The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File history of the UFW Movement
The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File history of the UFW Movement by Christian O. Paiz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023)
A true grass-roots history
History is often viewed as linear – “A” happens and “B” follows, on to its conclusion. The human story is never a straight line, with doubts, diversions and breakthroughs radically altering people’s efforts. This is especially true of labor history; there are many false starts, failures and sometimes triumphs as workers seek change and power.
In The Strikers of Coachella, farmworkers’ child Christian Paiz examines the epic struggle impoverished farmworkers launched in the 1960s-1980s to improve conditions and find their own voice. The upstart United Farm Workers (UFW) union is well documented in numerous books, along with its leaders, the late Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. This book’s strength is its emphasis on the workers, not the leadership. Paiz grew up in this world and after achieving a college education, returned to the Valley to teach high school, wisely recording oral histories with the community’s elders and his contemporaries.
For shoppers, the grocery produce aisle yields its bounty of fresh lettuce, grapes, citrus and multiple fruits and vegetables. Few consumers realize the callused and underpaid hands that nourish and harvest those crops. California’s Coachella Valley is famed for its musical festival and Palm Springs, yet few note the row crops and orchards, approximately 60 miles from the Mexican border.
Paiz labels this as “Rancher Nation,” a place politically and economically dominated by wealthy landowners. The Mexican, Filipino, Tejanos (workers who came west from Texas) and long settled Mexican American families were this land’s invisible wealth producers.
By the 1960s local workers were beginning to politically organize and lead voter registration drives. Male Filipino farmworkers, imported into the U.S. in the 1930s and forbidden to bring spouses from home or marry across racial lines, had carried union cards for decades and were the AFL-CIO’s Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee foundation. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave U.S. workers organizing rights, offered no protections to field hands.
In 1965 the Filipinos struck the grape harvest; Chavez and Mexican American workers saw an opportunity and instead of strikebreaking, united to launch the UFW. Chavez’s particular genius was carrying the strike to consumers through epic 1960s grape and lettuce boycotts that eventually helped win contracts.
In the context of the late 1960s civil rights movement, the UFW ignited U.S. Latina/os in rural valleys and urban enclaves. In the African American community, radical youth formed the Black Panther Party. For Latinx youth, the Brown Berets carried that same militant spirit. The Rancher Nation was quaking, its comfortable existence and political control threatened by popular resistance at multiple levels.
By 1970 the UFW was winning contracts; but in 1973 the ranchers colluded with the Teamsters and instead signed contracts with that union, unleashing a summer of repression and bloody attacks on farmworkers. The UFW launched its boycott campaigns again and in 1975 California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), a national first that recognized union bargaining rights.
The ALRA seemed like a breakthrough, but farmworker victories depended upon quick wins during critical harvest seasons. Ranchers stalled the process, intimidated workers and used legal pretexts to create roadblocks. Eventually the UFW might win an election, but grower challenges left the workers’ rights in a multi-year legalistic morass. Eventually, the ALRA staff would declare a victor, but by then participating workers had long followed the migrant path to other jobs.
Throughout this process Paiz does a masterful job weaving the UFW’s history with workers’ experience. Already impoverished people had to find work during long strikes; Filipino workers chafed at a movement that increasingly took on Mexican symbolism and leadership; many migrant workers were unwitting strikebreakers. Yet through this, workers found their voice and their power. The UFW’s low-cost clinics and service centers were life changing. Rebelling against their patriarchal husbands, women workers stood up for their rights and found their own power.
The 1980s anti-union Reagan years cast a pall not only on the UFW but all unions, as employers mercilessly forced strikes or locked out union members. There are other authors that blame Chavez’s leadership for the UFW’s faltering, but Paiz contextualizes that the upstart UFW suffered along with all unions in a national, systematic anti-union effort.
Farmworkers are still organizing, though not the national cause they were in the late 1960s. Growers still retain great political and economic power. Though the UFW’s “Black Eagle” symbol waves over few fields, Paiz chronicles the other positive changes in the Valley. Some farmworkers’ children achieved a higher education and then returned to their roots to teach school, open social services and boost local political movements. To stem the union movement, growers improved housing for their migratory workers, raised wages and thanks to federal OSHA regulations, portable toilets and clean drinking water now dot the endless crop rows.
A farmworkers’ life is still treacherous; growers use U.S. visa laws to import their workforce and exploit border crossers; pesticide poisoning and irregular work still means that farmworkers face poverty and a lowered life expectancy.
The Strikers of Coachella is a nuanced and incredibly well researched volume. Anytime workers try to organize there are those who are first in the fray, others trapped by fear or calculating their self-interest. This book is not only a testament to the farmworkers’ spirited resistance but a thoughtful study of the human condition and the extra effort and inspiration that lies behind any struggle where workers find their voice and power.
Reviewed by Mike Matejka, a Vice President of the Illinois Labor History Society