“I had never saw any grapes”
Mack Lyons had come a long way to get to Florida. He was born in 1941 near Dallas, to parents who worked in Texas cotton fields. He moved around the Southwest, including a stint hustling pool in Las Vegas, until in 1966 he settled with his first wife in Central California’s San Joaquin Valley. In Texas, he had been a farmworker inconsistently, and deliberately so. It was grueling work that he avoided as much as possible. Now in California and needing money, Mack and a few friends took a truck and went looking for a job in Delano’s sprawling grape fields. Mack said that until he pulled up to the edge of that DiGiorgio grape field in Delano, he “had never saw any grapes.” But it was not the fruit that made a lasting impression on him. It was the picket line of people, primarily Mexicans and Mexican Americans, holding flags emblazoned with a striking black Aztec eagle against a bright red background, and signs that read, in all capital letters, HUELGA.3
Mack recalled that neither he nor any of the other Black farmworkers he was riding with knew any Spanish. Huelga is Spanish for “strike,” and what Mack saw were the early days of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers striking in the Delano vineyards. Before the decade was over, everyone in California would know what huelga meant.4
Apprehensive but curious, Mack talked to the UFW members on the picket line. They likely explained to him that the strike began a year earlier, in 1965, initiated by the largely Filipino Agricultural Workers of California (AWOC) and followed by the largely Mexican American National Farm Workers of America (NFWA), led by Cesar Chavez, against the grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley. They likely explained that these growers cheated field workers out of wages, used state-subsidized labor in the Bracero Program as competition, exposed workers to harmful pesticides, and treated them as barely human. The growers attempted to break the unions’ strike by pulling in workers from elsewhere and having picket line demonstrators arrested. When Mack showed up looking for work that day, he himself had been an unwitting strikebreaker.5
The farmworkers had to figure out how to outmaneuver the growers, who had seemingly endless resources and local, state, and national political influence. In 1966, union leadership hatched two ideas: nationwide boycotts of grapes, which became the largest consumer boycott in American history; and a peregrinación, a pilgrimage, made from Delano to Sacramento with marchers holding large wooden crosses and posters of the Virgin of Guadalupe. UFW members drew parallels between their approach and the contemporary Black freedom struggle, and it was from the Civil Rights Movement that the UFW drew its image as “a ‘movement’ more than a ‘union.’ Once a movement begins it is impossible to stop,” as an editorial in El Macriado put it. The pilgrimage galvanized ecumenical religious sympathy, not only among Mexican American and Filipino American Catholic farmworker communities but also among a broad base of liberal Protestant churches. In 1966, against the protestations of some members, AWOC joined with nfwa to become the United Farm Workers of America, led by Cesar Chavez and funded by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO). It was a pragmatic move. Most California farmworkers were Mexican American, and the promise of AFL-CIO funding was hard to ignore.6
Mack was in. Quick to joke or jump into song, with “long legs” and a “languid smile,” Mack was a constant presence within the union. Over the next three years, he worked nonstop around the valley, organized pickets, picked grapes in fields where contracts were won, and was elected steward, a union representative among workers in Arvin, near Delano, by a field crew composed of Mexicans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and white southerners. Mack “must be a nice guy,” Chavez remarked, and admired that Mack was able to get such a diverse group of workers to agree on anything. Chavez came to respect Mack as much as his fellow workers did. Only years after joining the union did Mack come to be the sole Black member of the UFW executive board and of Chavez’s inner circle.7
The United Farm Workers was never just a labor union. Before he organized farmworkers, Chavez got his start as a community organizer on the payroll of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-based community organizer and political theorist. During his tenure as UFW president, Chavez was sometimes accused by fellow members of being more interested in leading a national social movement like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.—two of Chavez’s foremost inspirations—rather than dealing with the everyday toil of a labor union. In practice, the UFW was at least three distinct things. After winning contracts with grape growers pressured by the boycott, it was officially a labor union. It was also a community organization offering medical and legal services, social events, and political representation to members and nonmembers. And as produce boycotts drew national sympathy, Chavez insisted on a more expansive vision, aiming to provide economic justice for all poor Americans, reimagining the UFW as a nationwide social movement.8
When the UFW was working properly, these three elements were seamless. When it was not, internal and external critics tore into Chavez for being unable to decide on the goals and identity of the union. After the successes of the 1960s, the struggles of the ’70s were more complicated and bitter. Protracted fights with strikebreaking members of the Teamsters Union (a more politically conservative union brought in by growers to replace the UFW), interminable boycotts, and the passage and subsequent lack of support for statewide agricultural labor legislation left the union diffuse and exhausted, a symbol without much reality. In California, the UFW became a social movement without a labor union. In Florida, it was the other way around. It would become a sustained labor union without an accompanying social movement. But in its first decade everyone in UFW’s California offices were optimistic, riding high off of contracts won throughout the state. Mack, committed to realizing the UFW as a labor union and eager to be on the ground organizing and interacting directly with workers, said to Chavez, partly in jest, “Let’s consider California liberated and move somewhere else!”9