Trampling Out the Vintage

Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers

Frank Bardacke

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781781680667
• eBook ISBN: 9781781684436
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

In its heyday, the United Farm Workers was an embodiment of its slogan "Yes, we can"-in the form "?S?, Se Puede!"-winning many labor victories, securing collective bargaining rights for farm workers, and becoming a major voice for the Latino community. Today, it is a mere shadow of its former self.
Trampling Out the Vintage is the authoritative and award-winning account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers and its most famous and controversial leader, Cesar Chavez. Based interviews conducted over many years-with farm workers, organizers, and the opponents and friends of the UFW-the book tells a story of collective action and empowerment rich in evocative detail and stirring human interest. Beginning with the influence of the ideas of Saul Alinsky and Catholic Social Action at the union's founding, through the UFW's thrilling triumphs in the California fields, the drama concludes with the debilitating internal struggles that effectively crippled the union.
A vivid rendering of farm work and the world of the farm worker, Trampling Out the Vintage is a dramatic reappraisal of the political trajectory of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and an essential re-evaluation of their most tumultuous years.
Winner of the 2012 Hillman Prize in Book Journalism.

Notes

Introduction

1. Spelled in Spanish, “Cesar Chavez” carries accents, like this “César Chávez.” But Chavez, himself, did not write his name that way, nor was his name written that way in UFW documents, and so I have not written it that way in this book.

2. These membership numbers are high-end, peak harvest time estimates. See UFW Collection Unprocessed Files: National Executive Board, Folder “Crops,” Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State; Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Philip L. Martin, Promised Unfulfilled (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 76; Miriam Pawel, “For UFW, Contracts Are Give and Take,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2006.

3. Pablo Camacho, author interview, Watsonville, January 20, 1995; all following quotes are from this interview.

4. Raúl Medina, author interview, Watsonville, February 1, 1995; all following quotes are from this interview.

Chapter 1

1. Anna-Stina Ericson, “The Impact of Commuters on the Mexican Border Area,” Monthly Labor Review, August 1970, reprinted in George C. Kiser and Martha Wood, Mexican Workers in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979) p. 24; Julian Samora, Los Mojados (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), p. 10; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970, Part 6, “California.”

2. An extraordinary account of this history can be found in Alan Rudy, “Environmental Conditions, Negotiations, and Crises: The Political Economy of Agriculture in the Imperial Valley of California, 1850–1993,” Ph.D. thesis, University of California–Santa Cruz, June 1995, p. 204. The standard works on irrigating the desert are Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985; Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Two useful local histories are Mildred de Stanley, The Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today (Los Angeles: Triumph Press, 1966), and Alton Duke, When the Colorado Quit the Ocean (Yuma, Ariz.: Southwest Printers, 1974).

3. Rudy, “Environmental Conditions, Negotiations, and Crises,” p. 284.

4. Ibid., p. 12.

5. Samora, Mojados, p. 35.

6. U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, California Field Office, “Principal Crops: Production in California, 1950–Present,” Sacramento: 2008; Giannini Foundation, “Whither California Agriculture: Up, Down, or Out,” Special Report 04-1, San Francisco: 2004, 3, tables 2 and 3; Agricultural Commissioner, Imperial County, “Agricultural Crop Report,” 1982.

7. Giannini Foundation, “Whither California Agriculture,” 3, tables 2, 3, and 12.

8. The best account of this transformation is William L. Preston, Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

9. Steven Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson, The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland (Berkeley: University of California Press and California Academy of Sciences, 1992), p. 210.

10. Anne B. Fisher and Walter K. Fisher, The Salinas: The Upside Down River, Fitzgerald Rivers of America Collection (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945), pp. xv–xvii; Sandy Lydon, The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region (Capitola, Calif.: Capitola Book Company, 1985), 286–9.

Chapter 2

1. Aristotle, Politics, New York: Cosimo Books, 2008, p. 47; Karl Marx, Capital, New York: Appleton,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Praise for Trampling Out the Vintage
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue: The Car Pool
• The Founding
• The Boycott
• Farmworkers Win A New Deal
• Victory in Hand, Confusion at Heart
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Maps
• Photo
• Copyright