![]() ![]() If workers smelled pesticides in the field, they’d stay in the bus and demand that someone come out and inspect the fields. And they were used to using it when I got there. So farmworkers, historically, have quite a bit of power - but periodic power during harvest time. If farmworkers strike during harvest time, it’s a disaster for the grower. It was the farm workers, 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 then the harvest is a very short duration. You have to invest money, to pay for the ground rent, to put money into weeding, and to apply the pesticides if you’re going to be that kind of farmer. It’s the essential thing somebody has to understand if they want to understand the history of the United Farm Workers.Īgriculture is a very special kind of industry because the product is not continuous. It was the farmworkers, life on the crew, and the level of daily struggle that revived my political hope. 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. ![]()
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