Delano Grape Strike (1965-1970): Cesar Chavez and Farm Workers

The Delano grape strike was a five-year labour struggle by farm workers in the vineyards around Delano, California, from 8 September 1965 to July 1970. Begun by Filipino American grape pickers and joined by Cesar Chavez’s mainly Mexican American farm workers’ association, it grew into a national boycott of California table grapes. It ended with the first major union contracts for farm workers in the United States and made Chavez a national figure.

Background: farm work in California

California’s huge agricultural industry depended on low-paid seasonal labour. Over the 20th century this work was done by successive groups of migrants, including Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Mexican workers. Many lived in labour camps with poor housing and sanitation and moved from crop to crop through the year.

Farm workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which protected the right of most American workers to form unions and bargain collectively. Growers had no legal duty to recognise or negotiate with a farm workers’ union, and earlier strikes had often been broken by mass evictions or violence.

The end of the Bracero Program at the close of 1964, under which Mexican guest workers had been brought in on contract, gave domestic farm workers new leverage. In spring 1965 Filipino grape workers in the Coachella Valley won a wage of 1.40 dollars an hour after a short strike.

The strike begins

When the grape harvest moved north to Delano, growers offered lower wages. On 8 September 1965 Filipino workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), part of the AFL-CIO and led locally by Larry Itliong, voted at the Filipino Community Hall in Delano to strike. They demanded 1.40 dollars an hour plus 25 cents per box picked. Many of the strikers were “manongs”, older Filipino men who had come to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Itliong asked Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to join. The NFWA, founded in 1962 by Chavez and Dolores Huerta, was a young organisation with little money. On 16 September 1965, Mexican Independence Day, its members voted at Our Lady of Guadalupe church hall to join the strike. Mexican American and Filipino workers now picketed side by side, though tensions between the groups never fully disappeared.

The two leaders brought different strengths. Itliong, born in the Philippines in 1913, had worked in the fields and canneries of the West Coast since the late 1920s and was an experienced union organiser. Chavez, born in Arizona in 1927, had spent a decade with the Community Service Organization, a Mexican American civil rights group, learning the methods of community organising. Huerta, a former schoolteacher, was a skilled negotiator and lobbyist who later led many of the union’s contract talks.

Nonviolence, the march and the boycott

Chavez insisted on nonviolence, drawing on Catholic social teaching and the examples of Gandhi and the civil rights movement. Strikers faced intimidation, arrests and attacks on picket lines, and growers replaced many of them with strikebreakers. With the vineyards hard to shut down, the strikers turned to consumers.

The boycott first targeted Schenley Industries, a liquor company with vineyards in Delano, and the DiGiorgio Corporation. In March 1966 a US Senate subcommittee held hearings in Delano, where Senator Robert F. Kennedy became a prominent supporter. From 17 March to 10 April 1966 strikers walked about 300 miles from Delano to Sacramento in a “peregrinación”, a pilgrimage marked by banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Before it reached the capital on Easter Sunday, Schenley agreed to recognise the union.

In August 1966 the AWOC and NFWA merged to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), affiliated with the AFL-CIO, with Chavez as director and Itliong as assistant director. After winning contracts with some wine grape growers, the union turned in 1967 to the table grape grower Giumarra Vineyards, the largest in the area. When Giumarra used other companies’ labels to evade the boycott, the union extended it in 1968 to all California table grapes.

Chavez’s fast and the national campaign

In February 1968, worried that some strikers were turning to violence, Chavez began a fast to rededicate the movement to nonviolence. He ended it after 25 days, on 10 March 1968, at a Mass in Delano attended by Robert Kennedy.

Volunteers and strikers fanned out to dozens of cities across the United States and Canada, picketing supermarkets and winning support from unions, churches, students and politicians. Dolores Huerta directed the boycott in New York, the largest market. Polls later suggested that many millions of Americans stopped buying grapes, and some supermarket chains removed them from their shelves. Grape prices and sales fell sharply.

The 1970 contracts

As losses mounted, growers began to negotiate. On 29 July 1970 John Giumarra Sr. and other Delano growers, 26 in all, signed three-year contracts at the union’s headquarters at the Forty Acres site outside Delano. Combined with earlier agreements, most of California’s table grape industry was now under union contract.

The contracts raised wages to about 1.80 dollars an hour plus a bonus per box, created a union hiring hall, set up a health plan named after Robert F. Kennedy and included protections against dangerous pesticides, an issue the union had raised during the boycott.

Aftermath and legacy

The victory did not last unchallenged. When the grape contracts expired in 1973, most growers signed instead with the Teamsters union, leading to another bitter strike in which two UFW members were killed. In 1975 California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, signed by Governor Jerry Brown, which gave farm workers in the state the right to secret-ballot union elections. The union, renamed the United Farm Workers of America in 1972, won many of those elections.

Chavez led the UFW until his death in 1993 and became an icon of Latino civil rights; his birthday, 31 March, is a state holiday in California. Dolores Huerta continued as a prominent activist. Larry Itliong left the union in 1971, and Philip Vera Cruz in 1977, and the Filipino workers’ role was long overlooked; since the 2010s California has recognised Larry Itliong Day on 25 October. The Forty Acres was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008, and the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument was established in Keene, California, in 2012.

The strike took place alongside other movements for rights and dignity in the 1960s, from the Selma to Montgomery marches to the Black Panther Party, and helped inspire the wider Chicano movement.

Timeline

• 1965, 8 September: Filipino workers of the AWOC strike Delano grape growers.
• 1965, 16 September: Chavez’s NFWA votes to join the strike.
• 1966, 17 March – 10 April: The march from Delano to Sacramento; Schenley recognises the union.
• 1966, August: AWOC and NFWA merge to form the UFWOC.
• 1967–1968: The boycott expands from Giumarra to all California table grapes.
• 1968, 10 March: Chavez ends a 25-day fast for nonviolence.
• 1970, 29 July: Delano growers sign union contracts, ending the strike.
• 1975: California passes the Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

Why it matters

The Delano grape strike won union contracts for some of the poorest and least protected workers in the United States. Its boycott showed how ordinary consumers could support a labour struggle, and its coalition of Filipino and Mexican American workers helped shape Asian American and Latino civil rights movements.