Delano Grape Strike

The Delano Grape Strike Begins: September 8, 1965

Global Events: Milestone Events Throughout History. 2014.

COPYRIGHT 2014 Gale, Cengage Learning

From U.S. History In Context.

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Key Facts

Global Context

Africa

The Mozambican War of Independence, fought by rebels in Mozambique against Portuguese colonial forces, begins in 1964.

Asia and Oceania

A massive purge of Communists begins in Indonesia in 1965, resulting in an estimated five hundred thousand deaths over the course of six months.

Central and South America

Just ten days before the Olympic Games are to be held in Mexico City in 1968, a government crackdown on student and civilian protesters results in the deaths of at least forty-four people in an event known as the Tlatelolco massacre.

Europe

The prime ministers of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, two nations with a long history of violent rivalry, meet in 1965 for the first time in over forty years.

Middle East

Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1906–1975) is crowned king of Saudi Arabia in 1964. He institutes a variety of modernization policies that improve the Saudi economy.

North America

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination or segregation based on race or religion in the United States.

Key Figures

Political Leaders

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993), American labor leader.

Background

In the early years of the United States, most farming was done on small family farms. Harvest time required extra hands, but typically relatives, neighbors, and hired hands helped bring in the crops. Communities worked together to meet the needs of the labor-intensive harvest. Large-scale agriculture, supported by slavery, existed in the American South.

The demand for seasonal farm labor began in the United States as early as 1850. Throughout the country, farm production reached the point that producers required additional workers. In the Northeast, farm laborers were typically newly arrived immigrants, often of European descent. Former slaves, poor European Americans, and Native Americans did agricultural work in the post–Civil War South. In the West, farm laborers were often immigrants from China, Japan, or Mexico. As early as 1903, Japanese and Mexican farm workers in the beet industry formed a labor association and went on strike for better wages. One Mexican worker was killed during a conflict between laborers and farmers, but the newly formed union achieved its demands. One of the keys to the union’s success was that it drew together different cultural and ethnic groups that shared a common goal.

During the early twentieth century, urbanization and changes in farm production and technology increased the need for seasonal farm laborers. Numerous family farms were absorbed by large-scale agricultural facilities. At the same time, many people left rural areas for urban ones, and traditional farming skills were lost. Technological and chemical innovations, including machinery and pesticides, increased the cost and the productivity of farming.

Immigrants remained a primary source of seasonal farm labor until World War I (1914–1918), when the war in Europe greatly diminished the number of European immigrants coming to the United States. Faced with the loss of European immigrants, the American farmers began to look to Mexico for seasonal agricultural workers. Immigration from Mexico increased throughout the 1920s but was dramatically reduced during the Great Depression (1929–1941) due to the reduction in available jobs. Thousands of Mexican nationals, formerly in the country legally as workers, were deported during the 1930s. Migrant farm workers were also brought into the country from the Philippines, a U.S. possession. Large numbers of Americans moved west in search of work.

During World War II (1939–1945), the need for agricultural workers increased once again as millions of American men left their jobs in order to join the military. To make up for the loss of manpower, the U.S. and Mexican governments established the Bracero program to bring farm workers from Mexico to the United States. These temporary contract positions provided the United States with a source of much-needed farm labor. The Braceros, or Mexican workers, were facing depressed economic conditions at home and sought temporary work across the border. The owners of large farms supported the Bracero program because it offered them inexpensive labor. In addition, Mexican workers participating in the program lacked the resources to complain about long working hours, poor conditions, and low pay.

By the middle of the twentieth century, only 20 percent of farm workers in California lived in acceptable housing. Most had no access to toilets, running water, or other necessities. Less than a decade into the formally organized Bracero program, the federal government began to take an interest in migrant worker issues. Two presidential committees investigated the working conditions of migrant workers. The Public Health Service began to offer additional health services to foreign agricultural workers.

While migrant farm workers struggled with poor working conditions and few legal rights, the prospects for laborers outside agriculture improved. Labor unions provided workers with a voice and the control they needed to limit working hours, improve pay, and provide for better working conditions. Unions of all sorts grew during the first half of the twentieth century, especially after the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, but agricultural laborers remained almost completely untouched by organized labor. Ethnic bias, language difficulties, and the legal rights of guest workers, which were quite different from the rights of citizens, made organization more challenging.

The Event

In early 1965, short strikes by several groups of agricultural workers across California led to pay increases. These early strikes improved pay but did not lead to union recognition for agricultural workers. The Delano grape strike began on September 8, 1965, in Delano, an agricultural town north of Bakersfield. Filipino farm workers, organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), began the strike, refusing to pick the ripening Coachella grapes. Farmers brought in Latino workers, and the AWOC turned to the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) for help.

The NFWA was founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez (1927–1993), the son of migrant farm workers. Although his family was poor, Chavez’s parents stressed the importance of caring for others, particularly those who are less fortunate. Chavez left school after eighth grade to help support his family. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to the fields. He married a woman he met in the Delano grape fields and settled, with his family, in San Jose, California.

In San Jose, Chavez met Father Donald McDonnell (1923–2012), a Catholic priest who introduced him to the idea of nonviolent protest. For the first time, Chavez read works by Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) and Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226). He developed a vision of a farmworkers’ organization or union, which became the NFWA. Both Chavez and his wife Helen (1928–) continued to work in the fields to support their family of eight children. Chavez often traveled with the younger children to allow Helen to work as he went from farm community to farm community organizing laborers. Chavez enrolled about twelve hundred workers, primarily Hispanic, in the union’s first three years. Pressure from the NFWA and similar groups helped to end the Bracero program in 1964. The program had allowed railroad and agricultural companies to hire foreign workers for very low wages and to break strike efforts by calling in foreign laborers; ending the Bracero program enabled American migrant workers to negotiate for better pay and working conditions.

After hearing of the struggle faced by the AWOC laborers, the NFWA voted to join the Delano grape strike. They first appealed to other labor unions, such as the longshoreman’s union responsible for loading the grapes for shipping out of Oakland’s docks. Sympathetic to their struggle, the longshoremen sided with the laborers and let ten thousand tons of grapes rot instead of shipping them to market. The young agricultural workers’ groups also reached out to the public, encouraging a boycott of nonunion grapes. The boycott was a success and sales of table grapes dropped dramatically. In March 1966, striking workers began a march to Sacramento, California. One of the two largest growers in Delano, Schenley Industries, had sprayed workers with agricultural poisons early in the strike. The march protested this action. Growers responded to the strike with violence, but Chavez advocated a strategy of nonviolence. Faced with ongoing losses and a public opinion that favored the workers, Schenley signed a contract with the NFWA. DiGiorgio, the other major grower in Delano, soon followed, and workers chose the NFWA over the unionization efforts of another labor organization—the Teamsters—that was not solely focused on farm workers.

During the summer of 1966, the two farmworkers’ unions merged, forming the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFW), affiliated with the powerful AFL-CIO federation of unions. The UFW provided food, cash, and office equipment in support of the strike and the farm workers. By 1970 the UFW had significantly improved conditions for grape workers in California. Improvements included a union-run hiring hall, health clinic and health coverage, credit union, cooperative gas station, and community center, as well as higher wages.

Global Effect

Chavez and the UFW achieved a significant victory in the grape fields of California, organizing and improving the conditions for more than fifty thousand farm workers. But poor conditions continued on many nonunion farms throughout the country. In 1968 Chavez fasted for twenty-five days to bring attention to the plight of the farm workers. He used fasting as a nonviolent protest of working conditions once again in 1972. That year Arizona lawmakers, with the support of wealthy corporate farms, denied farm workers the right to strike or boycott during the working season, effectively eliminating their right to organize. Although the protest did not bring change to the Arizona law, it did bring farm workers together once again. Chavez’s third fast, which lasted twenty-five days in 1988, was continued by a variety of other public figures, once again drawing attention to the agricultural workers’ cause.

Unionizing improved the conditions for many farm workers, but even in the early twenty-first century, many farms were not union establishments. Migrant workers continued to face a wide variety of challenges, including little or no access to health care and education and inadequate housing. Children as young as ten or eleven often worked in the fields alongside their parents, and only 55 percent of workers’ children completed high school. Farm laborers often lacked access to social services, including programs such as Medicaid. In many states, agricultural workers did not qualify for workers’ compensation or receive Social Security. Although the Delano grape strike led the way for farm workers, many of the conditions Chavez and others fought against remained.

Books

Dunne, John Gregory. Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Kallen, Stuart A. We Are Not Beasts of Burden: Cesar Chavez and the Delano Grape Strike. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2011.

Levy, Jacques E. Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007.

Pawel, Miriam. The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Websites

“About America’s Farmworkers.” National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc. http://www.ncfh.org/?sid=36 (accessed on May 17, 2012).

Cesar Chavez Foundation. http://www.chavezfoundation.org (accessed on May 16, 2012).

Hartmire, Wayne C. “The Delano Grape Strike: The Farm Workers’ Struggle for Self Determination.” Farm Worker Movement (February 1969). http://www.farmworkermovement.com/essays/essays/Miller Archive/030%20The%20Delano%20Grape%20Strike.pdf (accessed on May 17, 2012).

“History.” United Farm Workers. http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=research_history.html (accessed on May 17, 2012).

Tejada-Flores, Rick. “Cesar Chavez & the UFW.” The Fight in the Fields. PBS. http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fightfields/cesarchavez.html (accessed on May 17, 2012).

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)

"The Delano Grape Strike Begins: September 8, 1965." Global Events: Milestone Events Throughout History, edited by Jennifer Stock, vol. 6: North America, Gale, 2014. U.S. History in Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/RDGCZV827950005/UHIC?u=mcc_mesa&sid=UHIC&xid=d83639f5. Accessed 15 Apr. 2019.

Gale Document Number: GALE|RDGCZV827950005

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Proclamation of the Delano Grape Workers for International Boycott Day

The Hispanic-American Experience. 1999.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Gale

From U.S. History In Context.

Full Text: 

Commentary on Proclamation of the Delano Grape Workers for International Boycott Day

Having sustained a strike against the grape growers of Delano, California, from 1965 to 1969, United Farm Workers founders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta came up with the idea of an international boycott of California grapes and grape products. By this time, the oppressive situation of the California grape workers had become known simply as "la causa" and was considered a moral issue among church, labor, and social leaders around the country. The boycott was far more successful than its organizers had imagined that it could be. Consumption of California table grapes and wines dropped precipitously, causing the growers to lose money. Shortly after the boycott was proclaimed, Chavez began his famous hunger strike, which was the final step needed to break the growers' resistance to collective bargaining.

This proclamation was issued on May 10, 1969, officially International Boycott Day. More than just a declaration by striking workers, the proclamation uses decidedly ceremonial, at times biblical rhetoric. Over and over it contrasts the honorable legacy of the workers ("We have been farm workers for hundreds of years . . .") with their present oppressed situation, forcefully implying that their right to better treatment is being denied them. The final sentence—"The time is ripe for our liberation"—boldly links their struggle to the natural order itself.

"Boycott Day Proclamation," by Delano Grape Workers

We, the striking grape workers of California, join on this International Boycott Day with the consumers across the continent in planning the steps that lie ahead on the road to our liberation. As we plan, we recall the footsteps that brought us to this day and the events of this day. The historic road of our pilgrimage to Sacramento later branched out, spreading like the unpruned vines in struck fields, until it led us to willing exile in cities across this land. There, far from the earth we tilled for generations, we have cultivated the strange soil of public understanding, sowing the seed of our truth and our cause in the minds and hearts of men.

We have been farm workers for hundreds of years and pioneers for seven. Mexicans, Filipinos, Africans and others, out ancestors were among those who founded this land and tamed its natural wilderness. But we are still pilgrims on this land, and we are pioneers who blaze a trail out of the wilderness of hunger and deprivation that we have suffered even as our ancestors did. We are conscious today of the significance of our present quest. If this road we chart leads to the rights and reforms we demand, if it leads to just wages, humane working conditions, protection from the misuse of pesticides, and to the fundamental right of collective bargaining, if it changes the social order that relegates us to the bottom reaches of society, then in our wake will follow thousands of American farm workers. Our example will make them free. But if our road does not bring us to victory and social change, it will not be because our direction is mistaken or our resolve too weak, but only because our bodies are mortal and our journey hard. For we are in the midst of a great social movement, and we will not stop struggling till we die, or win!

We have been farm workers for hundreds of years and strikers for four. It was four years ago that we threw down our plowshares and pruning hooks. These Biblical symbols of peace and tranquility to us represent too many lifetimes of unprotesting submission to a degrading social system that allows us no dignity, no comfort, no peace. We mean to have our peace, and to win it without violence, for it is violence we would overcome—the subtle spiritual and mental violence of oppression, the violence subhuman toil does to the human body. So we went and stood tall outside the vineyards where we had stooped for years. But the tailors of national labor legislation had left us naked. Thus exposed, our picket lines were crippled by injunctions and harassed by growers; our strike was broken by imported scabs; our overtures to our employers were ignored. Yet we knew the day must come when they would talk to us, as equals.

We have been farm workers for hundreds of years and boycotters for two. We did not choose the grape boycott, but we had chosen to leave our peonage, poverty and despair behind. Though our first bid for freedom, the strike, was weakened, we would not turn back. The boycott was the only way forward the growers left to us. We called upon our fellow men and were answered by consumers who said—as all men of conscience must—that they would no longer allow their tables to be subsidized by our sweat and our sorrow: They shunned the grapes, fruit of our affliction.

We marched alone at the beginning, but today we count men of all creeds, nationalities, and occupations in our number. Between us and the justice we seek now stand the large and powerful grocers who, in continuing to buy table grapes, betray the boycott their own customers have built. These stores treat their patrons' demands to remove the grapes the same way the growers treat our demands for union recognition—by ignoring them. The consumers who rally behind our cause are responding as we do to such treatment—with a boycott! They pledge to withhold their patronage from stores that handle grapes during the boycott, just as we withhold our labor from the growers until our dispute is resolved.

Grapes must remain an unenjoyed luxury for all as long as the barest human needs and basic human rights are still luxuries for farm workers. The grapes grow sweet and heavy on the vines, but they will have to wait while we reach out first for our freedom. The time is ripe for our liberation.

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)

Workers, Delano Grape. "Proclamation of the Delano Grape Workers for International Boycott Day." The Hispanic-American Experience, Primary Source Media, 1999. American Journey. U.S. History in Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ2159000312/UHIC?u=mcc_mesa&sid=UHIC&xid=58c563bd. Accessed 24 Apr. 2019.

Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ2159000312

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