This article argues that children were central to the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) social justice appeal in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As marginalized laborers and a vulnerable group in need of protection, child farmworkers were emblematic of the movement’s aspirations. As agents of protest and activism, both farmworker and non-farmworker children were key to its advancement. Additionally, the article highlights the many ways that the UFW shaped children’s politics, fostered their identity, and contributed to student-led civil rights efforts in rural California. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including oral histories and children’s correspondence with Cesar Chavez, this article details children’s unprecedented level of labor rights activism in the UFW movement's first decade.
On March 18, 1966, fifteen-year-old Yolanda Barrera defied her father when she stepped boldly onto Main Street and joined Cesar Chavez, striking campesinos, and other farmworker rights supporters as they marched into Porterville, California. Her father, Jesus Marin Barrera, the local farmworker union leader, had worked tirelessly to organize support in preparation for this event, but city officials denied his request for a parade permit and threatened to arrest anyone who participated. He feared for his children’s safety and “strenuously forbade” Yolanda and her siblings from joining the march. Yolanda did not take his order lightly, and was not normally a defiant daughter, but she “knew that if [she] didn’t disobey him, [she] would regret it.”1 That day was the moment of her political awakening, when her awareness of broader social issues converged with her lived experience as a young farmworker and motivated her to act autonomously on her own convictions. It was the moment when la causa became her cause too.
Although Yolanda’s family had only worked in farm labor for about five years, in that time she had experienced enough backbreaking toil and humiliation to know that it was an unjust system. Every weekend and through the summers, she and her younger siblings rose at 4:30 in the morning to help their parents pick oranges, plums, pears, and various other fruit in orchards throughout California’s Central Valley. The work was burdensome and sometimes dangerous. She poignantly remembers her “mother’s beautiful face…covered in dirt, sweat, and pesticide residue.” Their employers never provided even basic necessities, so they toted things like water and toilet paper with them into the fields. Bathroom facilities were nonexistent. “When the urge hit you,” Yolanda recalled, “you had to run to a place in the orchard where someone could not see you and stoop and do your business.” She found that aspect particularly “embarrassing and demeaning.” It made her feel “sub-human.” These experiences contributed to her burgeoning politicization, which led her to join the crowd in cheering “¡Viva la huelga!” “¡Viva la causa!” and “¡Viva Cesar Chavez!”2
The procession ultimately traversed more than three hundred miles to the state capitol in Sacramento, by which time it had grown to more than ten thousand strong. Throughout, men, women, and children—both farmworkers and others—carried flags adorned with indigenismo and religious iconography: the stylized United Farm Workers (UFW) black eagle and the venerated Virgen de Guadalupe (fig. 1). Along the way, labor leader Cesar Chavez repeatedly asserted that the collective action was something more than a labor movement; it was a social justice movement—la causa—a nonviolent revolution intent on upsetting the existing social order.3 While many readers may be familiar with the narrative of Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW), this article shifts the analytical lens away from adult activism to that of the child participants.4 Significantly, children stood at the center of the social justice appeal as both agents and symbols for la causa. Their presence and participation reinforced the social justice image and facilitated the UFW agenda during a critical period of opportunity.5
A young boy helped to carry religious iconography during the 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento, visually reinforcing la causa’s moral claim. Source: Image ETKS3624812, 1976 George Ballis / Take Stock/ TopFoto.
A young boy helped to carry religious iconography during the 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento, visually reinforcing la causa’s moral claim. Source: Image ETKS3624812, 1976 George Ballis / Take Stock/ TopFoto.
This article focuses on children’s participation in the UFW movement during its golden era—the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s; a period when the union achieved its greatest gains for farmworker families.6 The scale and scope of children’s UFW involvement at that time was unprecedented in U.S. labor history. Children from farmworker families walked picket lines alongside fields, volunteered in union offices, and attended union meetings. They were translators, sign-makers, and vendors of the union newspaper El Malcriado (fig. 2). Even children who were otherwise not affiliated with farmwork lent their support to la causa when they collected and donated money, toys, food, and clothing for striking farmworker families. They boycotted non-union products and encouraged friends, family, and classmates to do the same. Collectively, children logged thousands of miles on marches, lent their voices in rallies, and picketed in front of supermarkets. And according to Chavez, child laborers as young as six years old even voted in union elections.7 From agricultural towns to urban centers, children internalized and acted on la causa’s social justice message; farmworker rights became their civil rights cause.
Children solicited subscriptions to El Malcriado, the UFW newspaper, February 1973. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 34954, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Children solicited subscriptions to El Malcriado, the UFW newspaper, February 1973. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 34954, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
The emerging scholarship on children’s civil rights activism in the 1960s and 1970s typically focuses on three broad topics: the efforts of young African Americans in the South; adult agendas, conceptions, and designs for children’s activities; and the issue of racial egalitarianism and educational equity in urban settings. Less well known or studied is the intersection of the civil rights movement and labor activism in rural children’s lives.8 This oversight is at least in part because the standard U.S. history narrative points to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 as the end of child labor. But, like their adult counterparts, agricultural child laborers like Yolanda were largely exempt from the protections of New Deal labor regulations. As unprotected workers, such children keenly recognized the intersection of labor and civil rights more than three decades after the ostensible end of child labor.
Focusing on children’s activism in the UFW reifies Chavez’s claim that la causa was more than a labor movement. But his social justice strategy, and children’s involvement, were strongest during the movement’s first decade when Chavez embraced less conventional and more democratic methods. In the late 1960s, he pushed aside his distrust of outsiders; and college students, radicals, and hippies shared food, friendship, and floor space with the farmworkers, middle-class housewives, social workers, and religious devotees of many faiths who came together to further farmworker rights. During that time, the generational line was less clearly delineated, and children assumed adult responsibility for union activities. This period was before the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) of 1975, which was a significant victory for the farmworker cause, but one that decentralized the effort and shifted much of the union’s attention toward organized politics. The ALRA officially recognized California farmworkers as a class of laborers but threatened to diminish the UFW’s import. As Chavez struggled to maintain relevance and authority, the union became decidedly more autocratic and contentious. Scholars have detailed elsewhere the effects of the political turn, explaining that the UFW of the late 1970s struggled with internal strife, a weakened boycott network, and animosity among the leadership circle resulting from “the Game.”9 But children’s activism also appears to have declined during the later period as the union shifted away from grassroots organizing and Chavez’s distrust of outsiders returned with a vengeance.
This article recovers the voices and highlights the experiences of those young activists for whom la causa was their gateway into political awareness. It draws on letters and artwork that children (both farmworkers and others) sent to Cesar Chavez; items that were intentionally cultivated and preserved at the union’s Delano, California, headquarters. The following account is also reconstructed from oral history and online reminiscence projects with a focus on those who engaged with la causa as children. Childhood memories, first encoded almost entirely by sensory perception and naïve comprehension of contemporary circumstances, are useful in terms of what they tell us about the formative effects of early experiences. Granted, they are not perfect historical recreations, but childhood memories are valuable because they shed light on those things that made the greatest impression on young minds with limited ability to contextualize or problematize. Hence, children’s declarations of support and admiration are perhaps the purest forms of political allegiance in the most altruistic sense. Almost without exception, the correspondence and reminiscences center on the earlier, relatively more synergistic phase of la causa.10 In focusing on the children, this article provides a more nuanced representation of la causa’s first decade, complicates our understanding of the ways that Chavez mobilized supporters, and diversifies the scholarship on children’s civil rights activism. La causa was a uniquely formative political experience for child participants, and they were central to its social justice appeal.
The Huelga Kids
La causa’s early years offer a unique window into the mobilization of cross-generational class consciousness. Unlike in other industries, farmworker children in the 1960s possessed firsthand familiarity with workplace grievances. Due to labor law exemptions for the agriculture industry, children of any age could work an unlimited number of hours when they were not required to attend school (a requirement that was loosely interpreted and often ignored by parents, employers, and schools). Farmworker parents often brought their children with them to the fields. While a lack of childcare was typically the initial reason for doing so, the children’s ability to work helped to augment their parents’ meager wages. Hence, the children of farmworkers generally began “helping out” in the fields when they were as young as three or four years old. The labor of very young children entailed tasks such as bringing water to other workers; adding to parents’ sacks, buckets, or boxes; or following in the wake of adult workers, gathering overlooked produce. As they grew, children were expected to work faster and meet heavier quotas. Children often worked before and after school, learning to prioritize wage-earning over education and play; to do otherwise, they believed, could mean hunger and deprivation for their entire family. Over time, young farmworkers often internalized a negative self-image drawn from external factors that impressed upon them their low station in a social dynamic differentiated by race, class, and positional authority. Until la causa, there was no reason for them to expect anything other than a life of manual toil. This changed when the UFW embarked on its social justice labor campaign. Children learned that they could expect more—and that they were entitled to a childhood (figs 3 and 4).
A young girl emptied a bucket of onions into a burlap sack, 1976. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 35022, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
A young girl emptied a bucket of onions into a burlap sack, 1976. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 35022, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Child labor among the strawberries, 1976. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 35025. Photographer, Cathy Murphy. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Child labor among the strawberries, 1976. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 35025. Photographer, Cathy Murphy. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
For many farmworker children, la causa would become a defining feature of their childhood. Indeed, the union formed their community, shaped their sensibilities, and fostered their self-esteem. Farmworker children became involved in farm labor strikes as early as 1965 if their families joined the union. Entire families gathered at union meetings throughout California, Arizona, and as far away as Michigan. Although union meetings are typically remembered as adult-oriented spaces, children could be found everywhere among the crowd—especially at the big Friday night meetings held at Filipino Hall in Delano. Lupe Herrera reminisced that she eagerly looked forward to that end-of-the-week meeting because it was the one night that her parents let her stay up past her bedtime. She remembers being jealous of her three-year-old sister Rosario, who “got to go to a lot of meetings [while] the rest of us had to stay home…on a school night.”11 While there, children sat with their parents, siblings, or friends. The little ones were often perched on a lap or boosted upon an adult’s shoulders. Many sat on the floor in front of the rows of chairs or stood along the walls in the often-packed meetinghouse. As the strike dragged on for years, the weekly ritual of the Friday night meeting provided consistent context for many union childhoods. Children’s ability to grasp the significance of union business varied according to age and interest, but undeniably, the experience shaped their conception of community, justice, and even themselves.12
Children in UFW farmworker families, or huelga (strike) kids as they came to be known, were socialized through their participation in union activities. Friday night meetings were a significant component of that socialization as they were the main venue in which union leaders disseminated information, reported on strike and boycott activity, and promoted morale. Chavez and his executive committee carefully crafted meetings to inspire not only a sense of empowerment, but also community obligation. Children received these messages through visuals, speeches, group interactions, and even entertainment. Typically, a large red and white UFW flag with the stylized black eagle adorned the front wall. Additional banners lined the room proclaiming “Solidarity,” “Huelga,” and “Viva Cesar Chavez.” Sometimes children assisted in administering the meetings, such as when Yolanda Barrera translated guest speakers’ addresses from English to Spanish at the meeting in Porterville. She admits to editorializing occasionally, especially when speakers appeared sympathetic to growers.13 Her experience as a child laborer gave Barrera a precocious appreciation for the content delivered at the gatherings, as it no doubt did for many other young attendees. The message at Friday night meetings overwhelmingly taught them that they deserved better than to be treated as second-class persons who labored for a pittance.
Union meetings were community gatherings that fostered camaraderie and solidarity through group activities and entertainment. Theater and song, in particular, held children’s attention, informed their sensibilities, and shaped their perception of the union message. Children found the entertainment provided by Luis Valdez’s traveling performance troupe, El Teatro Campesino (the Farmworkers Theater), both educational and amusing. Performances were simple. Through actos (short skits), the improvisational entertainers interpreted the highly antagonistic grower-farmworker relationship in satirical and comedic ways and conveyed basic concepts such as dignity, corruption, and union objectives. Actors wore hand-lettered signs around their necks indicating who they were—Huelgista (striker), Esquirol (scab), Pátron (grower/boss), and Contratista (labor contractor)—delineating a clear cast of characters in the labor struggle. El Teatro Campesino performances played a significant role in educating strikers both at meetings and alongside fields where strikebreakers worked and strikers picketed. The entertainment lampooned growers, fostered farmworker camaraderie, and sometimes even converted scab laborers to la causa. Valdez believed the actos were successful because they conveyed the purpose and meaning of la causa “without asking its participants to read or write.” He thought of it as “a learning experience with no formal prerequisites.” Thus, El Teatro Campesino’s message met the needs of farmworkers who lacked formal education, while also being accessible to young children. It taught farmworkers, young and old, to recognize and challenge exploitative labor practices.14
Communal singing was also key to children’s political socialization. Anamaría De La Cruz recalls that, “Some of my earliest memories as a child growing up in the UFW are of singing.”15 In addition to fostering group unity, huelga songs boosted morale and provided strikers with an outlet for expressing the multitude of emotions that occurred throughout the prolonged struggle. In the style of Mexican rancheras (traditional folk music) and corridos (ballads), huelga songs fostered the development of a movement narrative as they relayed stories that featured prominent UFW leaders such as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta; the birthplace of the movement, Delano, California; and recounted activists’ experiences on the picket lines.16 For example, Picket Sign was a song that incorporated situations and conversations from the picket lines, and the lyrics were modified over time to reflect the evolving state of affairs. The song was both informative and irreverently entertaining. Lines such as “Sálganse de aquí con estos ‘Sanna-Vitches’” (“Get out of here with these Zaninoviches”) referred to the Zaninovich Brothers, growers who were a primary target of UFW action. But the singers’ heavily accented pronunciation of the growers’ surname sounded a lot like “son of bitches.” Then-teenager Abbey Flores Rivera recalled that the pun “caused us to gasp delightedly.”17 Throughout the song, the children would watch Chavez to see his reaction to the line. They delighted when he feigned surprise, grinned, and shook his head upon hearing the simulated profanity. For thirteen-year-old Lorraine Agtang-Greer, the strike marked a significant milestone in her young life as it “was the first time that I had ever done anything that was questioning authority.” She especially enjoyed singing Picket Sign because the Zaninoviches “treated [her] like crap” when she worked for them.18
The huelga song, Niños Campesinos, specifically acknowledged working children. It relates the story of peregrinos de verdad (true pilgrims), the children who rose early and traveled broadly to work in the fields:
The song acknowledges hardship, anhelos de verdad (true yearnings), and the fact that la causa also sought social justice for the young. It tells of children growing up and defending their interests, with “Ya esos campos sólo van los que no saben” (“only those who do not know better”) returning to the fields. The song ends with singers proclaiming, “¡Viva la huelga! ¡Viva la huelga! ¡Viva la causa de verdad!” (“Long live the strike! Long live the strike! Long live the cause of truth!”).19 Songs such as Niños Campesinos fostered a sense of solidarity among both children and adults and reinforced the multigenerational cohesion of the farmworkers’ cause.
Of the many UFW songs, the folksong De Colores was the one mainstay, sung at the close of every meeting, rally, march, and picket.20 Though it did not specifically speak of la causa, social justice, or the plight of farmworkers, its message inspired hope for women like Kathy Lynch, a young, white, University of California, Berkeley graduate who moved to Delano to volunteer. She married farmworker Lupe Murguía and raised their children in la causa. She explained that De Colores represented the union well because it “was a song of the season of springtime and beauty, of life and colors—and we were all kinds of different colors. I believe as we sang, our hearts were longing for the beauty that comes with gentle love and justice.”21 As meetings drew to a close, attendees would rise, cross their arms in front of themselves, grasp the hand of the person standing on either side, and then commence singing. Rivera admits that as a teenager she sometimes “grew extremely weary of this song” and would complain “‘here we go again’…while making faces.” But by the end of the song, she found her demeanor and attitude transformed as “the words reached deep into my soul and took me to another place where things are perfect, in harmony, of like mind and purpose.” She claims that she came to accept the song as her “spiritual cleansing.”22 As attendees across the age and color spectrums closed Friday night meetings united in song, the inclusion of children confirmed their sense of belonging to a community that valued them as participants (fig 5.).
Children and adults sang De Colores at the close of a UFW rally in Coachella, California, 1969. Source: Image ETKS3650929, 1976 George Ballis / Take Stock / TopFoto.
Children and adults sang De Colores at the close of a UFW rally in Coachella, California, 1969. Source: Image ETKS3650929, 1976 George Ballis / Take Stock / TopFoto.
However, singing was not confined to union meetings alone. De La Cruz remembers that “on Sundays we would sing together in the Administration building, where the community meetings were held…[and] on the picket lines.” She maintains, “UFW songs lent so much power and energy to our group.”23 Lupe Herrera remembers that her mother and grandmother would take her and her three siblings to “pray in front of the Digiorgio [sic] labor camp…[and sing] ‘Bendito, Bendito’ and ‘Oh Maria, Madre Mia.” The “spirituality in the music” fashioned the type of activism that Lupe would come to adopt as her own.24
Singing helped huelgistas remain focused on la causa’s tenets of non-violence, and in fact, many UFW members have referred to songs as the “lifeblood” of the union. While growers attempted to intimidate field-side picketers with guns, hired thugs, racial slurs, and threats, Chavez encouraged picketers to refrain from retaliatory violence, and instead, to resist through song. Adult UFW volunteer Jan Peterson claimed that “There were many times…when songs were all that we had.…We sang when we were sad or discouraged; we sang when we were angry or defiant; we sang when we were proud; we sang to lift our spirits.”25 When adult UFW picketers initiated song during protest action, they taught children to draw strength and resolve through nonviolent, lyrical means.26 Taken together, the union meetings, performances, and music fostered a sense of community among activists, educated children on the purpose and methods of la causa protest, and taught them a social justice vocabulary.
Chavez actively recruited children to engage in the farmworker movement. He taught his own children that the huelga was a people’s revolution, of which they were an important part. He celebrated the birth of new huelgistas, like baby Victoria Encinas in November 1972, whom he welcomed to la causa with her own union card. In a congratulatory note to her parents, he wrote: “May she live a long and full life, may she carry many huelga flags and may she bring the two of you much joy.”27 But whether children were born into the union or introduced to it at a young age, he maintained that they were “the future leaders of the socialist revolution.”28 Cesar’s niece, Becky Chavez, remembers that her uncle often gathered groups of children together, told them that they “had a mission to do,” and took them leafleting throughout the San Joaquin Valley.29
Children responded favorably to Chavez. He was especially adept at making children feel at ease and important. Young farmworker Yolanda Barrera expressed as much when she explained that when Chavez spoke to her directly, it seemed as though “the world had stopped for a split second.” Herrera remembered him as “a brilliant man [who] took the time” to explain things to children.30 That children were fond of Chavez is clear in the vast amount of mail that he received from young supporters (both farmworkers and others): letters, holiday and birthday cards, and artwork declared children’s devotion to Chavez and la causa. For example, in December 1970, when a Monterey County Superior Court judge sentenced Chavez to jail for contempt of court because he refused to end the Salinas lettuce strike, eleven-year-old Helen Encinas wrote that she “got very mad” when she heard the judge’s verdict. She was one of the hundreds of supporters who gathered at the courthouse on December 4. Nine-year-old Yvonne Esparza confessed that she “felt pretty bad when you had to go to jail.” And ten-year-old Cathy Martinez assured Chavez that her family was “praying for you and all the prisoners there too.” In a declaration of union solidarity, she added that she was not eating lettuce.31
Chavez welcomed children’s correspondence, and through it, encouraged the participation of even those children who lived a distance from the union’s main headquarters. Such was the case with twelve-year-old Angela Huerta from Salinas, California, who wrote in 1972 that she did not know what to do to support la causa. Chavez replied, “there are lots of people your age working for la causa.” He suggested that she “make huelga flags at home” and help her father with administrative tasks in the union’s Salinas office.32 In corresponding with children, Chavez acknowledged them as potential agents of change and mobilized their efforts in ways that helped further la causa.
Many huelga kids volunteered in union offices. Sometimes this entailed making huelga flags and hand-lettered picket signs. But it also included clerical tasks such as typing, filing, responding to telephone calls and letters, and even bookkeeping. These tasks required a degree of English-language proficiency that many adult farmworkers did not possess, but with even a rudimentary education, some huelga kids could perform. For example, thirteen-year-old Yolanda Barrera was the secretary at the union office in Porterville, California, and by the time she turned fifteen, she was also the branch’s bookkeeper.33 Rivera, already a three-year veteran of la causa, became the union’s head bookkeeper at seventeen.34 Sixteen-year-old Danny Terronez processed subscriptions and mailings and kept financial records in the El Malcriado business office. The newspaper’s June 1968 issue recognized his work and lauded it as “an example for all the young Sons of Zapata” to follow.35 In these ways, huelga kids provided services that were necessary to keep the volunteer organization running and shared in the leadership of la causa.
The Fallout: Huelga Kids and Rural California Education
Until la causa, work occupied a greater portion of farmworker children’s time and attention than did school. Even those who attended school typically had little time for scholastic pursuits as they worked in fields and vineyards in the early mornings and afternoons, on weekends, and during vacations. At the height of harvest or intensive cultivation periods, it was not uncommon for all the children in a family to skip school for weeks at a time to maximize earnings through full-time farm work. But, when child workers went on strike, normal educational activities like consistent attendance, homework completion, and participation in extra-curricular activities took on political significance. A brief look at huelga kids’ school experiences in Delano, California, highlights the intersection of labor and civil rights and adds nuance to our understanding of what Chavez meant when he claimed the movement’s social justice imperative.
From 1965 to 1970, schools throughout the San Joaquin Valley became proxy battlefields in the standoff between growers and the UFW. Agricultural towns had always been divided along the lines of race and class, but the ongoing labor struggle made tensions even more palpable for children in farmworker families. Huelga kids became frontline soldiers when they had to contend with educational personnel who were sympathetic to the growers who controlled school boards and influenced administration. Classrooms and board meetings became especially tension-filled spaces where anti-union expression was manifest in draconian enforcement of the dress code, punitive academic policies, and residency metrics that were stricter for huelga kids. School administrators were known to deny registration to new students who wore huelga buttons and refuse grade promotions to entire families of union children. Undisguised racism marked some teachers’ language and behavior when they referred to huelga kids as “beaners” and told them to “go back to Mexico” if they were unhappy. (Most huelga kids in the Delano area were actually U.S. citizens.) One teacher brazenly declared to her class, “I can’t teach anything to dumb Mexicans.”36 To combat such policies and actions, and to protect their children, the UFW encouraged greater union parent participation at school board meetings and threatened various schools with picketing and legal action.
While Mexican American children in the San Joaquin Valley had long faced discrimination by teachers and administrators who had little will to educate them, the strike intensified the oppression in the late 1960s—especially for huelga kids with the surname “Chavez.” The Chavez children went to school with the Zaninovich kids, who were quite popular among the children of area landowners. Raised in a grower home, the Zaninoviches resented their Chavez classmates whom they saw as troublemakers and a threat to their own family’s livelihood. In growers’ homes, Cesar Chavez was public enemy number one. At school, the Chavez and Zaninovich children were surrogates through which the feud continued. “We were harassed a lot,” recalled Linda Chavez, but “my brother Fernando, the oldest, I think probably had it the toughest.”37 The Zaninoviches and their friends habitually harassed Fernando. The chronic provocation once prompted a fistfight, a situation that greatly displeased Fernando’s father who expected his children to meet hostility with nonviolence. The conflict between expectations at home and the conditions at school were added burdens that huelga kids—especially the Chavezes—had to endure for la causa.
However, huelga kids were not left to fend for themselves. The union intervened at times when it mitigated disciplinary measures. For instance, many children who supported the UFW wore explicitly la causa-oriented adornments (huelga buttons, embroidered UFW eagles, and small union flags) on their clothing. Linda Chavez recalled that her Zaninovich classmate disliked seeing such displays, so he reported her to the principal who then threatened to suspend all students who wore the embellishments. However, the matter was dropped after Cesar Chavez met with the principal. Linda suspects that her father may have threatened the school with legal action—a battle that Chavez likely would have won in light of the Supreme Court’s February 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision that declared such accessorial displays within a student’s constitutional right to free speech.38 In this way, la causa and huelga kids’ political self-expression coincided with the largely student-led national Free Speech Movement.
By the late 1960s, high school students across the nation asserted their civil rights on school campuses. Regions as varied as Los Angeles, California; Crystal City, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; and Charleston, South Carolina saw a rise in Chicano and Black student-led activism as they demanded recognition of their right to self-expression, respect, and a better education. The National Association of Secondary School Principals commented on the prevalence of the student activism when it reported that 59 percent of American high schools had experienced some sort of student-led protest or unrest by March 1969.39 Although studies of Mexican American student activism focus primarily on urban schools in 1968—such as the student uprising at Harrison High School in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood and the “blowouts” at five East L.A. secondary schools—at least one scholar, Marc S. Rodriguez, points to the connection between rural migrant networks and youth-directed social movements as early as 1963.40 As Rodriguez explains, teenagers at Crystal City High School in Texas employed tactics that they had learned during their summer migrations to directly challenge Anglo control over school policies when they returned in the fall.41
Similarly, student farmworkers initiated direct action against Delano High School teachers and administrators in the fall of 1968. Pushing back against well-entrenched discriminatory practices, young huelgistas demanded full access to all that a public-school education had to offer. Many joined extra-curricular activities. Chavez’s nephew Freddy was even elected to student government. Years later, a white schoolmate, Virginia Wheaton, recalled that “One of my first political acts was to join with other students to demand that Freddie Chávez be elected as student body president.”42 A number of huelga kids also held college aspirations. But the practice of tracking Mexican American students through vocational courses rather than academically oriented ones undermined their dreams of upward mobility. Originally touted as a practical method for dealing with a peripatetic and sporadically attending migrant student population, tracking quickly became de facto discrimination. Disgruntled parents and students argued that vocational tracks unfairly preserved the area’s supply of cheap, manual labor while also preventing Mexican American students from gaining the academic preparation necessary to apply to college. This was, in fact, a common grievance leveled against school districts throughout the West and Southwest as the nation’s Mexican American high school population increased throughout the 1960s. As with the broader Chicano Movement, resolving the issue was high on Delano-area high school students’ agenda.
Student dissatisfaction ran deep and stemmed from years of discriminatory treatment at the hands of racist teachers who had long reinforced a social hierarchy that perpetuated the notion that children from farmworker families were inferior to those from growers’ homes. Valdez, the founder of El Teatro Campesino, recalled that he had experienced this first-hand at a Delano-area elementary school in the 1950s. He remembers asking his teacher why a particular white classmate was always chosen to be hall monitor. The teacher replied, “Jimmy’s father is a grower. He needs to learn how to give orders. Your father is a farmworker. You need to learn how to take orders.”43 More than a decade later, a 1965 Stanford University study revealed that such practices were still common in rural communities and that teachers were conscious and intentional about reinforcing the social stratification. One teacher who was cited in the study explained that she had selected a particular white student to lead five Mexican American boys to a different classroom because, “His father owns one of the big farms in the area and…one day he will have to know how to handle the Mexicans.”44 This sort of conditioning severely undermined generations of Mexican American children’s self-esteem and prospects. But through la causa students learned to challenge practices that reinforced this social hierarchy within their schools.
As the Delano grape strike standoff extended into its fourth and fifth years, San Joaquin Valley high schools became “seething cauldron[s] of repression and discontent.”45 Huelga kids who were emboldened by their la causa experience engaged in tactics similar to other civil rights demonstrations, such as the 1968 East Los Angeles high school “blowouts.” They held sit-ins, walk-outs, and openly criticized school authorities who tried to quash union support and dismiss students’ academic grievances.46 The fact that high school huelgistas in the graduating classes of 1969 and 1970 were the first in their families to have enjoyed a consistent secondary education—uninterrupted by labor during the strike—was significant. The consistent presence of such students on campus and their bold response to injustices made them increasingly visible to school officials and difficult to ignore. Nonetheless, administrators attempted to suppress unrest by suspending students who voiced pro-union opinions, firing National Teacher Corp interns who volunteered with la causa on their own time, and expelling students who led sit-ins and walk-outs.47 At Delano High School in the spring of 1970, teachers gave such students failing marks for coursework and the administration barred seniors from the graduation ceremony. Eloise and Dorothy Chavez, Cesar’s daughter and niece, were among those punished. Tensions came to a head at the graduation ceremony when a physical altercation broke out between plain-clothes policemen and union-affiliated students and parents. It was clear to many that the unrest at the high school was a consequence of tension generated by the area’s labor strike. Reverend Mark Day of Delano’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church asserted as much in a letter to the editor of the Fresno Bee, claiming that teachers and police had “constantly violated” the rights of union-affiliated Chicano students because of their support for la causa.48
The social justice imperative was obvious in the union’s negotiations with grape growers in July 1970, when Cesar Chavez explicitly connected the strife at the high school with the ongoing labor conflict. He included the reinstatement of students’ educational rights and opportunities in the list of union demands. Growers balked, asserting that what happened at the high school had nothing to do with the labor dispute. But UFW legal counsel, Jerry Cohen, countered, “We know it fits into the strike. It’s a community problem that has resulted because of the strike.”49 Labor talks stalled over the high school issue for a week. When they met for a second time, Chavez vehemently insisted that, “We cannot accept no for an answer. I have kids who didn’t get their diplomas, who didn’t get credit for the work they did at school, and the roots come from the conflict of the strike.”50 Despite growers’ protests that the issue was out of their hands, their clout with school administration was confirmed on July 27 when they successfully negotiated huelga kids’ reinstatement. Labor contracts were signed two days later.51 The UFW’s social justice agenda was reified in huelga kids’ educational experience. La causa did not just change children’s work environment, it enhanced their prospects when students, parents, and union leaders demanded educational equity.
Children and the Boycott
Due to the grape harvest’s seasonal nature (which interrupted field-side strikes), UFW leadership determined in the winter of 1965–66 that a boycott might help to apply year-round pressure on growers, while also increasing the public’s awareness of la causa.52 Although the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act prohibited unions from employing the secondary boycott, the agriculture industry’s exemption from national labor regulation and protection meant that the restriction did not apply to the farmworkers. Ironically, the very excuse that growers gave for resisting negotiations with the UFW permitted the mechanism that eventually brought them to the negotiating table. In boycotting supermarkets that sold nonunion grapes (and later, wine, lettuce, and other products), the UFW gained visibility with consumers across the nation by appealing to a moral economy that linked the idea of social justice to labor rights (fig. 6).53
Child with grape boycott picket sign in front of a Raley’s supermarket in Sacramento, California, 1968. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 3824, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Child with grape boycott picket sign in front of a Raley’s supermarket in Sacramento, California, 1968. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 3824, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Initially, the union strategy entailed sending single young men and women, and some married men without their families, to major metropolitan centers throughout the country where they organized consumer boycotts, raised funds, and established connections with sympathetic community leaders. But in 1967, the union began to send entire farmworker families to administer the distant boycotts. As other scholars have written, the increased involvement of married women—and specifically, mothers—in boycott organizing shifted the tone and strategy. For example, farmworker mother Hope Lopez operated out of the Philadelphia office in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her organizing appealed to a maternalistic morality rooted in the notion that the “common experiences of domesticity, family life, and childbearing” transcended race and class.54 Huelga children’s involvement and visibility were key to the efficacy of the maternalistic message in that it helped to recruit middle-class, urban housewives to the cause. With their support, sales of boycotted products declined, making growers more amenable to union negotiations.
Early boycott efforts were loosely organized, requiring boycott families to be frugal, flexible, and resourceful. On their journey across country, they relied on sympathetic “churches and unions…ready with hot meals and a place to sleep,” and typically arrived at their destinations with only a few dollars, and the name and telephone number of a local point of contact. It was often the children who initiated first contact if their parents possessed limited English proficiency.55 Later boycotters benefitted from more established networks, but the early boycott families from 1967–69 lived on extremely modest stipends, relying largely on community donations and local fundraisers for food, clothing, and housing.56
By the 1970s, boycott families underwent more extensive preparation before they traveled east. Herrera recalls that her family trained at the union’s La Paz headquarters in 1973 before they left for Baltimore, Maryland. Through a series of role-play sessions, she was taught how to confront shoppers while walking a picket line. Cesar Chavez took a particular interest in training children to be assertive and persistent, often playing the role of the obstinate shopper who tried to ignore and bypass young picketers on the way into a supermarket. “Cesar was relentless,” remembers Herrera, but her twelve-year-old sister Isabel “was just as relentless in trying to keep him out or [make him] go to another store.”57
While children’s general presence and participation in public boycott spaces served to highlight the family aspect of la causa, their images on boycott flyers and literature woke the public to the reality of agricultural child labor. Leaflets such as the one that circulated about Pogue’s Department Store in Cincinnati, Ohio, featured the image of a weary, weathered male farmworker holding a sleeping toddler (presumably exhausted from a day of labor) and text that informed readers that “every bottle of boycotted wine that Pogue’s sells is a vote to continue child labor in agriculture.”58 Another flier, featuring a photograph of a law enforcement officer standing sentry-like over a small child farmworker, quoted a Florida farmer from the 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame, with a headline that read: “We used to own our slaves—now we just rent them.”59 The connection between child labor, children’s well-being, and consumer action was made explicit when the seven Valdez children (Enedelia, Lucy, Milly, Olga, Rego, Mary, and Sergio) distributed more than twenty-five thousand flyers to Cincinnati shoppers in December 1970 with the headline plea: “Please Do Not Shop at Kroger Until the Valdez Family and 3 Million Other Farm Worker Families Secure Justice.”60 Children’s presence and images on the boycott frontlines helped to dispel the idea that farmworker issues were limited to adult interests. In explicitly linking the labor concerns and consumer choice with children’s well being, boycott teams made la causa more compelling as a social justice issue (fig. 7).
Small child holds picket sign reading, “I Need Your Help,” in front of Mayfair market, July 1969. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 34963, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Small child holds picket sign reading, “I Need Your Help,” in front of Mayfair market, July 1969. Source: United Farm Workers Collection, Image 34963, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Children in boycott families were young ambassadors for the farmworker movement. They interacted with the public on supermarket picket lines, at community rallies, and at meetings where they shared their experiences of working in agriculture. Regional newspapers and television news programs ran stories that featured these children and their work with la causa. Their very presence put a public face to the otherwise unidentified and invisible child laborers. Frances Alvarado remembers that she and her siblings first “attended an ALL white school and later moved…and attended an ALL black school,” during the two years that her family administered the boycott in Columbus, Ohio. She believes they “were the first Latino students that our school classmates had seen or met.”61 Like the Alvarado children’s conspicuous ethnic presence, children from boycott families made la causa evident in new communities.
Young Debra Rojas’s experience is especially illustrative of the influence that boycott children could have among their new classmates. In 1969, Rojas’s family organized the boycott office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she attended fourth grade. She remembers that her teacher assigned a story in their social studies textbook, At Home around Our World, that idealized farm labor conditions in California vineyards. Designed to showcase the state’s geography, climate, and industries, the book featured the adventures of nine-year-old twins, Jim and Jane Jackson, the children of a fictitious white Central Valley raisin farmer. In the story, the twins watched brightly clad Mexican farmworkers in their father’s vineyard, and agreed that, “there was something exciting about seeing people picking grapes.” The text explained that laborers sang while they worked in repetitive unison and likened the “Pick, bend, rise. Pick bend, rise,” movement to collective “gym exercises.”62 The stylized depiction of labor conditions in California’s grape vineyards bore disturbing similarity to romanticized scenarios associated with slave labor in the Old South. Recognizing the fallacy in the idealized tale, Rojas brought the story to her parents’ attention, who then sought to dispel the myth. “What is written in that book is so ridiculous, it’s not even funny,” her mother told a reporter for Pittsburgh Catholic. “I’ve worked all my life in the fields, starting when I was about five or six, picking cotton, grapes, prunes, apricots. What that book describes is horribly untrue.”63 Rojas’s social studies teacher conceded that the work was “glorified like it’s a game,” and then asked nine-year-old Debra to give the class a lesson on migrant life and farm labor.64 In explaining her family’s experience with farmwork in California vineyards, Rojas disabused her classmates of romanticized notions regarding the origins of their fruits and vegetables.
In the early 1970s, the UFW boycott teams extended their outreach to non-farmworker children as well, specifically enlisting public and private schools in their effort to educate young consumers. The union wrote to teachers, offering resource kits and guest speakers. The kits, marketed as supplements to current event and social studies curriculum, included statistical data, El Malcriado articles, summaries of court rulings, supporter organizations’ newsletters, first-hand farmworkers’ accounts, and statements by Cesar Chavez. The union also encouraged classroom viewings of films such as Harvest of Shame (1960), What Harvest for the Reaper (1968), and eventually, the UFW-produced Fighting for Our Lives (1975).65 Guest speakers informed schoolchildren of union aims, including how farm labor conditions affected child laborers.66 High school student Norah D. recalled being deeply moved when the guest speaker explained that his little sister was dying of cancer due to pesticide exposure. The “injustice and suffering…blew my 15-year-old, white middle-class mind.” Shaken by the presentation, she “could not sleep that night and the next. I could not understand how a country I had been taught to love and believe in could allow these kinds of things to happen.”67
La causa’s message inspired non-farmworker children to act within their schools, homes, and neighborhoods. Some children demonstrated their support by wearing huelga buttons, T-shirts with UFW iconography, and other articles of clothing emblazoned with the UFW eagle. In a letter to Chavez, twelve-year-old Alex Bernard proudly reported that his stepmother had embroidered the eagle onto his denim jacket.68 At school, children boycotted cafeterias that served non-union produce and demanded that home economics teachers instruct them with recipes that did not require boycotted products.69 High school students in Marin County, California, picketed their local Safeway store at lunchtime, while those from the junior high marched in front of Lucky and Purity markets.70 At home, many children refused to eat lettuce and grapes and urged their parents to subscribe to the UFW newspaper, El Malcriado.71 Some children canvassed their neighborhoods, knocking on doors to drum up support for the boycott. Others, such as fourth-grader Brendan Downey of Minneapolis, Minnesota, held a neighborhood la causa rally with his two sisters. They sold homemade UFW buttons and then mailed the $82 proceeds with donated clothes, food, and toys to the union headquarters in California.72 Many non-farmworker children and teenagers also marched in UFW parades in places like Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Middle-class teenager Cathe’ Fish attributed her political awakening to those UFW protest marches, saying they “woke me up.”73 And fourth-grader Christine Kostyrka, a young New Yorker, wrote to Chavez that she loved to shout, “Get the Gallo off the shelf!” when she walked by liquor stores.74
Just as huelga kids declared their support for Chavez and the boycott through letters, cards, and drawings, so too did young non-farmworker children. Kostyrka sent Chavez a hand drawn picture of a picket sign that read, “Don’t buy lettuce don’t buy grapes don’t buy wine that gallo makes.” [sic]75 Fourth-grader Steven Cintron sent Chavez a crayon drawing of himself with his mother at the supermarket. As the mother figure reaches for a head of lettuce, the boy’s speech bubble commands: “No mom, don’t buy that!”76 And one young child, who urged her grandmother to refrain from drinking Gallo wine, wrote to Chavez that her grandmother agreed but said that “she is going to miss it.”77
Chavez recognized that non-farmworker children held the potential to wield influence beyond the UFW’s immediate sphere. Because of this, he made a priority of responding to children’s letters in a thoughtful and timely manner (sometimes within only a few days). When twelve-year-old Alex Bernard wrote that he was in a quandary because, although his father and stepmother fully supported la causa, his mother and stepfather disapproved of his support for the boycott. Chavez replied: “I am glad you are supporting our struggle. Perhaps by [your] involvement in ‘La Causa’ your mother and stepfather will learn more about our struggle and will also become supporters. That is the way our movement began by one person spreading the word to another, and on down the line.”78 Chavez’s responsiveness to non-farmworker children validated their efforts and served to cultivate young supporters beyond the huelga kid community.
Sometimes these correspondences brought huelga kids into contact with non-farmworker children. When Chavez’s duties or ill-health prevented timely replies, he depended upon his young office staff to encourage and direct child supporters. Fourteen-year-old Joaquin Murguía replied to several children from Aurora, Colorado that, “it is not hard to help the union if you are a kid.” Explaining that he was only nine when he began picketing the Safeway in San Francisco, he encouraged the children to support the UFW boycott because, “we can use all the help we can get.”79 Twelve-year-old Debra Rojas (who had educated her Pittsburgh classmates on farm labor life three years earlier) encouraged at least one young girl to solicit support for la causa from her senators. She also advised several children to send food and clothing donations to the union and to boycott specific products and supermarkets.80 In directing the actions of other children, Murguía and Rojas shared in la causa leadership. Indeed, for many huelga kids, participation in la causa was an empowering experience as they learned to challenge injustice through nonviolent action, and gained skills, self-esteem, and a sense of dignity that would aid them beyond the fields.
The reasons for non-farmworker children’s enthusiastic support of la causa no doubt varied. Certainly, Chavez’s personal attention to children’s missives affirmed their actions as consequential and appreciated. Others, such as Cathe’ Fish and Norah D. experienced their own political awakening through exposure to la causa’s social justice message. For them, la causa was a civil rights movement that they could get behind. For others, the issues of child labor and poverty drove their devotion.
The latter was the case for Karen Bithell, a non-farmworker supporter from San Jose, California. Since she could remember, and through la causa’s first decade, she and her middle-class, white family were active union members who attended UFW meetings, raised funds, collected donations, participated in marches, and walked boycott picket lines. She regularly reported on her boycott activities to Chavez, affectionately signing her many letters and cards, “hermanita” and “your little sister.” She recalls with pride a November day in 1974 when she and her father picketed the Safeway supermarket in Santa Clara, California. With a handful of leaflets and sporting her white T-shirt emblazoned with the black eagle, nine-year-old Karen approached would-be shoppers, extended a leaflet, and began her spiel: “Don’t shop here because they sell non-union grapes and Gallo wine.” Many people pushed past, pretending not to see or hear her. Others politely smiled and accepted a flier on their way into the store. But some people, she remembered, stopped to listen as the fourth grader explained the UFW’s reasons for picketing the supermarket. Occasionally, annoyed shoppers scolded disapprovingly: “Aren’t you a little young to be doing this? Shouldn’t you be at home playing?” But with dogged determination Karen would meet their gaze and respond: “There’s no age limit for justice!” Through persuasion and resolve, she turned away thirty-one shoppers on that late-autumn day.81 Forty-three years later, Bithell explained that she “was doing it for the children.…Because I felt that children should be free to do everything that I was free to do; to go to school, to have decent meals, to have a warm place to sleep, and to play.”82
Conclusion
La causa was a formative political experience for child activists. While it shaped non-farmworker child activists’ convictions, it was perhaps most impactful for huelga kids as it fostered self-esteem and helped them to reimagine their place in society. Several former child laborers attribute their post–la causa success to the movement, claiming that it taught them to aspire and reframed the possibilities in their minds. Rivera noted that before la causa, “We lived in a time when we accepted so many things the way they were…[we] had been conditioned to think that way.” She claims that although she knew the emotional discomfiture and shame associated with discrimination, it was not until the union taught her the words for the mistreatment—racism, condescension, and stereotype—that she began to question their legitimacy.83 Similarly, Agtang-Greer explains that prior to the strike, it never occurred to her that she might eschew farmwork for college. She thought that “growers’ kids went to [college, but] my future [was] going to be working in the fields.” However, she left the fields in 1973 and “never went back.” For her, la causa “opened the doors to another world.”84 And the persistent Yolanda Barrera of Porterville overcame structural impediments (including an obstinate guidance counselor), graduated from high school, attended San Jose State University, and eventually earned a law degree.85
Refocusing the strike and boycott narrative on the children helps us to better delineate and appreciate the movement’s chronology, recognizing that the UFW’s social justice message was most clear and effective when it focused on families. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, children stood at the center of the social justice appeal. As marginalized workers and a vulnerable group in need of protection, they were emblematic of the movement’s aspirations. As agents of protest and activism, they were key to its advancement. By engaging with la causa, farmworker and non-farmworker children alike internalized and embraced the social justice message. They were receptive to notions of fairness, equity, and dignity, and they earnestly sought to further the cause within their sphere of influence. They were niños por la causa who recognized that there should be no age limit for justice.
Notes
The author expresses her sincere appreciation to the anonymous PHR reviewers for their insight and recommendations. Gratitude as well to the many scholars who read and commented on portions of this article since its inception: Paula S. Fass, Mark Brilliant, David Henkin, Lori Flores, Maggie Elmore, Natalie Mendoza, Adrianne Francisco, Susan Wladaver-Morgan, Brendan Shanahan, Brandon Williams, and Grace Goudiss. This project was made possible through generous funding from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the American Historical Association, and a Sam Fishman Travel Grant from the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs.
Yolanda Barrera, “My Life as a Farmworker in the 1960s,” Syndic, Literary Journal 6 (April 2012), http://syndicjournal.us/syndic-no-6/memoir-narrative-my-life-as-a-farmworker-in-the-1960s-by-yolanda-barrera/.
Barrera, “My Life as a Farmworker.” City police did not actually arrest any of the marchers. Yolanda quipped, “I guess the Porterville jail could not hold so many people.”
“Commentary of Luis Valdez, The Plan of Delano,” Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, University of California, San Diego, https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/essays/essays/Plan%20of%20Delano.pdf. Hereafter, the collection will be referred to as FMDP.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) began as the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) in 1962 and merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) in 1966 to become the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC). The organization was granted an independent AFL-CIO charter as the United Farm Workers (UFW) in 1972; the name was formally adopted in September 1973. However, for simplicity, and in keeping with the convention adopted by several other scholars, I will simply refer to the organization as the United Farm Workers (UFW) regardless of period.
This article defines “children” as those minors who were sixteen years old and younger. My usage is in keeping with the federal government’s definition of those minors whose labor was regulated by protective child labor legislation, although the federal government has never protected child farmworkers on a par with laborers in other industries.
By 1975, farmworker families benefitted from several union-driven achievements, which included contracts with growers that governed wages and working conditions, medical services, and improved educational opportunities. Moreover, visibility brought by UFW campaigns of this period supported a national campaign against child labor that resulted in amending Section 13c of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.
Cesar Chavez, “What the Future Holds for Farm Workers and Hispanics,” November 9, 1984, Commonwealth Club of California records, Hoover Institution Archives, https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/1605.
See Rebecca de Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Jon Hale, “‘The Fight Was Instilled in Us’: High School Activism and the Civil Rights Movement in Charleston,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 114, no. 1 (January 2013): 4–28; Dionne Danns, “Chicago High School Students’ Movement for Quality Public Education, 1966–1971,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 138–50; Dwayne C. Wright, “Black Pride Day, 1968: High School Student Activism in York, Pennsylvania,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 151–62; Gael Graham, Young Activists: American High Schools in the Age of Protest (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). Mario T. García’s biography of Sal Castro incorporates Chicano teenagers’ civil rights activism. See Mario T. García and Sal Castro, Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Rhonda L. Hinther has written about Canadian Ukrainian children’s participation in the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA). See Rhonda L. Hinther, “Raised in the Spirit of the Class Struggle: Children, Youth, and the Interwar Ukrainian Left in Canada,” Labour / Le Travail 60 (Fall 2007): 43–76.
Notable studies that grapple with the history of the UFW, its internal politics, and the late 1970s transition are: Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Worker Movement (Berkeley: University of California, 2012); Lori A. Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Haven: Yale, 2016); Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford University Press, 2009); Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (New York: Verso, 2011); Ana Raquel Minian, “‘Indiscriminate and Shameless Sex’: The Strategic Deployment of Sexuality by the United Farm Workers,” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2013): 63–90.
My contention that children were most active in the UFW from 1965–1975 stems from the fact that oral histories about UFW childhoods appear to be limited to that period. On the construction of memory and its use as evidence, see David Thelan, “Memory and American History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (1989): 1117–29; Paula S. Fass, “The Memoir Problem,” Reviews in American History 34 (2006), 107–23; Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, eds., Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
Lupe Herrera, “Alfredo and Juanita Herrera and Their Children: Lupe, Fred, Isabel, Rosario, and Celestina, the Boycott Baby,” March 21, 2012, Share Your UFW Story, http://www.ufwstories.com, accessed August 7, 2017. Hereafter the website is referred to simply as “Share Your UFW Story.”
Abbey Flores Rivera, interview by LeRoy Chatfield, March 4, 2009, part 1, “Growing Up in a Migrant Worker Family,” FMDP.
Barrera, “My Life as a Farmworker.”
El Teatro Campesino performed less frequently at union meetings after 1967 as the group traveled widely and pursued social justice issues more broadly. Randy J. Ontiveros, In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 133–41; Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 110–11.
“The UFW Songs and Stories: Sung and Told by UFW Volunteers,” FMDP.
“Chicano Movement Music,” in Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, vol. 1, edited by Cordelia Chavez Candelaria (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 144–45.
Estevan César Azcona and Russell Rodríguez, Rolas de Aztlán: Songs of the Chicano Movement (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2005); “The UFW Songs and Stories.”
“The UFW Songs and Stories.”
Azcona and Rodríguez, “Niños Campesinos,” Rolas de Aztlán.
“The UFW Songs and Stories.”
Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 119, 149; “The UFW Songs and Stories.”
“The UFW Songs and Stories.”
Ibid.
Herrera, “Alfredo and Juanita Herrera and their Children.”
“The UFW Songs and Stories.”
“A Woman’s Place Is…on the Picket Line,” El Malcriado, July 1970, 16–18; George D. Horowitz and Paul Fusco, La Causa: The California Grape Strike (Toronto, Canada: Macmillan Company, 1970), 20.
Cesar Chavez to Bill and Rachel Encinas, November 10, 1972, “Bill Encinas Family,” FMDP; UFW Membership Card Victoria Encinas, Bill Encinas Family, FMDP.
Cesar Chavez, quoted in Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 184.
Becky Chavez, quoted in Bobby Caina Calvin, “How Labor Leader Inspired, Empowered,” Sacramento Bee, March 31, 2007.
Barrera, “My Life as a Farmworker”; Herrera, “Alfredo and Juanita Herrera and their Children.”
Helen Encinas to Cesar Chavez, December 6, 1970, folder 8, box 2, United Farm Workers, Office of the President: Cesar Chavez Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Hereafter, referred to as Chavez Collection and Reuther Library respectively; Yvonne Esparza to Cesar Chavez, Dec 6, 1970, folder 8, box 2, Chavez Collection; Cathy Martinez, Christmas card to Cesar Chavez, undated, folder 8, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Angela Huerta to Cesar Chavez, no date, folder 8, box 2, Chavez Collection; Cesar Chavez to Angela Huerta, July 13, 1972, folder 8, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Barrera, “My Life as a Farmworker.”
Abbey Flores Rivera, “Farm Worker Credit Union,” FMDP.
Caption to picture of Danny Terronez, El Malcriado, June 1, 1968, 2.
“Delano High Repression Challenged,” El Malcriado, April 1–15, 1969, 10; “Educating Our Children: ‘Huelga School’ Tries New Techniques,” El Malcriado, February 1970, 8; Herrera, “Alfredo and Juanita Herrera and Their Children”; Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 206.
Linda Chavez Rodriguez, interviewed by Paradigm Productions, 1995/1996, archived in FMDP.
Linda Chavez Rodriguez interview; John W. Johnson, The Struggle for Student Rights: Tinker v. Des Moines and the 1960s (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
Hale, “The Fight Was Instilled in Us,” 7.
Marc Simon Rodriguez, “A Movement Made of ‘Young Mexican Americans Seeking Change’: Critical Citizenship, Migration, and the Chicano Movement in Texas and Wisconsin, 1960–1975,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 274–99; Jaime Alanis, “The Harrison High School Walkouts of 1968: Struggle for Equal Schools and Chicanismo in Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2010). For community activism in the Pilsen neighborhood, see Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 207–38; Dolores Delgado Bernal, “Chicana School Resistance and Grassroots Leadership: Providing an Alternative History of the 1968 East Los Angeles Blowouts,” diss., UCLA, 1997; Garcia and Castro, Blowout!
Rodriguez, “A Movement Made of ‘Young Mexican Americans Seeking Change’.”
Virginia Wheaton, comment on “Remembering Helen Fabela Chavez,” United Farm Workers, June 9, 2016, https://unitedfarmworkers.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/remembering-helen-fabela-chavez/.
Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 110.
Julian Nava, “Some Examples of How Mexican-American School Children Are Conditioned to Accept a Negative Self-Image,” folder 22, box 37, Julian Nava Collection, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge; Julian Nava, “Some Neglected Social Aspects of Teaching English,” folder 24, box 37, Nava Collection.
“Delano School Strike,” Fresno Bee, July 12, 1970.
Ironically, Sal Castro, the Lincoln High School teacher who fostered the Los Angeles walkouts, attributed the inspiration to Chavez and the farmworkers’ movement. He recalled thinking that “there had to be an urban counterpart to Cesar’s agricultural struggle.” UFW-affiliated teenagers were then inspired by Castro and the thousands of Los Angeles students who participated in the “blowouts” of March 1968. “Central High School Students Walk Out,” Fresno Bee, May 22, 1969; García and Castro, Blowout!, 133–34.
“Student Punishment Trial Delayed,” Fresno Bee, May 1, 1969; “Richgrove Ponders School Needs,” El Malcriado, February 1970, 8–9; “Boycott in Woodlake,” El Malcriado, April 1970, 14; “Delano High Repression Challenged,” El Malcriado, April 1–15, 1969, 10; Kelly Burch, “Racist Experience and Consequence,” April 23, 2013, Share Your UFW Story.
“Suit Brought Against Delano High School,” El Malcriado, June 1970, 15; “Violence in Delano: Farm Workers Are Beaten, Maced, Shot at, Arson Victims,” El Malcriado, July 1, 1970, 13; Father Mark Day recorded eyewitness accounts and Chavez’s perspective on the student unrest in Forty Acres: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers, introduction by Cesar Chavez (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 77–82.
Powell, The Union of Their Dreams, 64.
Ibid.
“35 Students Strikers Will Get Continuation Rights,” Fresno Bee, August 29, 1970; Day, Forty Acres, 77–82.
Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory, 48.
For an in-depth look at the UFW boycotts, see Lori A. Flores, “The United Farm Workers Union and the Use of the Boycott against American Agribusiness,” in Boycotts Past and Present, edited by David Feldman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 157–74; Margaret Rose, “‘Woman Power Will Stop Those Grapes”: Chicana Organizers and Middle-Class Female Supporters in the Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott in Philadelphia, 1969–1970,” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 6–36; Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory; Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams; Shaw, Beyond the Fields, 18–23.
Rose, “Woman Power,” 8.
Frances Alvarado, “Familia de Ramon Lara,” May 16, 2012, Share Your UFW Story.
Front cover, El Malcriado, September 4, 1969, 1; Rose, “Women in the United Farm Workers,” 167–70; Herrera, “Alfredo and Juanita Herrera and Their Children”; Aimee Reedy, “Guardian Angels,” March 29, 2013, Share Your UFW Story.
Herrera, “Alfredo and Juanita Herrera and their Children.”
“Pogue’s Supports Child Labor in the Vineyards,” flyer, 1972, folder 20, box 3, UFW California Boycott Records, Reuther Library; Letter to supporters, Cincinnati Boycott Office, February 9, 1972, folder 36, box 3, California Boycott Records.
“We Used to Own Our Slaves,” flyer, c. 1970, folder 36, box 3, California Boycott Records.
Father John Bank, “The Valdez Family Leads the Cincinnati Lettuce Boycott,” El Malcriado, December 1970, 12–14.
Alvarado, “Familia de Ramon Lara.”
Though the textbook was published by the California State Department of Education, it was used in school districts across the nation. Delia Goetz, At Home around the World (Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1967), 206–208.
Bill McClinton, “Teaching Fantasy: Every 4th Grader Should Know…Farm Work Is Fun,” El Malcriado, February 1970, 6–7 (reprinted from The Pittsburgh Catholic, November 1969).
McClinton, “Teaching Fantasy.”
Damien Howard to Cesar Chavez, May 9, 1975, folder 20, box 4, Administrative Files, Reuther Library.
Michael Gannon to Teachers, Los Angeles City Schools, April 23, 1971, folder 36, box 3, California Boycott Records; Various letters from the students at Mary Immaculate School in Pacoima, California to Cesar Chavez, March 2, 1972, folder 6, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Norah D., “An Awakening,” March 28, 2013, Share Your UFW Story.
Alex Bernard to Cesar Chavez, December 3, 1975, folder 20, box 4, Administrative Files.
Marianne Bithell to Cesar Chavez, March 22, 1972, folder 8, box 2, Chavez Collection; Irma Escamilla to Cesar Chavez, March 2, 1972, folder 6, box 2, Chavez Collection; Angela Curran and Pat Morales, appeal to high school students, November 11, 1971, folder 36, box 3, California Boycott Records; Michael Gannon to Teachers, Los Angeles City Schools, April 23, 1971, folder 36, box 3, California Boycott Records; Andrew Barnes, “D.C. Schools Join Ban on Lettuce,” Washington Post, October 20, 1972; David Oddo, “Honoring the Legacy of Cesar Chavez with the Si Se Puede Spirit,” March 29, 2013, Share Your UFW Story.
“Marin County Kids Picket: Don’t Eat,” El Malcriado, June 1970, 12.
Andrew Guthrie to Cesar Chavez, undated, folder 7, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Karen Bithell, interviewed by author in Fresno, California, April 3, 2017; Brendan Downey to the UFW, no date, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection. Additional letters convey similar support: Benjie Shapiro and David Belneck to Cesar Chavez, December 16, 1969, folder 7, box 2, Chavez Collection; Carlton B. Ashley to Cesar Chavez, December 16, 1969, folder 7, box 2, Chavez Collection; Chicago Boycott team to Andy, April 24, 1972, folder 6, box 2, Chavez Collection; Angela Huerta to Cesar Chavez, March 16, 1973, folder 8, box 2, Chavez Collection; Cesar Chavez to Sister Dolores Ann, February 13, 1975, folder 20, box 4, Administrative Files; Pete G. Velasco handwritten note to Cesar Chavez on a copy of his reply to Sister Dolores Ann, no date, folder 20, box 4, Administrative Files; Cesar Chavez to Fr. Paul Boucher, June 18, 1975, folder 20, box 4, Administrative Files.
Cathe’ Fish, “Marching at Sixteen,” April 22, 2013, Share Your UFW Story.
Christine Kostyrka to Cesar Chavez, received May 24, 1975, folder 20, box 4, UFW Administrative Files, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Christine Kostyrka to Cesar Chavez, received May 24, 1975, folder 20, box 4, UFW Administrative Files, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Steven Cintron, drawing, May 16, 1974, folder 7, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Unsigned letter to Cesar Chavez, undated, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Chavez typically handwrote his replies and then his secretary would type the letter in duplicate prior to mailing one copy. The copies of Chavez’s replies were then saved with the original letters from the children. Alex Bernard to Cesar Chavez, December 3, 1975, folder 20, box 4, UFW Administrative Files; Cesar Chavez to Alex Bernard, December 23, 1975, folder 20, box 4, UFW Administrative Files.
Joaquin Murguía to John O’Brien, November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection; Joaquin Murguía to David (unknown surname), November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection; Joaquin Murguía to Craig Haynes, November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection; Joaquin Murguía to Gwen (unknown surname), November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection.
Debra Rojas to Kim Tennell, November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection; Debbie Rojas to Karen Rossi, November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection; Debbie Rojas to Mary Lovelace, November 1972, folder 9, box 2, Chavez Collection.
In her letter, Karen reported to Chavez that she had turned away thirty-one shoppers. During our interview, she explained that the picketers tallied the numbers on a clipboard. Bithell interview; Karen Bithell, e-mail message to author, April 6, 2017; Karen Bithell to Cesar Chavez, November 26, 1973, folder 8, box 2, United Farm Workers, Office of the President, Chavez Collection.
Bithell interview.
Rivera interview, FMDP.
Agtang-Greer interview, FMDP.
Barrera, “My Life as a Farmworker in the 1960s.”
University of California Press