My historical novel set in Delano during the grape strike
led by Cesar Chavez is about personal heroism over political convenience, moral
choices that run against the grain of community standards, and unique
opportunities the characters encounter to forge their own path in the midst of
politically tumultuous times.
What led up to the Road to Delano
Cesar Chavez was hardly the first to dream of creating a
labor union to improve the lives of impoverished migrant farmworkers. He knew
the history of the unionizing efforts in California agriculture was dismal. It
couldn’t be done if he judged the possibilities by the past alone. Many had
tried, and every one of them had failed to change the system of abusive farm
labor practices. The growers had proven they had the power to rise up and crush
nascent reform movements. The law of the land was against him. So when Cesar
quit the Community Service Organization (CSO) in 1962 to begin organizing a
farmworkers union, he traveled a well-beaten path. The Central Valley had
witnessed a long line of organizers seeking to change the economic relationship
between labor and growers with little to show for their efforts. A cycle of
misery and revolt had occurred in the Central Valley, the heartland of our
nations’ industrial agribusiness, for nearly a hundred years.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the lords of the
Central Pacific Railroad, who built the western half of the transcontinental
railway, were giddy at the possibilities for the flat and fertile land. The
Valley lays pinched between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coastal
Ranges to the west and runs nearly the entire spine of the sunshine state. As
the largest section of Class 1 soil in the world, with abundant water from ice
melt, and more than 300 days of sunshine a year, it could become a farmers’
paradise. It only needed men to work the land. Up and down the Eastern seaboard
the railroad promoted that cheap virgin farmland was for anyone with the skill
and fortitude to tame it.
Farmers came, they plowed, and they planted.
Unlike Midwestern and Eastern farmers, they didn’t work
small tracts. Instead, they laid out whole sections, using every mechanized
advantage for the greatest efficiency. Come harvest time, they needed hordes of
stoop labor to reap the bounty of their efforts. First, the growers recruited the
Chinese workers who had built the great railroad to work the fields.
Reactionary Californians who feared the Chinese would settle down and become
landowners passed anti-Chinese laws that ostracized them from the community. So
they left the fields. The Japanese, the Okies, and the Filipinos followed in
waves. Mexican migrant field-workers, both legal and illegal, were long a part
of the mix of nationalities engaged in labor on the industrialized farms.
Growers and industrialists wanted no limit on immigrant
labor to keep wages down and to keep the workforce available for its vast needs
for stoop labor. Growers provided temporary labor camps to house migrants.
Growers didn’t want the workforce to settle down, to become comfortable, and to
assimilate into the community. After the harvest, they forced them to move on.
This created a migrants’ circuit stretching from Imperial County hard by the
Mexican border to the citrus and nut orchards of the Sacramento Valley in the
far north of the state. With a surplus of bodies constantly on the move, wages
were kept low and working conditions intolerable. This created a malleable and
subservient labor pool to operate the great agricultural machine.
Discontent rose steadily during the 1920s and 30s, with
workers flocking to picket lines in a determined effort to extract better wages
and working conditions from tightfisted growers. Communist organizers
infiltrated many of the groups. Communists and progressives had the language
and organizing skills of revolution, so they led the way. But the workers never
embraced their ideology of class warfare and collective land ownership. They
just wanted better living conditions and better wages. Some had once been
landowners but had been chased off their land by drought and debt. No one
wanted to give up their rights to own property, but neither did they see
themselves as slaves to the land. Many of the Japanese workers brought over to
replace the Chinese had their minds set on saving to buy their way out of stoop
labor. Some of them, before the Second World War, became prominent landowners.
The American worker, no matter how poor, no matter how
deeply disenfranchised, no matter how wretchedly they were treated, had no wish
to forgo their ambitions of becoming respectable citizens. Even as part of a
group, they were individuals. The myth of the rugged individual who claws their
way up to achieve the American Dream through hard work and grit had sifted down
to the lowest of low. This dream, though only a low-simmering aspiration,
traveled with them as they stooped among the cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes,
onions, and grapes. A better life had simple ingredients: a house, a car that
wouldn’t break down on the way to work, a healthy life for their children,
nutritious food, and schools that didn’t discriminate. Then if the winds of
good fortune blew their way, maybe they would even enter the ranks of the
owners. If it wasn’t plausible for the many, it was possible for some lucky
few. It was after all American soil they cultivated.
By the mid-1930s, successful strikes were on the verge of
crippling many farm operations and strangling harvests. But before the growers
caved into the workers’ demands, a new organization arose called the Associated
Farmers, whose statement of purpose was almost solely focused on stopping all
efforts at collective bargaining agreements. They allied themselves with law
enforcement, who deputized local citizens, providing them with ax handles as
tools of persuasion. They were to use them to force stubborn workers to defend
themselves in a violent reaction. This physical confrontation was a battle
fieldworkers couldn’t win. The wealthy growers in alliance with the armed state
and aggressive vigilantes were efficient at putting down all dissension in the
fields. It didn’t matter how peaceful a strike action began; it always ended with
deputized citizens bearing cudgels and wreaking havoc. A melee always followed,
a deliberate tactic in a strategy designed to discredit legitimate efforts to
organize peacefully for a redress of issues. Growers had no intention of
agreeing to any collective bargaining agreement, out of both principal and
practice.
During the banner years of organizing efforts, 1933 to 1937,
all the strikes were broken, leaders arrested, and known communist organizers
were imprisoned. By the late ’30s, exhausted from fighting, workers lost their
enthusiasm for organizing and unionizing efforts waned in the lead-up to the
war.
Meanwhile, in the east, during 1933 and ’34, a debate raged
in the U.S. Congress over Senator Wagner’s proposed bill to stop the labor
conflicts sweeping the nation. After vigorous debate, his bill, The Wagner Act,
also known as the National Labor Relations Act, finally passed in 1935. The
Wagner Act, a watershed moment for organized labor, codified the right of
workers to join a union and affirmed that unions had the right to collective
bargaining through secret ballots. It ended the most intractable struggle
between industry and labor by granting unions standing to pursue collective
bargaining. Except for farmworkers. The bill covered every category of worker,
except it expressly excluded agricultural and domestic workers.
How much suffering, fighting, and poverty could have been
alleviated in the lives of the lowest of the low wage earners if they had been
granted the right to choose their affiliations. A moment of duplicity in
leaders’ legislative duty to apply democratic principles equally and fairly;
instead, they forced onto farm labor nationwide the culture of plantation
racism current in Southern society, that not every worker needed to be or should
be treated equally.
Duplicity runs deep under the well-phrased freedom-loving
vocabulary of our civic discourse. Our nation’s history is full of talk of
freedom and equality, but when the moment came to decide who should share in
these new rights, the elites often engaged in a lurid game of keep-away played
with the deepest ambitions of our nations most vulnerable.
Why were some workers granted a voice in their workplace,
which since the law’s enactment had lifted millions into the middle class,
while excluding the most vulnerable of workers?
Jesse F. Perea, Professor of Law at the University of
Florida, concluded in his study, “The Echoes of Slavery,” that Senator Wagner
agreed to exclude farmworkers in deference to the Southern Democrats. Southern
Democrats, in turn, agreed to support New Deal legislation as long as nothing
disrupted Jim Crow. The notion of southern landowners negotiating with black
men, who had once been their property, over wages, and working conditions, was
far too unpalatable for their gentility to stomach. The exclusion maintained
the political structure of segregation for another generation to grapple with.
The law effectively disenfranchised farmworkers nationwide,
just as American agriculture acquired all the techniques and technology of mass
production. They received no access to workers’ compensation, unemployment
insurance, no health care benefits, or any form of relief, state or federal
when their occupation impoverished them. They were forced into the lowest
economic echelons of an increasingly prosperous nation. Those who cultivated
the land and picked the food that Americans ate, migrated in hunger and
destitution from one harvest to the next, a low-cost workforce to do the
bidding of landowners. Farmworkers, by their legal designation, became a
sub-class of the national workforce. Labor laws, forged by a history of
conflict that created humane working conditions for millions, didn’t apply to
them. They existed in a segregated limbo, on the fringes of the American
promise. All of this was done to appease the segregationist sensibilities of a
dying Southern plantation sensibility.
Unless they escaped into better jobs in different
industries, there was little to dream about for these American workers.
Once America entered the war, efforts to organize for better
wages were swallowed up in patriotism and pragmatism. Able-bodied men shipped
off to war, leaving a shortage of farm labor. To meet the need for unlimited
low-cost labor for growers, the federal government authorized the bracero
program in cooperation with the Mexican government.
The importation to California fields of landless Campesinos
recruited by the Mexican government met the growers’ need for a flexible, low
cost, and manageable labor force. The vigilante strong-arm tactics of the
Associated Farmers became obsolete.
A government bureaucracy developed to house, feed, pay, and
control the braceros, and these farm labor administrators would brook no
dissent. When a bracero misbehaved or complained about his job, he was packed
on a bus and returned to Mexico. There was no negotiation of wages, for they
were fixed by contract with the Mexican government. Braceros lived in shabby
labor camps with a company store. Costs for housing, food, and incidentals
charged to the store were deducted from their pay. Despite their meager
earnings, it was more than the nothing they would earn if they returned to
their impoverished villages south of the border. So they were quiet, dutiful,
and hardworking, a lumpen workforce that fed the giant agricultural machine
needed to feed a hungry nation.
After the war ended, California growers lobbied the Truman
administration to continue the bracero program indefinitely. Truman signed
Public Law 78, extending the program with the condition that citizens were
granted priority in hiring. If jobs went unfilled, then braceros could be
hired, a fair law the growers had no intention of keeping.
The largest of the bracero camps stood in Oxnard,
California. The Buena Vista camp housed 5,000 men in a warren of shacks, flimsy
dorms, kitchens, and eating halls bordering the American sugar Beet Factory, to
whom they were indentured. It housed an exploitable workforce that harvested
beets along the foggy coastal land of the Oxnard plains that fed the sugar beet
factory that produced the white sugar used to sweeten our food. By four a.m.,
braceros loaded into buses and trucks and dispatched to the local fields for
the backbreaking work of cultivating and cutting sugar beets. When the locals
showed up at the Farm Employment offices seeking employment, the jobs had been
filled. They were powerless to do anything to regain their stolen jobs, so they
lived on the margins of a prosperous city, surviving on the scraps of work they
could find while biding their anger.
Cesar Chavez in Oxnard
Into this cauldron of discontent, Cesar Chavez drove his
beat-up station wagon on a hot August day in 1958. He had a one-year contract
to organize the farmworkers in Oxnard for the CSO. Chavez had organized in
communities up and down the San Joaquin Valley for the past five years. He was
seasoned in holding house meetings, handling disputes, and solving problems.
The CSO focused on voter registration, holding citizenship and language
classes, resolving pressing community issues, and helping with health care and
education. They were not a labor group. Cesar hadn’t come to town to help the
unemployed. That aside, his heart was always with the downtrodden. The year in
Oxnard opened Chavez’s eyes to what could be accomplished for a group he’d spent
nearly his whole life around.
Cesar had a diminutive bearing—short, lean, and soft-spoken.
At first meeting him, one could easily misjudge his grit, his tenacious spirit,
and few in those early days understood the full measure of his fire. There was the
anger of deprivation in that blue flame, but not the pure anger of youth. Time
and knowledge had smoothed out his thinking. His motivation now existed in an
alchemy of understanding that human dignity was a fragile state of mind tied
mysteriously to economic freedom. A man could be free to go about his way, move
where he will, and that was one freedom. But a man also needed a say in what he
was paid, and how he was treated on the job. If he didn’t have a voice, he was
no better than a slave, a modern indentured servant, perpetually in debt to the
master.
Then there was this idea of the American Dream that sifted
about in the air, the notion that a man could rise above his circumstances
through the application of hard work because of access to opportunities. If
that dream existed, it appeared to him parceled out directly along the fault
lines of race. There was nothing haphazard about it. Some got the full benefit
of the equality promised to them all; others with brown skin or Filipino names
were subservient to the equality of others.
Life had taught him this truth. Since his father lost his
Arizona ranch to the dual devils of the Depression, drought, and debt, he had
stooped beside his parents in whatever field they could find to work. He hoed,
cut, cultivated, weeded, trimmed, picked, shoveled, and hauled under the
California sun, spring, summer, and fall, and in the winter rains he lived in
the shacks that were so cold it went through everything he owned down to his
marrow. That’s when the pain of his real poverty sunk in, when there was no
remedy for the cold, the hunger in his belly, and the ramshackle surroundings
he now called home. Something must warm a man beside the heat of a woman’s
body. It wasn’t dignified to live in such want. That he knew.
He had reason to be angry, but he bided his time. He also
had this secret, this wish, this crazy idea that foamed up inside him from time
to time, that one day he would do something about the ache of wet and cold to
the bone. Why shouldn’t he be treated like a man and not a farm implement?
Those in charge received the full benefit of the truth that all men are created
equal. Was that just a mythical notion like the gold of Ophir that existed
somewhere, but no one could point to the exact location on a map. A true
mystery. If you could only find that place, one would be prosperous and happy.
Or was that notion the anchor bolt of the American Dream?
Add to his thinking a deep sense of moral imperatives
inculcated since his childhood days by his Roman Catholic mother and father.
His clear understanding of right and wrong began with the way people treated
each other. He observed firsthand his parents treating the lowest with dignity
and respect. His mother played a crucial role in shaping Cesar’s world. Her
dichos, or moral sayings based on Catholic wisdom and tradition, influenced him
profoundly.
He had dropped out of school after eighth grade because he
didn’t want to see her labor so hard in the fields. So he didn’t begin
seriously reading until introduced to important books by Father Donald
McDonnell in the early ’50s. Father McDonnell introduced him to Gandhi and Pope
Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, an encyclical on capital and labor. After reading the
encyclical, he now had a framework for understanding the role of employer and
employee from a Judeo-Christian perspective. He came to believe that class
warfare was unnecessary and unchristian. The Christian view was to have
harmonious relationships between the classes. It was apparent classes existed,
and he had no problem identifying with the laboring class. But he rejected the
socialists’ idea of state ownership of land. He learned from Pope Leo that it
was a deep impulse in man to want to better himself, and that made wages,
especially when they were at their lowest, the most sacred. And that if a man
aspired to buy land through diligent work and careful saving, then the land
became his wages. So landowners were entitled to their wages too, and labor was
due respect and just treatment.
To the communists, the inequality between labor and grower
meant a class struggle through collective bargaining that would ultimately
reshape the economic and political order. To Cesar, the battle was for respect
as a human being in the workplace. That respect had tangible manifestations. Labor
had rights that were as sacred as growers’ property rights. Mutual respect
meant a fair wage, humane working conditions, and the right of workers to speak
as one voice.
He had read all this and considered it. Yet he didn’t have a
full vision of how to bring human respect and wage justice to the people he
served—until the year he arrived in Oxnard.
Cesar had a practical mind. He believed in patience. To
begin, he wanted them to take tiny steps forward. He had to have an issue that
would engage the people, raise their blood to just below a boil, so they would
be willing to work to see change through. People wanted to be led, but they
didn’t want to be tricked. They had to have a good reason to put forth the
energy, and they needed hope their efforts would result in a positive
improvement in their lives. He had no illusions that something great would
happen. But he had committed to the work, to see what could be done. So he
organized his house meetings and used his unusual gift. One that proved
remarkably useful to him in those days—his ability to hear peoples’ needs. In
planning his meetings, he thought the hot issue to begin organizing around
would be the railroad crossing. He thought the mothers and fathers would be
outraged about the lack of lights and whistles. The farmworkers’ kids had to
cross the busy Southern Pacific tracks to walk to school, and he remembered
that several of his classmates had been killed by trains.
The people surprised him. In house meeting after house
meeting, men raised their angry voices about their stolen jobs. The growers
were playing a shell game, pulling a fraud, saying there were no jobs for them
when they could see the braceros in the fields, working away. Those jobs were
stolen by the braceros because they were paid below the going rate. The beet
farmers preferred cheap labor unless someone stood up to them. Cesar surveyed
their eyes. These men had the beaten-down look of those with an expiring hope.
Finally, one night, after listening to them complain about
no work, he stood and confronted them. If you want jobs, he said, you will have
to fight for them.
Yes, they nodded their heads. They spoke cautiously in
murmurs.
Who will go with me tomorrow morning to the Employment
Office to demand jobs?
No one raised their hands. They had anger, even a flickering rage, but he could
see plainly they were not yet organized. They did not yet understand how to
take action for change. That would come in time. They possessed the seed of
dissatisfaction; their situation reeked of injustice, and given time, they
would learn to speak up.
Over the next year, beginning with one farmworker, he
marched nearly every day into the backroom of the State Employment Office where
the Farm Labor Office was located to register for work. Eventually hundreds of
the unemployed followed his leadership. They were organized for change. And
after one year the local farmworkers began to find work here and there, but
were rapidly fired under trumped-up excuses—they didn’t work fast enough,
didn’t know how to cut or cultivate, couldn’t drive a tractor, excuse after
excuse. Growers grasped after their prerogatives with greedy malice, and would
not let go.
Finally, because of his organizing efforts, the state of
California officials overseeing the braceros was fired for taking bribes from
growers. The officials running the Farm Office for the state were fired for
breaking employment laws.
By the end of his year, the locals were finding plenty of
work. It had been a hard slog, tedious, aggravating, nerve-wracking,
frustrating, but Cesar had persevered. He had organized for change. If he could
do this, there were so many possibilities.
Shortly before he left Oxnard, he stood on the edge of a
beet field in the chilly morning; the ocean dampness lay in a thin mist over
the fields as he watched the rounded backs of laborers inch their way along the
rows of plants, chopping at the moist earth. Pope Leo’s words might have made
that moment a personal epiphany, that “their scantiness be accounted sacred.”
The less they earned, the more sacred their wages. These men contorting their
bodies until the pain drove down, a nail through the flesh, were happy to work.
When they rose from the fields, tired and aching, they were satisfied as men.
They could feed their families. If his job ever was to organize for better
wages and working conditions, he could do it. He could form a union. He could
do it right here, right now.
But he wasn’t ready, so he bided his time.
These lonely men breaking their backs to make sugar were the
only workers in America denied their right to vote if they wanted to speak as
one to the growers. It would be a fight, a battle, a war. But he could do it.
Those men out there were living proof.
He also knew that once he left this city, what he had
accomplished would dissolve into nothing. The sense of injustice sifted into
every fiber of his being.
Soon he left Oxnard. His family piled into his station wagon
and drove to L.A. to take up his position of Director for the CSO. He never
forgot these men and their struggle. The thoughts of what he could do for
farmworkers would never be far from him. His idea of a union that would fight
for the dignity of a man’s wages continued to grow in his mind.
And while that idea germinated in Cesar’s mind until it
became a driving ambition, there arose discontent in other quarters of the
valley. Not all growers saw labor issues the same way. There were enlightened
farmers sprinkled here and there. So in 1958, farther up the valley from
Oxnard, around Delano, another event took place that shaped the history of the
land. It happened to a grower. His name was Sugar Duncan.
The Road to Delano
His story begins in the 1930s when he first arrived in the
Central Valley to farm the fertile valley land. He had little money and owned
no land. But Sugar was a gambler, and it was the Depression, land was cheap,
and opportunities were everywhere for someone who knew his way around.
So our story, The Road to Delano, opens with another young
man with great ambitions who rides a Pullman from the east into this restless
land of promise.
