Their members lacked even basic legal protections and could be fired and evicted from company housing with little recourse. NFWA leadership knew that picket lines and local protests would not be enough to achieve their objectives.
During the strike, organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), along with student activists from the Bay Area, arrived in Delano to offer support, drawing parallels between the Jim Crow South and rural California in the fight for racial justice. The ongoing Black Freedom Struggle provided both inspiration and allies to the farm workers. Chavez had organized the NFWA around the premise that the farm workers’ struggle was part of a much broader movement for civil rights. Indeed, the founders had consciously shied away from that title and offered many services beyond a typical labor organization. The Boycott Campaign The NFWA had always been more than a union. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. What began as a labor dispute in the fields of Delano blossomed into a civil rights struggle, a movement for achieving justice for farmworkers.ĭemonstrators protest the arrest and prosecution of United Farm Worker (UFW) picketers outside of the Criminal Court, New York City. But although the harvest ended without the farmworkers achieving their objectives, the struggle was just beginning. Instead, they hired replacement workers, or "scabs," from elsewhere in California and as far away as Oregon, Texas, and Mexico to complete the fall 1965 harvest. The NFWA membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of the strike, and within a few days, NFWA was picketing ten additional vineyards, in addition to the sites already targeted by AWOC.ĭespite this remarkable show of unity by the farmworkers, the region’s growers were confident that they could defeat this latest attempt at organizing and they refused to negotiate with the farmworkers on strike. So, despite Chavez's reservations, on September 16, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, the NFWA membership met at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Delano to hold a strike vote. Yet they also knew that the Association wasn’t going to undercut the AWOC action. They were building a movement and did not know if they had the resources to commit to a strike. Just three years old, the young organization was still finding its footing - both financially and in the community. The NFWA leadership, including Cesar Chavez, didn’t feel ready for the strike. The fledgling organization’s leadership had two choices: join the strike or break it. The National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) had now emerged as an influential force in the community. Such tactics had long been an effective check on union power. There was also a risk that the growers might draw from the large population of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers to replace the striking Filipino crews. Many lived in company housing and could be evicted with little or no notice, and, indeed, many eventually were forced to leave their homes as a consequence of striking.
This decision was a big risk for Delano’s grape workers. Eager to extend the union’s victory at Coachella to the vineyards of Delano, members of the AWOC local met at Filipino Hall and voted for a strike. Both actions had ties to the wave of farmworker strikes that followed the termination of the Bracero Program in 1964. Only a few months earlier, AWOC had won similar concessions for grape workers in the Coachella Valley, which gave the Delano strike added urgency. Two veteran organizers, Larry Itliong and Ben Gines, led the strike. The strikers wanted the piece rate to go up from ten cents a box to twenty-five cents. They demanded a raise both in their hourly wages, from $1.25 to $1.40, and in the piece rate (the pay a worker earned for each box of grapes packed). On September 8, 1965, over 800 Filipino farmworkers affiliated with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) struck ten grape vineyards around Delano. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1965, thousands of workers in the Delano grape fields voted in favor of striking This article explores the early months of the strike as well as the successful consumer boycott campaign initiated by the National Farm Workers Association. In addition to lost wages, many also faced eviction from housing owned by growers.
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The decision to strike was full of risk for farmworkers and their families. Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee members picketing in front of Filipino Community Hall as part of the Delano Grape Strike on September 24, 1965.
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