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A Moveable Feast: The UFW Grape Boycott and Farm Worker Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2013

Matt Garcia
Matt Garcia*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Extract

When most people think of the United Farm Workers, two things come to mind: Cesar Chávez and the grape boycott. Regarding the former, Chávez distinguished himself as perhaps the best-known Mexican American labor and civil rights leader in the country through his advocacy for farm worker rights in California during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1970, the union he led forced growers to the bargaining table for the first farm labor contracts in the history of the Golden State. This achievement would not have been possible without Chávez's embrace of the boycott, a strategy that, until proven important to the struggle, had been regarded by labor leaders as supplemental to the main strategies of strikes and marches. In fact, when we evaluate the contributions of the United Farm Workers to the history of labor in the United States, the grape boycott might well be its most enduring legacy, even more so than Chávez's leadership.

Type
Symposium: Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Workers
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 83: Strikes and Social Conflicts , Spring 2013 , pp. 146 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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References

NOTES

1. Garcia, Matt, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chávez and the Farm Worker Movement (Berkeley, 2012) 47Google Scholar. Jim Drake, “Two Unpublished Manuscripts,” Farmworker Movement Documentation Project (FMDP), 6. Gilbert Padilla, interviewed by the author, August 19, 2008, Fresno, CA.

2. I make this claim although consumer historian Lawrence Glickman contends, “Consumer activism lacks the signature victory that we associate with such social movements as abolitionism, organized labor, women's suffrage, temperance, and Civil Rights.” Glickman, Lawrence, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The labor contracts signed by the UFW in 1970 are one such “signature victory” achieved by means of a boycott.

3. Today, The United Farm Workers argue that the beginning of the farm worker movement should be pegged to September 30, 1962, when Cesar Chávez initiated the National Farm Worker Association in Fresno, California. While this was an important event, it excludes the important work that AWOC had been doing before NFWA's formation. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee truly grew out of the merging of the mostly Mexican NFWA with the mostly Filipino AWOC during the grape strike in 1965. This periodization also captures the important contributions of Filipino Americans, especially Larry Itliong, who led the AWOC strike that resulted in the merger. The United Farm Workers is the most popular name of the organization, although it was known by other names before it arrived at this name in February 1972. To simplify the narrative, I refer to the union as the United Farm Workers (UFW) unless it is necessary to distinguish it from its other iterations.

4. Gilbert Padilla, interviewed by author, August 19, 2008, Fresno, CA.

5. Marshall Ganz, interviewed by the author, March 26, 2008, Cambridge, MA.

6. Jerald Barry Brown, “The United Farm Workers Grape Strike and Boycott, 1965–1970: An Evaluation of the Culture of Poverty Theory,” PhD diss., Anthropology, Cornell University, 1972), 136. Marshall Ganz explains that the union, now under the AFL-CIO, spent hours deliberating on the direction of the movement after the defeat of Perelli-Minetti winery. Bill Kircher favored further organizing among winery workers to consolidate their victory over all California vintners, but the majority of UFWOC leaders favored a campaign against table grape growers because many workers had come from those plantations and had seen little in the way of progress since the beginning of the struggle. Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins, (New York, 2010) 227–28Google Scholar.

7. Of their 12,170 acres, Giumarra owned 6,430 in the Delano district, dedicated to table grape cultivation. Jerald Brown, PhD diss., 136.

8. Jerald Brown, 143.

9. Ibid., 34.

10. Newton-Matza, Mitchell, “Boycott,” in Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, Volume 1, ed. Arnesen, Eric (New York, 2007), 171–74Google Scholar.

11. Brown, PhD. diss., 204–5.

12. Dolores Huerta, quoted in Jerald Barry Brown, “The United Farm Workers Grape Strike and Boycott, 1965–1970: An Evaluation of the Culture of Poverty Theory,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1972), 205.

13. Brown, Ph.D. diss., 218–19. 1966 became the benchmark because a poor crop in 1967 had reduced total shipments well below the norm for the table grape industry. Therefore, 1966 shipment totals represented a much truer condition of the market.

14. Brown Ph.D. diss., 202.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 211.

17. Brown to Elinson, October 8, 1968, UFW Administration Files Collection, Box 26–33, ALUA.

18. Elinson essay, FMDP, 5.

19. Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory, 110.

20. In chapters 5 through 8 of my book, From the Jaws of Victory, I document the declining relevance of the boycott as a strategy for farm worker justice; however, veterans of the boycott houses played an important role in challenging Chávez's attempts to direct the union's efforts away from organizing workers and toward the construction of an intentional community at La Paz. Miriam Pawel and Frank Bardacke also provide important perspectives on what happened to the union during the 1970s in their contributions to this journal and their respective books: Pawel, The Union of their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chávez's Farm Worker Movement (New York, 2009)Google Scholar and Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (London, 2012)Google Scholar.