John Gregory Dunne, “Delano: the Story of the California Grape Strike”
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DELANO The Story of the California Grape Strike JOHN GREGORY DUNNE Noonday 346 $1.95 DELANO DELANO The story of the California grape strike JOHN GREGORY DUNNE Photographs by Ted Streshinsky Farrar, Straus & Giroux New York Copyright © 1967 by John Gregory Dunne All rights reserved. Library of Congress catalog card number: 67-22438 Published simultaneously in Canada by Ambassador Books, Ltd., Rexdale, Ontario Printed in the United States of America. Second printing, 1969. The quotations from Cesar Chavez in Chapter Six are copyright © 1966 by The Farm Worker Press and by Cesar Chavez. For Harriet Harrison Burns ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Carey McWilliams, for whose many books about California much of the historical information in Chapter Four was drawn. I would also like to thank Cesar Chavez, Eugene Nelson, and Ramparts Magazine for allowing me to quote, in Chapter Six, from a series of long taped interviews in which Mr. Chavez reminisces about his youth and early social work. I am also grateful to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post, who published a part of this book in a slightly different form, under the title Strike, for their encouragement through the duration of this project. Finally, I would like to especially thank Ted Streshinsky, who was there during the long days and nights, and last, but most of all, Joan Didion, who has been there for five generations. DELANO ONE Highway 99 drops out of the dun-colored foothills of the Tehachapis north of Los Angeles and for the next five hundred miles cuts straight as a plumb line up through the Great Central Valley of California. It is a landscape remarkable only in its flatness, its absolute absence of distinguishable topography. Except for the few cold, gray months of winter, a deadening heat lies over the dull green fields that stretch from the Sierra Nevada on the east to the Coast Range on the west. An occasional glimpse of an irrigation canal now takes on, for the driver passing through the Valley, be aspect of scenery. Breaking the monotony are a succession of towns, but for all intents and purposes they might be the same, some larger, some smaller, yet all seemingly grafted onto the land by the same hand. Beyond those, all that saves the driver from highway narcosis are the big rotating sprinklers and the yellow crop dusters floating lazily in the bleached blue sky until they sweep over the fields trailing clouds of Ortho-K and all the other insecticides that anyone who watches billboards on Highway 99 could name in his sleep. In its heat and in its flatness, it all suggests a vacuum of the human will, but the feeling, like the Valley itself, deceives, for this is the heartland of the richest industry in California, a $4.08 billion-a-year industry that goes by the name “agribusiness”. From this state and largely from this Valley comes forty-three percent of the fruit and vegetables sold in the United States, more cotton than is grown in Georgia, tomatoes, peanuts, asparagus, apples, plums, grapes, sugar beets. In Kern, Tulare, and Fresno counties alone, the annual crop is worth in excess of one billion dollars. It is growing, which gives the Valley year its rhythm. It is growing, which gives Valley life its particular tone, growing which has enabled Valley people to remain largely insulated from what industrial America thinks and does and worries about. The concerns of people in Tulare and Madera and Merced are a way of life removed from those of people in the space industries of Southern California or on the assembly line at River Rouge or tending the Bessemer converters along the Monongahela. The prevailing ethic is that of the nineteenth-century frontier. And it is precisely this rhythm, this tone, this insulation, this ethic which made the Valley unable to understand an intense, unschooled Mexican-American named Cesar Chavez and the bitter labor strike which broke out in the grape vineyards surrounding the little Valley town of Delano in the fall of 1965. It is in no way extraordinary that the Valley was unable to understand Cesar Chavez. He belongs to that inarticulate subculture of farm workers upon whom the Valley depends but whose existence does not impinge heavily on the Valley consciousness. Their works is one of side roads and labor camps, of anonymous toil under a blistering sun. The very existence of farm workers is a conundrum. Because they have never been effectively organized, they have never been included under legislation that safeguards the rights of industrial workers; because they are excluded from the machinery of collective bargaining, they have never been able to organize effectively. Nearly half the male workers are Mexican, and during the harvest, when wives and children spill into the fields to pick the crop before it rots, the percentage of Mexican-Americans swells to over seventy percent. Once the crop is in, they are as welcome as a drought, regarded in each community as no more than a threat to the relief rolls. Migrating with the harvest from crop to crop, they work an average of only 134 days a year. Eighty-four percent earn less than the federal poverty level of $3,100; the average annual income is $1,378. So pervasive is their poverty that in Fresno County, over eighty percent of the welfare cases come from farm labor families. This was the birthright of Cesar Chavez. He went on the road at the age of ten, eking out a seventh-grade education in some three dozen farm community schools. “That winter of 1938 I had to walk to school barefoot through the mud, we were so poor,” he has recalled. “After school, we fished in the canal and cut wild mustard greens-otherwise we would have starved. Everyone else left the camp we were living in, but we had no money for transportation. When everyone else left, they shut off the lights, so we sat around in the dark. We finally got a few dollars from some relatives in Arizona and bought enough gas for our old Studebaker to get us to Los Angeles. Our car broke down in L.A. and my mother sold crocheting in the street to raise the money for enough gas to get to Brawley. We lived three days in our car in Brawley before we found a house we could afford to rent. Next winter, we were stranded in Oxnard and had to spend the winter in a tent. We went to bed at dusk because there was no light. My mother and father got up at 5:30 in the morning to go pick peas. It cost seventy cents to go to the fields and back and some days they did not even make enough money for their transportation. To help out, my brother and I started looking along the highway for empty cigarette packages, for the tinfoil. Every day we would look for cigarette packages and we made a huge ball of tinfoil that weighed eighteen pounds. Then we sold it to a Mexican junk dealer for enough money to buy a pair of tennis shoes and two sweatshirts.” The words might have come from The Grapes of Wrath, and, indeed, to read and hear about Delano and Cesar Chavez in the months after September 1965 was to have a curious sense of déjà vu. The Delano strike appeared to have no kinship with the institutionalized formalities of most contemporary labor disputes. There was no ritual of collective bargaining, no negotiating table around which it was difficult to tell the managers of money from the hewers of wood and the carriers of water, no talk of guidelines and fringe benefits and the national weal, no professional mediators, on leave from academe at a hundred dollars a day and all expenses paid, plugged in by special telephone lines to the Oval Room at the White House. The strike in Delano seemed primed by earlier, move violent memories. It might have been a direct descendent of the Pullman Strike of 1894, when thirty workers were gunned down by state militiamen in the rail yards of Chicago, of the sit-ins staged by the fledgling United Auto Workers in 1937, when Walter Reuther was beaten and kicked on the picket line and then thrown down a flight of stairs outside the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant. Even the cause of Cesar Chavez and his strikers seemed particularly superannuated in contemporary America-the demand of workers for the right to organize. But since the fall of 1965, Chavez’s demand has riven the town of Delano. There, for the first time in thirty years, union activity was met with the cry of “Communism” and a town was mobilized to combat the Red Menace of labor organizers. There, embattled growers, untouched by labor’s consolidation over the past three decades, were acting as if the Wobblies were still the nations’ number-one threat. There the AFL-CIO was mouthing the jargon of “capitalist exploitation”; there the strident voice of the radical Left was heard; there the beards and sandals and dirty fingernails provoked the shrill charge of “outside agitators.” There clergymen invoked Scripture to denounce each other as “Godless,” growers clutched the American flag and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” strikers waved red banners and chanted “We Shall Overcome.” There each side declared itself innocent of violence, yet anonymous telephone callers breathed threats, fires lit the night, and shotgun blasts split the midnight silence. The song was an old one, the lyric curiously irrelevant.