapter 3 of Lettuce Wars. It describes the conditions that led to the Salinas general strike in the vegetable fields which began in August 1970 shortly after the successful conclusion of the Delano grape strike and boycott. The victory in the Salinas strike established the Salinas vegetable workers as a stronghold for the union. It aroused farmworker activism and militancy far and wide across the Southwest, and set in motion forces among the growers and other powerful interests that, in the years to come, would seek to reign in and crush the movement.
Excerpt: Chapter 3
“….As the end of the 1960s approached, these lettuce workers, most of them braceros until 1964, had reason to believe their time had come. Small groups of volunteers leafleted the Salinas and Santa Maria valleys and distributed the UFWOC newspaper.* The workers, many of them dispossessed farmers and farmworkers, including among them workers who were no strangers to struggles for land and rights in Mexico, were watching events unfold in the grape growing areas.
By 1968 a number of wine companies, fearing a boycott of their easily identifiable labels, came to terms with UFWOC. This included Almaden and Paul Masson in the southern Salinas Valley. Then, on July 29, 1970, Delano grape growers, battered by the nationwide boycott, met UFWOC officials in Delano and reluctantly signed union recognition contracts, putting an end to an epic five-year grape strike and boycott.
Workers in the coastal valleys appealed to UFWOC that their time had come. Chávez, who was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the new responsibilities of the union to set up dispatch services and enforce con- tracts to 85 percent of the table grape industry, wanted the Salinas and Santa Maria Valley workers to hold off on a strike.
Sensing an approaching groundswell, the growers set out to erect a wall of protection. So while Delano grape growers were concluding that agreements with UFWOC were inevitable, Teamster union officials were counting bundles of cash delivered to them by vegetable growers to sweeten a deal the growers desperately wanted. On July 27, 1970, the day before the Delano signings, came the stunning news: thirty-two Salinas, Watsonville, and Santa Maria growers signed contracts with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to represent their workers. The Teamsters declared that farmworkers had approached them about union representation, but it was the lettuce growers, not the workers, who had done so.
The Teamster deal provided growers with a valuable legal argument. In the event of a strike they could claim they were the victims of a union jurisdictional dispute and plead for legal relief. To undermine a boycott they could claim that their lettuce was already union label, a tactic sure to confuse at least part of the public. This was strike and boycott insurance financed out of the union dues now being deducted from farmworkers’ paychecks. And as an additional bonus, the Teamsters got 2 percent of each worker’s check for their “retirement fund.”
When the Teamsters announced they were moving into the vegetable fields the anger of many Salinas Valley workers headed toward a breaking point. When workers on Salinas ranches refused to sign with the Teamsters and were fired, it was spark hitting tinder. Sporadic, unorganized walkouts began and were spreading. If UFWOC didn’t call a strike, it might just happen anyway. There were intense, heated meetings, with members packed shoulder to shoulder in the union hall on Wood Street, where the UFWOC leadership argued with the workers to delay a strike while the union tried to bargain with United Fruit negotiators and placate Church allies who feared the consequences of a big strike. There were delays as the growers and union leaders jockeyed. But the determination of the workers to strike was palpable. Chávez came to Salinas and called for all the union staffers and volunteers from around the country to head to Salinas and Watsonville. The flame ignited.
Raphael Lemus was at the union hall in August 1970 when union staffers put out signs for different ranches and asked workers from these ranches to claim them. Lemus picked up the D’Arrigo sign and held it up over his head. With that he became an organizer. Word got back to the company. The next day at work a supervisor approached Lemus and offered him a foreman’s job. “Do I look like a dog to you?” Lemus asked the smiling supervisor. “What do you mean?” the supervisor replied. Lemus said coolly, “You must think I’m a dog. You just offered me a bone. I don’t take bones.”
This defiant attitude was expressed in a mass way on August 24, 1970, when 7,000 workers in dozens of companies from Watsonville, Salinas, and Santa Maria walked out and joined long caravans that wove their way through the valleys. Production stopped in the middle of the year’s biggest harvest. For days no lettuce market figures were being quoted out of Salinas because, as one grower spokesperson understated, there was a “scarcity of the product.”
Production of strawberries, celery, carrots, and tomatoes was also hit. In the days leading up to the signing of union grape contracts, representatives chosen by strawberry workers at Pic ’n Pac had gone to farmworker rallies in the Central Valley to seek out UFWOC leaders. “We’re await- ing your arrival in Salinas,” they told the union people. “We’re ready to strike. We’ve waited a long time for something like this.” As strike fever mounted a group of Pic ’n Pac workers and their families were gathered near the entrance to the La Posada trailer camp at the edge of the Alisal, near Salinas’s old Chinatown. When a union sound truck passed by La Posada announcing the decision of Freshpict workers to strike, someone in the camp misunderstood the message and yelled out, “Ya ha llegado el momento. Nos estan llamando en huelga!” (The time has come. They’re calling us out on strike!) The residents of La Posada formed a car caravan and went to the Pic ’n Pac fields and called the pickers out on strike! They’d misunderstood the message, but the strike was on.
It did not take long for Pic ’n Pac’s losses to mount up. After losing 500 acres of berries, the company signed with the union, one among ten strawberry companies to do so.
The wall the growers erected to keep out the flood they feared did not hold. Grower unity broke down when Interharvest renounced its agreement with the Teamsters and signed a UFWOC contract on the last day of August. Local growers, already disturbed and worried about the entry of conglomerates like United Fruit into vegetable farming, were furious. They formed the Citizens’ Committee for Agriculture, announced a boycott of Interharvest products, and set up a blockade of an Interharvest yard to keep trucks from leaving. Salinas police and sheriffs, normally quite adept at keeping traffic flowing at struck firms, were somehow unable to this time. The Interharvest blockade ended after a little more than a week, but it provided tactical advantages to the growers. By keeping Interharvest, the largest Salinas Valley grower, with about 20 percent of the valley’s production of lettuce, out of the fields for a crucial week of the strike, lettuce prices were driven skyward, aiding some struck firms to recoup through high prices at least some of what they’d lost in volume.
The strike gave weight to the threat of a boycott. By October, Freshpict, another giant with 40,000 acres of vegetables, and a subsidiary of the Purex Corporation, signed with UFWOC. In November, D’Arrigo, a long-established, family-owned grower, also gave in. By then, UFWOC had companies representing nearly 20 percent of vegetable production under contract. But others held firm and fought wickedly to keep the union out.
By forcing some of the most powerful growers and agribusiness corporations to recognize a union of farmworkers and negotiate wages and working conditions, the general strike accomplished what no other farm strike had previously achieved. Most crucially it put initiative in the hands of workers as a collective organization.
These accomplishments did not come easily. Many striking workers were evicted from the labor camps and forced to sleep in the fields or on the concrete floors of those camps that remained open. Families of strikers endured intimidation and harassment from police and eviction from company housing. Striking workers faced forces mustered by the growers and the state—police, private guards, and bands of armed vigilantes, some of them directly employed by the Teamsters Union, which partnered with the growers to suppress the strike.
The strike met with unrelenting hostility from the Salinas establishment. Bumper stickers proliferated around the Salinas community with the message, “Reds, Lettuce Alone” and “Get César Out of Our Salad.” Early in the strike the local Salinas paper, The Californian, published front-page stories and pictures featuring growers and their families bravely taking to the lettuce fields determined to save their rotting crops. A look at the news photos was enough to cause sidesplitting laughter from Lemus and his fellow workers. In none of the photos are the hardworking growers even bent over. Either they were unable to bend down as their workers did for hours at a time, or they felt it was beneath their dignity, so standing up, head of lettuce in one hand and knife in the other, they smilingly carried out the harvest work. Such pleasant work, the photos seemed to say: only a misled ingrate would choose to strike over this!
Numerous articles in the local paper pleaded the growers’ case: They could not survive on the $2.10 an hour demanded, or a union hiring hall the new contract would force on them, or the new rules that guided the use of pesticides in the fields. Economic disaster was on the horizon, and furthermore, the American way of life was now under siege. To dramatize this, growers flew U.S. flags from non-union trucks and buses and field equipment. Even the celery burros (work tables) of the strikebreakers were propped with U.S. flags. (Indeed, there was more truth to this threat than perhaps the growers themselves realized, since the American Way of Life was, and is, only possible because the intense, cruel exploitation of some sustains the privileged lives of others.)
Growers organized rallies denouncing the intrusion that now threatened the well-being of California’s farms. Anne Merrill, from one of the prominent local grower families, became a star at these gatherings. Acclaimed as the growers’ answer to the union’s Dolores Huerta, Merrill spoke in defense of farmworkers who now faced an evil form of union- ism. She and other grower representatives became champions of the
By the end of the 1970 Salinas harvest season, UFWOC had contracts with Interharvest, D’Arrigo, and Freshpict, major vegetable growers; Meyers and Brown and Hill tomato packers in the King City area; Delfino, the largest artichoke grower; and Pic ’n Pac and other strawberry firms in the Salinas-Watsonville area. In addition, it had contracts previously won at Almaden and Paul Masson wineries in the San Ardo area south of King City. In all, by 1972, UFWOC could count 147 contracts in the grapes and vegetables covering more than 50,000 jobs, thirty-three boycott centers in major cities, and more than 600 volunteers on its staff.
The strike was a life-changing event, sending some workers on a path of activism they had never imagined for themselves. Something “immutable” had been suddenly flung in the air, and no one could tell how it would come back down to earth, nor what things would look like when it did.
The growers feared their old autocratic control over workers would never be the same. Farm unions may be inevitable, one grower conceded after the strike. Although this reflected the direction things were going at the time, it did not signal any general resignation. Whereas growers gave ground in wages and working conditions, this was only a tactical retreat. They remained hostile to unionism but even more so to the dangerous elements they saw lurking in the shadows of the picket lines.
When clergy and religious activists joined the Delano grape strike, a hue and cry went up of “outside interference.” When students, fresh from the civil rights, antiwar, and Free Speech movements, turned their energies toward supporting farmworkers, the criticisms intensified. The struggle of farmworkers for better conditions hit up against the racism and chauvinism they faced as Mexicans, Filipinos, and so on, raising issues that struck deeper than workplace conditions, issues that hit on a central feature of a society built on national oppression. This drew in politically awakened sections of people with a broader critique of U.S. society, which in turn provoked denunciations that drifted across the political landscape like a smoky cloud after an explosion. UFWOC was accused of leading, not a union, but a “social movement.”
In the wake of the Salinas general strike these accusations grew more persistent. “Movement” became a dirty word. In the discourse of the day, unions, as long as they stuck strictly to bread-and-butter issues, were judged in the court of public opinion makers as respectable and responsible. Movements, on the other hand, were political, social, and reckless. For the growers and a growing chorus from other defenders of the system, including, as we shall see, powerful trade union leaders, there was no place in the fields for a social movement.
There was, for sure, an element of truth to the charge that UFWOC was part of something more than a union struggle, but this was one of its great strengths. The farmworker struggle gained in vitality to the degree to which it came to represent the rebellion against the two- fold oppression of farmworkers: as highly exploited workers with low wages, few benefits, poor housing, and so on, and as Mexicans, subject to intense forms of repression and discrimination in nearly every aspect of social and civil life (or as some farmworkers considered themselves with ample justification, a lower caste). To many campesinos these early years of the 1970s brought a newfound strength and optimism. It seemed only a matter of time before the storm that swept the valley the summer of 1970 would reshape the landscape. The other valley growers would fall one day to the union. The balance of power was shifting, all this in the context of other changes going on in society and the world. It was possible for farmworkers to sense their struggle was part of something larger, contributing to bigger changes taking place. Not to oversimplify the matter, individual outlooks varied greatly. Many farmworkers were, after all, displaced peasants, that is, small owners who maintained entrepreneurial ambitions. And some still ran small farms or aspired to return with money made in the United States to begin their own businesses. Visions and aspirations thus varied greatly. This does not contradict the notion that the struggle had opened up the field to new potential and new aspirations, including radical ones, as farmworkers sought to struggle against exploitation and the oppression they faced. *UFWOC, the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee was the precursor of the United Farmworkers Union. UFWOC was formed during the Delano grape strike and boycott of 1965 to 1970 when the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta merged with the Agriculture Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by the Filipino farmworker leader Larry Itliong….”
