Imperial (127 page)

(
California Farmer,
Question of the Month:
To be fair to all parties, when should contracts between growers and labor be negotiated?

(Lee Anderson, Junior, from Indio:
Harvest time is not fair.

(John Volker from Brawley:
The unions will say at harvest time and farmers will say after harvest.
)

Do you remember the broad and sinister motives of the mid-1930s, when the Communists launched a similarly strategic lettuce strike, and failed? Repression saved the growers then. What about now?

“Carlos Martínez,” one of the strikers, now stands on the corner of Imperial and Ninth in Calexico, waiting for his friend “Manuel Solís” to come from work, because Solís owes him money. Suddenly, Martínez’s supervisor drives past in his pickup, backs up, stops, calls Martínez lazy and also
montonero,
meaning a troublemaker, then invites him to drink a beer with him. Martínez prudently refuses. At this point, the supervisor, “Alberto García,” threatens to make him disappear, and points a pistol at him twice.

García will later insist that Martínez promised to
hurt
Tasty Foods and
break the buses.
In any event, the two men argue for forty-five minutes (I presume that Solís did not appear to pay his debt). García claims that he carries his .22 only when he is carrying a lot of cash to pay his workers; therefore, he did not have it when he met Martínez.

Martínez’s testimony is both detailed and direct, García’s, contradictory and vague. No one saw the incident with the pistol, but the ALRB decides to believe Martínez.

Another incident: A striker tries for reinstatement. A Mexican foreman replies:
I do not give work to lazy people because they are strikers.

In the early 1980s Tasty Foods violates labor laws by declining to rehire two UFW supporters, laying off two others, and threatening a fifth with physical harm. The Agricultural Labor Relations Board hearing will be appealed, sometimes all the way up to the California Supreme Court.

In the end, the defendant’s petition for review is denied. The Administrative Law Officer of the ALRB issues an order that Tasty Foods cease and desist from firing and threatening reprisals, that it reinstate and
make whole
unlawfully terminated workers, that it make its internal records available, post copies of the hearing notice, etcetera, and read it in all relevant languages at a convocation of the workers.

LIMITATIONS

What has César Chávez won, really?

The restricted ALRB hearing documents often remark that a four- or five-year interval between the labor violation and the court’s remedy for it is not uncommon. (Letter from the ALRB Field Examiner to the El Centro legal firm that represents a certain “Abel Farms”:
It has now been almost 5 years since these workers were discriminated against. Most of them have not found steady employment and are currently unemployed.
—In the end, contempt proceedings are filed against Abel in the Court of Appeals,
the first ever,
says the case assignment document.) How are those unemployed workers doing now? What was the cost to their marriages and their health?

But the radicalism of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board must have been shocking to Imperial’s growers. For instance:
Respondent is found to have violated the act for an alleged threat that only the discriminatee saw.

The extremism of some members of the United Farm Workers must have appalled them even more.

A police report from 1979 describes how two hundred strikers from the United Farm Workers have surrounded a labor camp in Monterey. One officer counts over a hundred rocks lying on the ground, arranged by size. Gas cans and soda bottles seem to be in the process of being rigged up as Molotov cocktails. Rocks are already embedded in the wood of the buses; and the labor camp inmates say that they had to run from a rain of rocks. It appears that they have also flooded a field, smashed windows, and sent a worker to the hospital with one of their rocks. Another scab tells the officers that a striker pushed a pistol in his face. The strikers are shaking the cyclone fence around the camp, and they are screaming at the people who were trying to sleep. It will take thirty-nine officers to stop them. The police report sums up the United Farm Workers’ motives as follows:
Personal gratification.

Taking the grower’s side, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board imposes an awful punishment: It requires a public apology from the UFW during peak season, or, at the union’s option, a simple promise not to do it again. If any restitution for damage was ordered, that appears nowhere in the restricted documents.

This was the starkest example of pro-union violence that I came across in the restricted files; but in Imperial itself, especially in 1979, there were any number of incidents which would have been frightening to experience, and possibly embittered their victims. Eventually, César Chávez himself was forced to concede, at least among friends, that documentary photographs from the Imperial Valley had begun to seriously injure the public image of the UFW.

A certain Imperial grower of lettuce, tomatoes and other commodities (let’s call the company “Sylvester & Co.”), having unionized and survived, eventually reaches our universal Rubicon: the collective bargaining agreement expires. Negotiations grind on for twenty-four sessions over a period of three months, then fall apart. Sylvester offers a twenty-one-percent wage increase; the United Farm Workers demand a hundred twenty-five to two hundred percent. Later both Sylvester and the UFW will accuse each other of bargaining in bad faith.

Sylvester blames the United Farm Workers for condoning and possibly instigating the following during the strike: They threaten the people who continue to work; they run them off the road, and they even beat them. Property damage is significant. In the face-off, someone shoots a striker dead. This is Rufino Contreras.

Co-petitioning the appeals court with Sylvester & Co. is a grower named “Joffe Brothers.” During this same period, the Chavistas rush a crew of Joffe Brothers scabs, shouting obscenities at them and attacking with rocks until they flee to a bus. Back in the thirties, police and Legionnaires might have been doing the same to strikers. Perhaps these actions of the UFW were accordingly excusable and even necessary. I hate to think so.

On another day in those same fields, the picketers metastasize into six or eight hundred rioters. The police command them to disperse; they refuse.
The film shows what happened as the bus began to leave the area. First, the Union picketers broke through police and security lines and intercepted the buses . . . Windows were then shattered by pieces of concrete thrown by the picketers. One bus was forced off of an embankment by the attacking strikers.
They also attack the police.

A memo notes that this case was decided
adversely to the Board . . . Petition for hearing denied . . .
In other words, I presume that the growers won that time.

ELENA PRIETO’S CARD

It is central to the Imperial Idea that when confronted by impediments—for instance, temperatures bordering on the preposterous, or waterlessness, or field workers who not only demand wage increases but intimidate other employees and damage company property—a person clenches his teeth and bulls his way ahead. This was not merely, as Richard Brogan called it, arrogance. I suspect that many growers sincerely believed, as they used to about a minimum wage, that additional expenses might put them out of business. They already had to deal with underproduction, overproduction, leasing and contracting fees. They worried that they might be required to hire someone without qualifications. One foreman fretted:
You’re going up against competition, against Bruce Church and Bud Antle. And we can’t just fool around with non-experienced people.
Moreover, any human being, and especially an Imperialite, evinces a natural disposition to resist being told what to do. I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.

All this being said, the reactions of some Imperial growers to the Chavistas ranged from the ill-advised to the pathetic to the disgusting.

Abel Farms, for instance, the company that won the ALRB’s very first contempt-of-court prize, clings very fiercely to its accustomed ways of growing lettuce, cantaloupe, watermelon, alfalfa, cotton, sugar beets, broccoli, carrots, rapini, onions, asparagus and wheat.

The members of this concern (evidently not only field workers but also foremen, perhaps even the big boss) meet before work in a certain shop in Heber to drink coffee, plan out the day and roll dice. Union organizers want to go there before six A.M., so that nobody can be said to be stealing time from management. Nonetheless, Mr. Abel, the man after whom his farms are named, denies access. Not many days after this, an organizer attempts to address the workers on these premises at five in the morning. Mr. Abel expels the man. On the following day he performs a citizen’s arrest of five organizers.

(Does he have any right on his side? Mr. Abel will later accuse organizers of crossing his fields and kicking good lettuce into the furrow. His understanding is that they have a right to talk to workers in cars, not in fields. Or they can talk during the lunch break—which lasts an entire ten minutes and does not take place at any set time. He tells the organizers that they can sit at the side of his fields all day but they are not to come
onto
those fields. Defying him, they go from crew to crew, damaging lettuce.)

The election approaches. “Ramón Ortega,” supervisor, advises “Elena Prieto” in his weeding and thinning crew to vote for Teamsters; he recommends that she not wear a UFW button. Even though she does not consider it to be such, this will later be charged, rightly I think, as
unlawful interrogation.
At another time, Ortega counsels her to vote for the
caballitos,
the “little horses” on the Teamsters’ emblem. She used to ride to work with him; after the election, their friendship cools.

Meanwhile, an irrigator’s foreman warns him that
if Chavez’s union gets in, everything is going to get fucked up.
The irrigator is holding a bird in his hand, the foreman says. If he lets go of it to reach for many who are flying, he will be left with no bird at all. The irrigator considers this to be a threat that he will get fired if he votes for any union.

Perhaps because of these tactics, the United Farm Workers win the election.

Elena Prieto signs a UFW authorization card given her by a certain woman organizer. Ortega is eating lunch, watching. A quarter of an hour later, when she returns to work, Ortega tells her she should not have signed. And behind Ortega I seem to see, as she perhaps also saw, the Associated Farmers of the 1930s, with their deputies and axe handles. Elena Prieto must have been a brave or desperate woman. Her victory, and the tale of César Chávez, is as miraculous to me as water leaping up and out of the tan desert.

ANOTHER FINAL WORD

César Chávez fasts again at Delano in 1988, at the age of sixty-one. The purpose of this Fast for Love is to warn about the effects of pesticides on field workers’ children.

Before this century is done,
he says,
there will be an evolution in our values, . . . not because man has become more civilized but because, on a blighted earth, he will have no choice.

Enemies of César Chávez, take heart! As the twentieth century ends, the Brawley Chamber of Commerce advises you to
DISCOVER THE RICHES BRAWLEY HAS TO OFFER
, these including
LABOR: Wages 25% lower than the California average. Put our labor force to work for you.
Our convenient twenty-two-percent unemployment rate
(seasonal fluctuations occur due to the predominance of the agricultural industry)
creates
a strong and readily available work force.
Moreover, better than eighty percent of Brawley’s private companies remain non-union.

And as Brawley goes, so goes Imperial! Reader, ride north with me out of Duroville, to the Thermal Boxing Club, then into Coachella’s tan walls, Avenue 52, a row of palm trees, a 7UP truck, a smog test station. On Sixth and Grapefruit by the Mexican Food Lounge I begin my inventory and discover the following: Riverside Scrap Iron & Metal, Pipe Materials, Seaview Citrus, Medjools, Grapes, a palm grove and gated houses the color of sand . . . Past the two sofas in the sand at Rancho De Lara there is a leafless vineyard; then I find the long lines of cars of migrant workers, two of them kicking a ball around in the dirt shoulder of Avenue 52. Another line of half a dozen cars is silhouetted in an artichoke field. The day is hot and horrible.
They do work Americans wouldn’t do.
I approach the power plant of Mecca, which achieves one single twist of smoke . . .

ONE MORE REASON TO BE A WATER FARMER

Richard Brogan had been uttering quite a few remarks about César Chávez—off the record. Later we returned to the subject of water farmers; and he said: You almost might have a backlash against the union farmworker—and I think that Mr. Brogan meant the farmworker of Mexican descent; for, as you may remember, he had expressed bitterness that
in this county there’s a significant bias; you can see the anti-white attitude every day
—a sense, he continued, of to hell with them by selling off the water. There’s absentee landlords here, too. Somebody opening their check every month, what the hell do they care?

Chapter 140

SUBDELINEATIONS: WATERSCAPES (1950-1975)

“Get more water to get more people to get more economic growth” is a syndrome to be evaluated, not a principle of necessity. The great Southern California engineer and water developer of earlier days perceived this clearly when he said, “If we don’t get the water, we won’t need it.”

—Paul S. Taylor, 1970
²³⁸