Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW: Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, California

Chapter 6. From Factory to Industrial Area: Areawide Organizing in the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys

CHAPTER 6 From Factory to Industrial Area: Areawide Organizing in the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys The record is clear—farmworkers have tried again and again to build a union. They have never stopped, despite the terrific odds always against them. h. l. mitchEll, national Farm labor Union As the National Farm Labor Union strike at the Arvin ranch bogged down, organizers again shifted tactics. Through their experience at DiGiorgio they realized that going after another “rural factory” would continue to drain dwindling resources and not reach many workers. They determined instead to focus on a broader geographical area consisting of clusters of large ranches that produced a single crop, enabling them to reach thousands of workers while forcing organized agriculture to expend more resources.1 In this chapter I will examine the Farm Laborers’ areawide organizing in California, further demonstrating that union organizers did not adopt traditional organizing strategies and that they did not consider their cause hopeless. Rather, I argue that they were constantly experimenting as they became more sophisticated in their understanding of California agriculture, and that their organizing approach was unusual within organized labor. Their areawide organizing involved taking into account shifting trends in social and productive relations in agriculture, organizing internationally, and acting consciously to strengthen organized labor in both the United States and Mexico. While their vision was broad geographically, they acted locally, attentive in particular to productive and demographic trends in the sites of their areawide drives—cotton and tomatoes in the San Joaquin Valley and melons in the Imperial Valley. Eviction of DiGiorgio workers, June 1948. Courtesy of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. On the line: Ernesto Galarza, director of research and education, National Farm Labor Union AFL. Courtesy of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Other labor unions gave aid to the DiGiorgio strike: food caravans of trucks and cars were mobilized. Courtesy of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. National convention (NFLU) delegates, Fresno, California, 1950. Courtesy of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. 206 Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW Cotton and Machines Commercial agricultural production expanded rapidly following the completion of the first sections of the publicly funded Central Valley irrigation system on the eve of World War I. The cotton industry was at the forefront, employing more than one hundred thousand workers during harvest by the late 1940s. A handful of large corporate growers controlled local cotton production, politics, and labor relations through the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Labor Bureau (ALB). They set prevailing wages and maintained grower discipline.2 The ALB and other organizations also maintained control over workers by recruiting from diverse and ever-shifting labor pools. During the first wave of expansion prior to the Great Depression, cotton growers sought primarily Mexican immigrants and their children. Stunned by worker militancy in the 1933 San Joaquin Valley cotton strike, they immediately turned to U.S. citizens from the upper South. But they soon began to shift again to new labor pools. By the late 1940s U.S. citizens of Mexican origin approached 40 percent of cotton harvest workers in the San Joaquin Valley , almost equal to the number of Anglo Americans, the remainder primarily African Americans. By constantly employing new groups to keep workers divided and on the defensive, the growers sought to hold down wages, prevent them from establishing solid roots, and undermine their unions.3 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some cotton growers sought exclusively European Americans, others turned to Mexicans and/or African Americans, while many were only concerned that none challenge their authority. W. L. Frick, president of the California Cotton Cooperative Association and member of the ALB, asserted that “the employment of agricultural labor—and that is restricted to so-called white people, which I employ practically entirely. . . . [I consider] twenty-five to thirty percent of that group to be my social equals,” and, like other growers, he held nonwhite people in still lower esteem.4 Cotton fields and camps during harvest time were a highly segregated patchwork of Anglos, Mexican immigrants , Mexican Americans, and African Americans. They contrasted with those in Hawai‘i, where segregated camps and work crews did not preclude constant interethnic contacts. Despite the divisions, many workers maintained pro-union sympathies and continued to engage in strikes and skirmishes, attracting Farm Laborers organizers, who quickly found workers in the Valley eager to form new locals. In the spring of 1948, when the...