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Symposium: Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Workers
When most people think of the United Farm Workers, two things come to mind: Cesar Chávez and the grape boycott. Regarding the former, Chávez distinguished himself as perhaps the best-known Mexican American labor and civil rights leader in the country through his advocacy for farm worker rights in California during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1970, the union he led forced growers to the bargaining table for the first farm labor contracts in the history of the Golden State. This achievement would not have been possible without Chávez's embrace of the boycott, a strategy that, until proven important to the struggle, had been regarded by labor leaders as supplemental to the main strategies of strikes and marches. In fact, when we evaluate the contributions of the United Farm Workers to the history of labor in the United States, the grape boycott might well be its most enduring legacy, even more so than Chávez's leadership.
This is one of my primary arguments in my book, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chávez and the Farm Worker Movement . In 1965, Jim Drake, a protestant minister who became an executive board member of the UFW, convinced Chávez that the boycott would be a useful activity for volunteers after the peak of the harvest. Gilbert Padilla, also a founding member of the UFW, conveyed the logic behind the action: "You don't organize people unless you have something for them to do; otherwise you lose them." 1 From these humble beginnings, the grape boycott grew into the most successful consumer boycott in United States history. 2
The boycott, however, was not as simple as it appears to have been. What follows is an explanation of how the strategy evolved over a short period of time and how it became the effective tool that it was for approximately a ten-year period from 1965 until 1975, when the union shifted tactics toward state-sponsored farm worker justice under the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Critical to this evolution was the union's ability to adapt the boycott to the tactics of the growers--essentially moving it and changing it to meet the challenges volunteers...