The Whip and the Bee

Looking back on these excerpts from an organizer’s diary I kept more than 30 years ago (and originally published in Dissent magazine), I am struck by how lucky I was to go to work for the United Farm Workers when I did. Nowadays, we live in an era in which the left, particularly the intellectual left that dominates colleges and universities, specializes in explaining its failures. Its opponents, the left never tires of pointing out, control the media, have enormous power, and are loaded with money. The Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez never doubted the odds were stacked against them, but—equally important—they were never paralyzed by waging a struggle in which their backs were against the wall. If the growers lost enough money, they would sooner or later make concessions, the union always knew. By contrast, the grape strike was a source of life for the union and its workers, an act as natural as breathing, and nothing a grower could threaten them with was as powerful as this felt knowledge.

LOS ANGELES: 1967

I pronounce it like FDR’s middle name, and the man at the Greyhound ticket window stares at me. “The bus don’t stop at no place like that!”

“But it’s on the map.”

“I don’t care what it’s on. The bus don’t stop there!”

“You sure?” He nods, and then I spell it out, “D-E-L-A-N-O!”

“De-lay-no. That’s different. Sure, we got a 6:30 bus goin’ there.”

THE PINK HOUSE

The bus trip to Delano is made up of sprints down freeways, then sudden turn-offs for small towns, and more freeway driving. The foothills along the way are one gray-brown mound after another. Their monotony is broken only by an occasional orange or lemon grove, and I sleep most of the time. I am tired when we reach Delano, but all I want to do is walk. A man outside the bus station gives me directions for the Farm Worker offices, and I start out for them. His directions, I soon realize, are almost unnecessary. Delano is as racially divided as any Southern city, and after a few blocks it becomes clear which part of town is for Anglos and which part for everyone else. I head west, past a cluster of stores and cafes and across the overpass which lets Route 99 cut through the center of town. I am surprised by the heat. It is not just that the sun is hot but that everything around me is. It feels as if there were radiators hidden in the trees and telephone poles.

It is three days before I am assigned to work with the organizers who are laying the groundwork for a strike against the Guimarra Corporation, the principal grape grower in the area. I have been fearful of getting an office or a research assignment, and now the worst seems over. There is a shortage of sleeping spaces in the houses the Union rents, and so with two others. I move into the back room of El Malcriado, the Farm Worker newspaper.

CARD CHECKS

The organizers’ meetings begin at eleven in the morning. They start this late because most organizing is done in the evening after the workers come home from the fields, and Bakersfield, where the majority of Guimarra workers live, is an hour from Delano. 10:30 is usually the earliest an organizer can get back home. The only exception is Friday night, when organizing is cut short so that everyone can be at the Union's general meeting; Friday is also special because it is the day on which the Union’s $5 a week salary is paid. After the general meeting, most of the organizers end up drinking beer at People’s Cafe, where prices are cheap and nearly all the customers are farm workers.

The organizers’ meetings are run by Fred Ross, a tall, gaunt man, somewhere in his middle fifties. It is Ross who, when he was working for Saul Alinsky’s Community Service Organization, started Cesar organizing, and the two have been close ever since. Ross introduces me and another new organizer to the groups but that is it as far as our newness goes. We are assigned older organizers to work with, but there is no theorizing, no special explanations for our benefit. It is assumed we will learn what needs to be done by having to do it ourselves.

The first organizers’ meeting I attend begins with Ross asking for newly signed union cards. The cards represent commitments by the workers at Guimarra to have the United Farm Workers as their union, and they put the Union in a position to call for a card check election and know that it has the support to win. Still, this is not the main value of the cards. For it is clear that the Guimarras, who insist that their workers don’t want a union, will never voluntarily agree to an election. What the cards do is prepare the way for a strike at Guimarra.

After the card check Ross asks, “Any more new crews?” “Two more back in the mountains,” one of the organizers answers.

There is a groan. This will happen at least three more times in the next weeks. Crews we never knew existed will be reported working on some remote part of the Guimarra vineyards. It is this kind of isolation that has made it difficult for the men to know their own strength or numbers, and when I drive to Bakersfield the next night to meet with a family who has not yet signed with the Union, I am immediately confronted with this situation. We meet with a father and his two sons, and most of our time is spent answering questions they put to us about the Union. It isn't that they don't hate the Guimarras but that they don't know how many other workers are willing to sign union cards and they fear being blacklisted. They are also new enough to be afraid of their crew leader.

HOUSE MEETINGS

With one other organizer, I share responsibility for five different crews. With three of them, we meet with the crew leader himself. With the other two, we concentrate on a group of men who rent the same house. We are in contact with each crew at least several times a week, sometimes to get new names, other times just to talk about how the grapes are ripening. From our point of view the ideal time for a strike is when the seedless Thompsons, the Guimarra’s biggest cash crop, are ready for picking.

Early in July, Fred Ross makes a decision to hold a house meeting for the crew leaders we absolutely trust. It is a crucial step. So far, the workers have committed themselves only to wanting union representation. They have said nothing about a strike, and our problem is to see how many are willing to leave the fields when it comes to a showdown with the Guimarras. The meeting takes place early in the evening at a farm house just outside Bakersfield. Some of the men arrive in their own cars, others in the trucks they use to take their workers into the fields. We have to introduce at least half the crew leaders to each other, although many of them have been working at Guimarra for more than a dozen years. There is much joking about the need for introductions, but they set the tone for the meeting. The men don’t feel anonymous.

When Cesar speaks, it is not to rouse the men but to ask questions. “Do you want a strike? Will your crews stay out? Who else is to be trusted?” The questions are ones which all of us have been asking, but now it is possible to compare replies and have the men judge one another’s accuracy. Most of the crew leaders have never seen Cesar before, and he moves among them slowly, listening, asking questions, nodding in sympathy. Although there is nothing striking in anything he does or says, he sets off reactions we have not gotten in the last month. At the end of the evening Fred Ross asks the crew leaders if they are willing to help us arrange house meetings with their men. They say they are, and the stage is set for the most crucial part of the organizing.

FIESTA

By the end of the month we have gone as far as we can with house meetings. It is necessary to see if the workers feel confident enough to turn out in mass for a Union gathering at which they know there will almost certainly be company spies. We decide on a fiesta. It will have free food and mariachi bands, and anyone can use these as an excuse for coming, although it is obvious that the fiesta will be for something more. We are worried that not enough workers will come, but we plan for 2,000 anyway and spend the ten days before the fiesta urging our crews to come. Other problems in managing the fiesta become comic, especially the matter of what to serve. Cesar wants brains as the main dish and says he knows just the man to cook them. Everyone else groans, and for days the organizers’ meetings open with someone asking if Cesar has given in on the brains. Finally, it turns out that the man who is supposed to cook them can’t be gotten, and we settle on lamb instead.

It could not have been more than a few seconds between when Cesar stopped speaking and when people began shouting. But it seemed to take forever, and I remember feeling that silence was as important as everything that came after it.

Our fears about attendance prove wrong. We have more than 2,000, as farm workers who have nothing to do with Guimarra also come. The crowd is restless at the start, wanting the Union to prove itself. Only five people have been scheduled to speak, but it is still too many, and when Cesar's turn comes, the crowd is uneasy. He begins in a low voice, not moving his arms, barely moving his feet. He talks the whole time in Spanish, not doing as he usually does, stopping every few sentences and translating into English. I have a hard time following him, but the man next to me translates whenever I ask him a word, and I keep up that way.

It is the Union, much more than the Guimarras, which Cesar wants to talk about. “I want to tell a story about a man with a whip,” he says. “This man was an expert with a whip. He could flick the ashes off a man’s cigarette while he smoked it...even pull a handkerchief out of a pocket with the whip. He could also kill a man with this whip, and because of his temper and his reputation, everyone was afraid of him. His workers always did what he told them, no matter how much they hated it, and his wife and his children were very quiet when he was around the house.... After a while, it got so that nobody would stand up to this man, and to keep in practice he began using his whip on anything that bothered him. A stray dog, a cat, even flies. He was so good, he could take the whip and kill a fly while it was still in midair.

“All this went on for many years, and then one day, as the man was sitting on his porch, a bee came buzzing around him. It flew in his hair and around his ears and didn’t pay any attention when he tried to brush it away. One of the man’s workers was passing by at the time, and when he noticed what was happening, he was very surprised. ‘Why don’t you use your whip on the bee?’ he asked. ‘It’s no bigger than any of the other things you’ve gone after.’ But the man with the whip just smiled ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I can kill the bee, all right. That would be easy for someone like me. But bees are different from anything I’ve whipped before. If you go after one, they all come after you. So if I took my whip to this bee, there would be the whole hive to fight. I’d get stung for sure....’ Cesar stops at this point. There is no sound, no movement, just waiting. Then he begins again. ‘That is what the Union means. The Union is like the bees, and the man with the whip is like the grower. He cannot do anything to one of us without having all of us come after him.’

It could not have been more than a few seconds between when Cesar stopped speaking and when people began shouting. But it seemed to take forever, and I remember feeling that silence was as important as everything that came after it.

STRIKE VOTE

We call for a strike vote the first week in August on the night after the men get their paychecks. We want to make sure no one has a reason for going to work the next day. The strike vote is unanimous, and the tension is so great after it that speeches are unnecessary. The meeting ends with the singing of “Nosotros Venceremos,” and for a brief moment I feel as if I were in Mississippi again, leaving a civil rights meeting.

The next morning all of us are up by three. Four of the five crews I share responsibility for have said they will join the strike. We go to the fifth crew leader's house before he is up, and when he leaves, we follow his truck. At each house that he stops, we get out and ask the men who are up to stay away from work. More than half do, and by the time the truck gets to its last stop—an ice store—it is carrying only a dozen men. We get out and begin talking with the men, but this time less about the Union than who they are loyal to: those who have joined the strike or the Guimarras. Just as I think we have failed, the man sitting nearest me climbs down from the truck, then two more follow, then everyone else climbs down. We promise them rides back home, and they start heading for our station wagon. Suddenly, we realize we will never fit everyone into it, and it is not until their crew leader (who has been opposing us) says that he will drive everyone home that our problem is solved. We follow his truck to make sure everyone gets back home all right; and then we go out to the fields.

The sun is up, and it is still cool, the ideal time in the day for picking grapes. But the Guimarra fields are empty. The only people at the gates I go to are pickets and police. Later we learn that, except for the Anglo workers, only two crews have broken the strike. Despite the number of men involved, our strategy has been kept a secret and the Guimarras were caught by surprise. It is not until the following week that they realize most of their workers are not coming back, and they start breaking the strike by bringing in crews from Texas and Arizona or border cities like Calexico.

The crews are bused in late at night so they can avoid our picket lines, but they cannot be kept under cover for more than a day or two. Most of the new workers were not told a strike was going on, and getting them to leave the fields is difficult. Roving picket lines, equipped with bull horns, speak to the workers whenever they get close to the road, and sometimes whole crews will throw down their boxes of grapes and leave the job. But most of the new workers are a long way from home and feel trapped. They have no money or transportation and they don't know where else to look for a job. As the week goes on, new workers are brought in at a much faster rate than we can turn them away. The Guimarras also begin radio advertisements saying the strike is over, and before we can get the advertisements stopped, they have done us enormous harm.

BOYCOTT

The government officials we speak to are of no help. Unprotected by the National Labor Relations Act, we are as handicapped as any union was before the New Deal. Another week goes by, and it becomes clear that, if the strike is going to be successful and nonviolent, we must move to a national boycott of Guimarra grapes (we later include all California-Arizona grapes when other growers start letting the Guimarras use their labels). Organizers are sent out to key cities, and we begin cutting down on our work in California.

Still, we maintain a picket line in front of the Guimarra packing sheds, and when word comes that some Teamster locals are prepared to honor the line, we run it around the clock. I have a midnight to eight shift. Our one compensation is that it is cool at night. Most of our time is spent trying to keep awake. We get threats from some of the white packing shed workers and from some of the high school boys who have been hired to break the strike, but while I am there, nothing happens. I will be in Cambridge, doing research of my own and working part time for the Boston boycott, when I will learn that the men I have been picketing with were beaten up so badly they had to he hospitalized. Two of the men were in their sixties. It is enough to make me stop imagining in more detail.

WINNING: 1970

I am in the office of the Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York when word comes in that the Guimarras are about to sign a contract and that the other Delano growers are ready to follow their lead. There has been talk of victory for weeks; and now, when it is official, the news seems flat. I look around me at the office the Garment Workers let the New York Grape Boycott Committee share. We have a picture of Cesar and some “Huelga” posters on the wall, but basically the typewriters and the telephones and the fluorescent lights belong here most of all. Somewhere along the way, our organizing has come to take on a life of its own. The satisfaction it provides lies in the effort itself. When it is over and we win, there is a feeling of relief and, above all, purpose, but the intensity is gone. Perhaps we are punch drunk in a way? I imagine an outsider seeing us in that light. And then I stop thinking about it. A lettuce strike has begun in Salinas, and I have calls to make.

Nicolaus Mills has taught at SLC since 1972 and is the author of, most recently, The Triumph of Meanness.