cesar chavez and the united farm workers

It was the farmworkers, life on the crew, and the level of daily struggle that revived my political hope. When I went into the fields, I was sort of washed out politically.

And I got very interested in Spanish and the life of the crews. It was physically difficult but not physically impossible. We worked six months a year and got unemployment the other six months. It was the Golden Age for California farmworkers. Within a couple of years, I worked myself onto a collective piece-rate crew picking celery, which in the mid-1970s made very good money. The crews that we were on were very powerful people and had a sense of their own efficacy. It was like coming to Detroit in 1938, right after the sit-down strike, and feeling the momentum and power of workers. We discovered in the fields a whole life that I found fascinating and that I was unprepared for. He said that you could go into the UFW office, get a dispatch, and go out into the fields. I went through various jobs, and eventually I picked up a hitchhiker in 1971 who said he had just worked in the field of the Salinas Valley, that there had been a big strike in 1970 and the UFW had won - there were contracts at four companies. The idea was that the coffeehouse would support us financially while we did antiwar work with GIs at Fort Ord, but it didn’t. I left Berkeley in 1970 to work at a GI coffeehouse.

Cesar chavez and the united farm workers