Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers: What Went Wrong? Jon Wiener interviews Frank Bardacke

Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and writes for The Nation.

The United Farm Workers was once a mighty force on the California landscape, with 50,000 members at the end of the 1970s; today the membership is around 6,000. What happened? And to what extent was the UFW responsible for its own demise? Frank Bardacke has been thinking about that for a long time—he was active in the student and anti-war movements in Berkeley in the 1960s. He moved to California's Central Coast in 1970, worked for six seasons in the Salinas Valley fields and then taught English as a Second Language at the Watsonville Adult School for twenty-five years. Verso has just published his book Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers—it's a masterpiece of sorts, on the order of Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. I spoke with Frank Bardacke recently on KPFK 90.7FM in Los Angeles.

You worked in the fields in Salinas, picking celery. What was that like?

It’s done by collective piecework, with a crew of thirty to thirty-five people, paid for each box of celery. They share that pay equally. The crews are all men. They have a high degree of solidarity. They try to make the jobs equal. The men typically come from the same small towns in Mexico, often they are brothers and cousins and fathers and sons. You can’t get on a crew unless the members want you and are willing to carry you while you learn the work. The core of the crew will stay together over many seasons. The result is that they have a tremendous amount of power and leverage at harvest time, because they can’t be replaced except by other crews with similar skills. They never split up if it comes to a strike—they either strike together, or they don’t strike. These people, along with the lettuce workers, were the heart of UFW strength in the fields.

How much did piece-rate vegetable workers earn in the mid-1970s, at the height of UFW power?

When I worked on a celery harvest crew in the mid-seventies, we made about $14 an hour. The guys who cut the lettuce made about $20 an hour. That’s the equivalent of about $50 an hour today. They were among the highest paid people in the US working class. This resulted from their own power in the fields, coupled with the UFW’s institutional power and ability to mobilize support in the rest of society. That was in the 1970s....