Abstract
This chapter addresses how agricultural laborers in the civil rights-era United States organized—under the United Farm Workers (UFW) union—successful national consumer boycotts of grapes and lettuce. Alongside labor strikes, these boycotts helped agricultural workers make advances in their rights and conditions of work. The UFW campaigns remain significant in the histories of US Latinos, labor, and global boycotts for their strategic use of civil rights and family-centered rhetoric to galvanize support from food shoppers, for remaining flexible enough to embrace a diverse range of allies, and for bringing the US agricultural industry to the negotiating table in a way that Americans had never seen before, and have not seen since.
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Notes
- 1.
Lori Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Haven, 2016), 163.
- 2.
Sarah Stern, “‘We Cast Our Lot With the Farm Workers’: Organization, Mobilization and Meaning in the United Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott in New York City, 1967–70” (Thesis, New York University, 2013), 23.
- 3.
Margaret Rose, ‘‘Woman Power Will Stop Those Grapes’: Chicana Organizers and Middle-Class Female Supporters in the Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott in Philadelphia, 1969–1970,’ Journal of Women’s History, vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 1995), 6–7.
- 4.
Rose, “Woman Power,” 7.
- 5.
Margaret Rose, ‘‘Woman Power Will Stop Those Grapes’: Chicana Organizers and Middle-Class Female Supporters in the Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott in Philadelphia, 1969–1970,’ Journal of Women’s History, vol. 7, no. 4, (Winter 1995), 6, 10–16.
- 6.
Rose, “Woman Power,” 17–18.
- 7.
Rose, “Woman Power,” 18–19.
- 8.
Stern, “We Cast Our Lot,” 32.
- 9.
Stern, “We Cast Our Lot,” 39–40.
- 10.
Stern, “We Cast Our Lot,” 40.
- 11.
Heidi Tinsman, Buying Into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham, 2014), 153.
- 12.
Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (London, 2011), 326; Matt Garcia, “Remembering Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Movement” panel remarks, Organization of American Historians Conference, San Francisco, California, 13 April 2013.
- 13.
Rose, “Woman Power,” 22; Stern, “We Cast Our Lot,” 23.
- 14.
“Farm Union Reaps First California Victory,” Business Week, 16 April 1966, 159.
- 15.
Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, 350.
- 16.
Marshall Ganz, interview with the author, Los Altos, California, 5 September 2009.
- 17.
Miriam J. Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture (Ithaca, 1996), 81.
- 18.
Bardacke, Trampling, 342–46, 351.
- 19.
Doug Willis, “Calif. Lettuce Rots as Farm Unions Clash,” Washington Post, 28 August 1970, A6; Miriam J. Wells, ‘Legal Conflict and Class Structure: The Independent Contractor-Employee Controversy in California Agriculture,’ Law & Society Review, vol. 21, no. 1, (1987), 55; Harry Bernstein, “Growers Losing $500,000 A Day,” Los Angeles Times, 27 August 1970, 1 and “Chavez-Grower Contract Talks Stalled by Suit,” Los Angeles Times, 29 August 1970, A1.
- 20.
Bernstein, “Growers Losing $500,000,” 1; Jacques Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York, 1975), 196.
- 21.
Bardacke, Trampling, 361; “Chavez Union Signs Pact With Major Vegetable Grower,” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1970, 3; “UFWOC Signs with Valley’s Largest Lettuce Grower,” El Malcriado, 1 September 1970, 7.
- 22.
“Chavez May Face Jail or Fine in Court Contempt Action,” Los Angeles Times, 25 November 1970, A3; Levy, Cesar Chavez, 417; Harry Bernstein, “Another Grower Signs Contract With Chavez Union,” Los Angeles Times, 9 October 1970, 3; Jim Stingley, “Chavez Signs 3rd Big Salinas Grower,” Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1970, A1; “Chavez, Salinas Lettuce Grower Agree to Pact,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1970, C5.
- 23.
“Cesar Jailed, Boycott Goes On,” El Malcriado, 15 December 1970, 3.
- 24.
Tinsman, Buying Into the Regime, 8, 134.
- 25.
Jennifer Robin Terry, “Niños por la Causa: Children and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s,” Paper, Western Association of Women Historians, San Diego, 28 April 2017, 1.
- 26.
Terry, “Niños por la Causa,” 5–6.
- 27.
Margaret Rose, ‘Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism in the United Farm Workers of America, 1962 to 1980,’ Frontiers, vol. 11, (1990), 29; Barbara L. Baer and Glenna Matthews, “The Women of the Boycott,” The Nation, 23 February 1974, 234; Margaret Rose, ‘From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott, 1965–1975,’ Labor History, vol. 31, no. 3, (1990), 273, 276.
- 28.
Tinsman, Buying Into the Regime, 162; Flores, Grounds for Dreaming, 209–10.
- 29.
For more on tensions within the UFW see Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker Movement (New York, 2009) and Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (Berkeley, 2014).
- 30.
Tinsman, Buying Into the Regime, 146.
- 31.
Tinsman, Buying Into the Regime, 148, 169.
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Flores, L.A. (2019). The United Farm Workers Union and the Use of the Boycott Against American Agribusiness. In: Feldman, D. (eds) Boycotts Past and Present. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_9
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