THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT PHOTOGRAPHY OF DAVID BACON - THE YEAR CESAR DIED: Rebuilding the UFW

THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT PHOTOGRAPHY OF DAVID BACON
THE YEAR CESAR DIED:  Rebuilding the UFW - March/April, 1994
Photographs and text by David Bacon
The Progressive, 7/2/19
https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-social-movement-photography-of-david-bacon-Peregrinos-190702/



We're delighted to share the fourth of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. This part tells of a march held a year after the death of human rights and labor organizer Cesar Chavez and subsequent rebuilding of the union. Chavez, with Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and others, co-founded the United Farm Workers.

A former union organizer, Bacon's thirty years of photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University's Green Library.



A year after Cesar died, and we had marched in his memory, I was in Delano again, this time thinking not so much about the UFW's past as about its future.  For a year his death had won some attention for farm workers from mainstream reporters.  But always they saw the union as his personal creation, so their endlessly repeated question was, "Will the UFW survive the death of Chavez?"

I remembered what workers in Cesar's funeral march kept telling me - "We're still here."  Having spent twenty-five years as an organizer, I knew what they were saying:  "We are the union."  The media question was irritating not because the union's future didn't deserve attention, but because the way it was framed made the workers invisible, as though they didn't count.

I'd been hosting a labor interview show for our community radio station for two years by then - the beginning of two decades in front of a radio microphone.  Chuy Varela, our program manager, disliked the media question as much as I did.  So when the UFW announced that it was going to retrace the route of its seminal 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento, he gave me one of the station's battered tape recorders (we recorded on tape in those days), and an old mike on a cable. 

I put my camera strap around my neck, the recorder strap over one shoulder, and the mike and an extra lens in a pocket.  They weighed a ton, especially at the end of a day's marching.  Thankfully cameras and recorders later became digital and much lighter.  But in Delano they helped me discover a way to collect sound and images that stayed with me for many years. 

This method made it possible, not just to be both a writer and a photographer, but to combine transcribed interviews and photographs in a way that was often more powerful than either treated separately.  It led to two books - Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) and In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte (Colegio de la Frontera Norte/University of California Press, 2017).

Studs Terkel was my model - I'd often tell people I was just Studs with a camera.  And the first person whose voice and images I tried to put together was Dolores Huerta, who'd known Cesar, married his brother Richard, and worked with union cofounders Larry Itliong and Gilbert Padilla from the very beginning.

Arriving at the UFW's old headquarters at the Forty Acres in Delano, I learned the march would start with a mass, which they often did, and also with another ritual.  In the Catholic tradition, Dolores and the union's new president, Arturo Rodriguez, would wash the feet of the veterans who'd walked in the 1966 march, and who would walk to Sacramento once again. The march itself was called a "pereginacion" and the marchers "peregrinos" - pilgrimage and pilgrim in Spanish.

Knowing the room at the Forty Acres from many meetings over the years, I could see that my fellow photographers were in the wrong place.  As things got underway, I squeezed myself into position so that when Dolores dipped the damp cloth into the water, and then gently wiped the feet of her former husband Richard, I was facing her with the feet and bowl clearly in view.  In the background were the two dozen photographers, whose cameras unfortunately only captured the back of her head. 


Over the years I've taken many more photographs of Dolores Huerta, and interviewed her many times.  Her interactions with other people fascinate me.  The photographs show her reporting about negotiations in the front of a room full of workers, sitting with them and gossiping, or taking a hard line with a grower across a negotiating table.  In interviews she always said what she really thought - no canned messaging - a rare thing in a union leader. 

Washing the feet of those older workers was not just an emotionally moving tribute.  For Arturo and Dolores it was intended to demonstrate the continuity of their leadership with Cesar Chavez, at a time when the union had to change in order to survive.

By1994 the grape strike was 25 years in the past.  The era of many contracts was largely unknown to a new generation of workers in California fields.  A majority were so young that they were only small children when the formative battles of the union were fought.  People joked that to these youth Cesar Chavez was the name of a Mexican boxer, not a union leader.

By the 90s workers were also drawn much more from Mexico's indigenous population than they were in the mid-60s, when the grape strike started.  Most of the Mexicans who walked out in 1965 came from the states of central Mexico, especially Michoacan, Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Jalisco, where the colonial European legacy is strong. 

Starting in the mid-1980s waves of immigrants began arriving from southern Mexico - Oaxaca, and even Chiapas.  Many often didn't speak Spanish, only the indigenous languages of Mixteco, Triqui, Zapoteco  and Purepecha.  Recognizing this shift in demographics, a year before the 1994 march the UFW began a relationship with the Mixtec/Zapotec Binational Front (now called the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations - FIOB), an organization of indigenous people with chapters on both sides of the border.

Growers took advantage of changing demographics in the fields, with the arrival of migrants with little knowledge of labor rights in the U.S., to lower wages drastically.  They were assisted by Republican governors, who paralyzed enforcement of the state's farm worker labor law, rendering it virtually unusable by workers and the union. 

From 1965 to 1980, the UFW had raised the base wage for field work in California from $1.25 to about $5.50 per hour - at the time more than twice the minimum wage.  Between 1980 and 1994, the field labor wage in California fell backwards.  Taking inflation into account, by the time of the Delano-to-Sacramento march wages hovered around the legal minimum, and often fell below for thousands of workers.  Labor contractors, who assemble crews of workers and then sell their labor to growers, returned to the fields after being virtually eliminated under UFW contracts. 

By the time of Cesar's death things were so bad that farm workers began organizing spontaneous work stoppages to force a change.  In 1989 workers struck the tomato fields around Stockton.  In 1992, 4000 grape workers in the Coachella Valley walked out, and won their first general wage increase in a decade - 40¢ an hour.

When the UFW marched from Delano to Sacramento in 1994, it was making a bid to lead those uprisings.  As the long trail of Chavistas with their red and black flags wound through the fields and small valley towns along State Route 99, workers were its main audience.  As many as 500 a day signed union authorization cards as marchers stopped along the way.

And while the march wound up the San Joaquin Valley, the union sent organizers into the fields in other valleys.  I accompanied two organizers to Salinas, where we went to talk with a crew cutting broccoli for the D'Arrigo Brothers.   The union and the company had been fighting since the first 1969 lettuce and vegetable strike.  The company bitterly opposed unionization, but under the farm worker labor law organizers could "take access" - go into the fields to talk with the workers on their lunch break.

We found several broccoli machines stopped for mealtime.  The women who sorted and packed the broccoli above the conveyor belts climbed down.  As they sat eating the organizers told them about the march to Sacramento.  Several took flags with the union's black eagle and wore them as bandannas.  The men who'd been cutting the broccoli heads in front of the machine, tossing them onto the belt, sat down to eat in the rows.  They too listened to news of the march, and stuck union buttons on their hats. 

There was little fear.  I learned later that a union committee, organized in the 1969 strike, had been functioning in the company ever since.  "We have to go back to the tactics we were using when we first built the union, in the sixties and seventies," Dolores told me when, back at the march, I described what I'd seen and photographed. 

Passing through Stockton and Lodi, the march grew from a couple of hundred participants to 5000 as it approached Sacramento.  It finally became a sea of fifteen thousand people as it reached the state capitol on the last morning.  And although supporters arrived by the busload from cities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, it was overwhelmingly a march made up of farm workers.  

At the rally at the end of the march, the union announced that it had affiliated the United Farm Workers of Washington state, whose leaders shared the platform in Sacramento.  The union in Washington had been locked in a years-long struggle with Chateau St. Michelle winery. The affiliation bore fruit a year later, when the winery agreed to an election that the union won.  With the help of skilled organizers, workers then negotiated a first contract, which has been in place ever since.

In the months that followed the arrival of the peregrinos the union received the certification to negotiate with a number of companies in California.  Dolores credited the march with creating the pressure that finally ended the paralysis at the labor board.  In the year that followed the Sacramento march, the union won eight elections to represent farm workers, and negotiated contracts covering 3700 workers.

After the Delano-to-Sacramento march the UFW also began organizing marches to protest Proposition 187 in small valley towns throughout the state.  Proposition 187 would have prohibited education and medical care for undocumented immigrants, and forced public employees, from teachers to librarians, to turn the undocumented in to immigration authorities for deportation. 

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a majority of all farm workers in this country are undocumented, and the percentage is higher in California.  A majority of UFW members are therefore undoubtedly themselves undocumented (although the union doesn't ask).  Proposition 187 would have therefore affected the UFW and its members more than any other union in California.

Few of them can vote, however, because they are not citizens.  "Even though they can't vote, they can still go out and knock on doors and talk to people who can," Dolores explained.  To mobilize its members, "in every single town where we have a union office we organized a march." 

In Stockton the march involved over a thousand tomato workers who were fighting for a contract. At the world's largest rose company, Bear Creek, whose fields have supplied flowers to California cities for over a century, workers decided to participate as well.  "We just got angry at the injustice of it," one of their leaders, Daniel Sanchez, told me.  "That helped make us strong enough to organize." Like workers at D'Arrigo Brothers, they formed union committees, and eventually won an election and negotiated a union contract.

Generating anti-immigrant hysteria through Proposition 187 was the key to the successful election strategy of Republican Governor Pete Wilson.  For a time that hysteria kept Republicans in power in Sacramento. Even San Joaquin Valley Democrats who supported 187 lost in that election.  "Why vote for a fake Republican if you can get a real one?" Dolores asked bitterly.

But in the years that followed, Proposition 187 became the Republican Party's undoing.  Immigrants holding green cards flocked to citizenship classes.  In rural districts they and their citizen children became a new force in California politics.  Democrats retook the San Joaquin Valley's Congressional seats.  In the state legislature, Latino elected officials, some of them from farm worker families, led the effort to win overtime protection for agricultural laborers, 80 years after they'd been excluded from Federal labor standards.

A new law put teeth into the Agricultural Labor Relations Act a decade after the 1994 march, requiring the mandatory mediation of first-time contracts where workers vote for union representation.  The union used it to negotiate agreements with the tomato companies where workers had struck in 1989.  Even D'Arrigo Brothers decided to make peace with the union, and agreed to a contract in 2015, after decades of labor conflict.

So Cesar's death and the march a year later did turn out to be watershed moments for the United Farm Workers.  And the photographs of the faces of the marchers, and the workers on the broccoli machines, document what they felt at that critical moment. 

Veterans of the 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento

Dolores Huerta and Martin Sheen, before the 1994 march begins

Dolores Huerta, with Arturo Rodriguez holding the carafe of water, washes the feet of Richard Chavez

Fred Abad and Pete Velasco, Filipino veterans of the United Farm Workers, and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in the years before the UFW

Arturo Rodriguez and Dolores Huerta

The 1994 march leaves Delano, as reporters converge on marchers to get interviews

D'Arrigo Brothers workers cutting and packing broccoli

Two UFW organizers walk into a D'Arrigo Brothers broccoli field

An organizer talks with broccoli cutters on their lunch break

An organizer talks with a worker with a union button on her cap

The marchers on State Route 99

UFW President Arturo Rodriguez talks with a class from a school in Atwater, where the marchers have stopped for a break

A priest says mass in the morning before marchers start from Merced.

A marcher outside of Sacramento

A tired Dolores Huerta in Sacramento, as the march reaches its end after a month

Arturo Rodriguez, Dolores Huerta and other UFW leaders are accompanied by (then) former governor Jerry Brown

Veterans of the 1966 march, who also marched all the way from Delano in 1994, wear the wooden cross that means they've walked the whole way

Marchers in Sacramento

Marchers head for the state capitol building

Filipino community organizations from the Bay Area came to Sacramento for the conclusion of the march

Thousands of marchers and UFW supporters in front of the capitol building

In Salinas a D'Arrigo Brothers worker gets off work, ready to join a rally to demand a union contract

D'Arrigo Brothers workers, after the 1994 Sacramento march, are inspired to march to the office of the company to demand a union contract

D'Arrigo Brothers workers show their support for the union.  It took another ten years before they finally won their first union agreement, but the union committee kept pressure on the company for all that time.