United Farm Workers Research Articles

Cancer incidence in the United Farmworkers of America (UFW), 1987–1997

Cancer incidence in the United Farmworkers of America (UFW), 1987–1997

Labor Day and Public Health

The cover image of farmworkers walking a picket line in Watsonville, Calif, in 1997 marks Labor Day and worker health. Workers and their families constitute the overwhelming majority of the public. Research classifications based on gender, race/ethnicity, country of origin, or sexual orientation usually contain a predominance of workers in each group. Egregious disparities in health are evident between those who own businesses and those who work for wages, with little or no control over the conditions under which they labor. Most of the members of this association and the readers of this journal are themselves public health workers and health care providers. Public health research, policy, practice, and education devoted to workers and their families belong in the Journal, and a broad discussion of worker health is warranted. Public health and worker safety share historical roots. This month's Images of Health, titled “Night Shift in a Glass Factory,” depicts child exploitation nearly a century ago. Socialists, labor leaders, Progressive reformers, and public health workers joined together to address “the bitter cry of the children.” Strong alliances among groups such as these are needed today. Bernardini Ramazzini's classic text Diseases of Workers was published in 1700. The excerpt reprinted here underscores the fact that certain links between working conditions and poor health have been known for quite some time. Such is the case with repetitive tasks and stress injuries. Years of effort and struggle to arrive collectively at needed workplace safeguards were obliterated in March 2001 when the US Congress and the Bush administration voted to undo the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's landmark ergonomics standards. Political will is needed to repair this damage and protect the health of large numbers of workers. Workers' health goes beyond occupational health. Rajiv Bhatia and Michael Katz demonstrate that better wages equals better health in their article, “Estimation of Health Benefits From a Local Living Wage Ordinance.” Earlier this year, students at Harvard University aligned with campus unions and staged a 21-day sit-in to demand a living wage of at least $10 an hour for all university employees. Collective action is effective in bringing attention to labor concerns. The largest public health programs in the United States, Medicare and Medicaid, were initiated through the political pressure of organized labor. Trade unions have historically defined the most pressing health concerns of workers. They are also effective partners in ensuring essential health coverage and programs, as Elizabeth Barbeau and her colleagues found (see “Coverage of Smoking Cessation Treatment by Union Health and Welfare Funds”). The farmworkers featured on the cover won, on March 22, 2001, their 4-year struggle to be represented by the United Farmworkers Union. In doing so, they gained wage increases, paid holidays, job security, life insurance, a seniority system, a grievance procedure, and a company-paid medical and dental plan. The medical and dental plan covers not only the farmworkers themselves, but their families as well, both in the United States and in Mexico. Improving the health of workers also advances the health of the majority of the public.

Sociology: Making Sense of the Social World

Sociology: Making Sense of the Social World

Resources and Resourcefulness: Strategic Capacity in the Unionization of California Agriculture, 1959-1966

Why did the insurgent United Farm Workers (UFW) succeed while its better-resourced rival-the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO (AWOC)-failed? Explanations relying on altered political opportunity structures or resources, accounts of Cesar Chavez's charismatic leadership, or descriptions of UFW strategy fail to identify mechanisms for creating effective strategy. By analyzing leadership, organizational influences on actors' choices, and their interaction within the environment, this study shows that greater access to salient information, heuristic facility, and motivation generated more effective strategy. Differences in strategic capacity can explain how resourcefulness can compensate for lack of resources, why some new organizations can overcome the liability of newness, and how reorganizational focal moments may lead to a social movement.

Every Worker is An Organizer

Farm Labor and the Resurgence of the United Farm Workers

Poisons in the Fields: The United Farm Workers, Pesticides, and Environmental Politics

Poisons in the Fields: The United Farm Workers, Pesticides, and Environmental Politics

The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement (review)

Book Reviews 139 While the mothers' movement never exceeded five or six million members and their activism faded quickly after the "Mass Sedition Trial" of 1944 (chapter eleven)—a case that ended in dismissal—Jeansonne urges careful contemplation of the movement's significance. That significance derives from the activists' alteration of "the historical conception of isolationism," their role in creating a political culture in which the demagoguery of a Joseph McCarthy might thrive, and their unique place in "twentieth-century women's history," a place that deviates sharply from dominant perspectives of "women as pacifists" (179-186). For Jeansonne's analysis of these influences as much as for the particular cases under examination, Women of the Far Right merits attention. Diane Cypkin Pace University The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement. By Susan Ferriss and Ricardo Sandoval. New York: Harcourt Brace Sc Company, 1997; pp. 352. $25.00. In April of 1997, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) aired a documentary entitled "The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement." A companion volume by journalists Susan Ferriss and Ricardo Sandoval was published as a supplement to the documentary. Airing of the film and publication of the book were scheduled to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Chavez's death on April 22, 1993. Book and film aluce reflected the continued interest in both Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW). The Fight in the Fields presents an overview of Chavez's life and his efforts to improve the lives of poor people. In presenting that overview, Ferriss and Sandoval provide a clear, readable story of the major periods in Chavez's life: as a migrant; as an organizer for the Community Services Organization (CSO); as creator and leader of the union's dramatic strike of 1965-70, which made him a national figure; as the union's commander during battles with the Teamsters in the 1970s; as politician attempting to pass legislation favorable to farm workers; and as an administrator trying to maintain the union during difficult times in the 1980s and 1990s. In their narrative, Ferriss and Sandoval often rely on the public discourse of Chavez and his followers, as much of the story is told through their words. The book also includes excerpts from works which focus on the lives of farm workers, a public letter from Chavez to the leaders of the growers association, and poetry and eulogies about Chavez. Such sources strengthen the book's clearly articulated argument. Ferriss and Sandoval detail the debates between Chavez and his opponents in agriculture, politics, and the legal system. During his years with the CSO (1952-62), 140 Rhetoric & Public Affairs for example, Chavez worked to organize poor people into community groups, registered Mexican-Americans to vote, and helped individuals solve their personal problems. The authors detail how Chavez was challenged by members of the establishments he fought, as well as by middle-class Mexican-Americans who feared they would lose power if Chavez succeeded in creating effective organizations among the poor. While his opponents questioned Chavez's motives and labeled him a Communist, argumentative tactics quite common in the 1950s and 1960s, Ferriss and Sandoval illuminate Chavez's skillful refutation of such specious allegations. Also detaüed is Chavez's evolution from CSO organizer to union leader, as he succeeded in establishing a union among farm workers, a powerless group that many felt could not be organized. Most of the book focuses on the public dispute between Chavez and the powerful agriculture industry in California, an industry supported by the state's political, legal, and—often—religious institutions. Ferriss and Sandoval outline agriculture leaders' tactics in their attempt to destroy Chavez's credibility by labeling him a troublemaker, a Communist, and an individual whose own questionable purposes motivated his efforts to organize farm workers. Particularly striking are the authors' detailed treatments of the companies' efforts to create their own unions to challenge the UFW, to use their influence in farming communities to limit the tactics Chavez's union might use, to form alliances with the Teamsters in an attempt to defeat Chavez and the UFW, and to recruit political figures—including Ronald...

The color of privilege: three blasphemies on race and feminism

This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Aida Hurtado advances the theory of relational to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aida Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men.For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldua, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group.A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer.Aida Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

United farm workers campaigns for strawberry workers

United farm workers campaigns for strawberry workers

Industrial Feminists and Other Communities of Workers

Industrial Feminists and Other Communities of Workers Jacqueline Jones (bio) Annelise Orleck. Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xi + 384 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). In 1954, sixty-eight-year-old Clara Lemlich Shavelson retired from her job as a cloakmaker and applied to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) for a pension. Lemlich Shavelson is best known to students of history as the young woman who, in 1909, delivered a fiery speech at Cooper Union’s Great Hall of the People and thereby triggered the “shirtwaist uprising” of thousands of Jewish and Italian garment workers in New York’s Lower East Side. Yet Lemlich Shavelson’s career as an organizer and political activist extended far beyond that fateful evening. In the 1920s and 1930s she helped to coordinate rent strikes, protests against unemployment, and housewives’ food boycotts in her Jewish working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 1944, her children grown and her husband disabled by a heart attack, she went back to wage work, to the same shop floor that she had helped to organize three decades earlier, and labored full time for another ten years. Nevertheless, the male union officials who considered her pension application in 1954 informed her that she had to work for fifteen consecutive years in order to qualify. They were reluctant to bend the rules for this outspoken Communist. In effect, the union that owed its existence to organizers like Lemlich Shavelson now refused to provide her the benefits that were the hallmark of its existence. Lemlich Shavelson was eventually granted an honorary lifetime membership, and supposedly the pension benefits that went with it, but after five years her meager monthly checks from the ILGWU stopped coming, and in the early 1960s she was informed that she had been awarded only a lump sum to be paid in installments. She protested, received another small lump sum, and at the age of seventy-eight found herself struggling to get by on only her Social Security check. In the words of Annelise Orleck, “Shavelson was [End Page 482] unceremoniously cut off by the union that would continue to celebrate her name on every major anniversary of its founding” (p. 276). The story of Clara Lemlich Shavelson is a long and fascinating one, for as she grew older she retained her youthful militancy and energy. As a grandmother, she was happy to babysit for the children of her son and his wife, but insisted on being paid so that she could donate the money to the Communist party. In her early eighties, she pressured the owners of the California nursing home where she lived to boycott grapes and lettuce in support of the United Farm Workers, and she was an active supporter of the union-organizing attempts of nurses and orderlies in that same home. Common Sense and a Little Fire provides a compelling, sweeping account of the struggles of Lemlich Shavelson and three other union activists—Fannia Cohn, Louise Newman, and Rose Schneiderman—to promote what Orleck calls “industrial feminism” during the first half of the twentieth century: “Their brand of feminism was deeply imbued with class consciousness and a vivid understanding of the harsh realities of industrial labor” (p. 7). All four women served as ILGWU organizers during the formative period, 1909–1915, a time that spanned not only the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” (and more) but also the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (in 1911) and the active involvement of the cross-class Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in labor organization. After that period, the careers of the four women diverged. Lemlich Shavelson married and turned her attention toward the founding of radical neighborhood grassroots associations. Fannia Cohn remained “married to the union,” and devoted her entire life to the cause of workers’ education, especially women workers’ education. She helped to create a national movement that yielded institutions like the New York Women’s Trade Union League School for Women Workers, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and the Southern Schools for Women Workers. Rose...

Where the Dove Calls: The Political Ecology of a Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico by Thomas E. Sheridan, and Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest by Laura Pulido (review)

Where the Dove Calls: The Political Ecology ofa Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico Thomas E. Sheridan Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988 and Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest Laura Pulido Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996 Reviewed by F rederick S tr a n g e Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA 99004 191 192 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 58 • 1996 W h a t these two theoretically aware and research-rich studies share in common is an effort to articulate ecological, cultural, and political approaches to Southwestern Latino communities and social move­ ments. They offer encouraging approximations to an ideal paid lip-service more often than realized: the linking of local adaptations or resistance struggles to national or international systems. Thomas E. Sheridan’s Where the Dove Calls is based on ethno­ graphic fieldwork in Cucurpe, an agropastoral peasant community less than half a day’s drive from the U.S. border at Nogales. In a concise and engaging style, Sheridan shows us how high-tension political factionalism in the town results from strategies to wrest con­ trol of scare surface water, pasture, and arable land. The author makes a convincing case for the crucial determination of these struggles by the following factors: a) land reform agents and policies of the Mexi­ can government; b) a wavering but always reviving tradition of land to the tiller (or stockman); c) a contested land base, continually split by partible inheritance; and d) a position as cattle vendors at the bot­ tom of an international (U.S.) hierarchy. The agile way Sheridan combines these elements enables him to contextualize the gritty pres­ sures and short-lived triumphs of life in Cucurpe. Its citizens don’t simply react to the social and natural forces bearing down on them; they resist in an ever-renewed process of creative adaptation. Along with vignettes of alliance and confrontation in the town, the chapters on the history and functions of corporate land tenure are especially welcome. In a contribution to long-standing debates on the extent and meaning of corporateness in peasant communities, Sheridan neither romanticizes yet another peasant communal utopia nor veers to the opposite extreme, the reduction of peasants to au­ tomatons in a specious Darwinian struggle. For these peasants in cowboy boots, corporate control of land is eminently pragmatic; it is agonizingly problematic as well, owing to contradictions that arise between households and communities, and between the needs for both arable land and pasture. I am left to wonder why Sheridan does STRANGE: Reviews of Where the Dove Calls and Environmentalism 193 not subject his basic unit of analysis, the household, to the same deconstructive scrutiny he lavishes on corporate landholders. Like corporate groups, co-residing families can only be taken mislead­ ingly as natural units, or as givens. They, too, change their form and function in response to historical, ecological, and, indeed, national political constraints and stimuli (Roseberry, 1986). One is grateful, nonetheless, for the way in which the author’s insistent qualifying of his subjects’ motives succeeds in humanizing them. In their stubborn combination of intricate ecological knowl­ edge and rough-hew n political adroitness, Cucurpenos are remarkable. Sheridan sees the (currently unlikely) encouragement of such people as an unrealized key to a revival of agricultural and live­ stock production in Mexico. Threatened people in unforgiving environments raise their voices as well in Laura Pulido’s Environment and Economic Justice. This University of Southern California geographer proposes to compare the protests of the United Farm Workers (UFW) pesticide campaign in the San Joaquin Valley (1965-1971) with those of the currently operating Ganados (sheep and textile) Cooperative in the Chama Valley, northern New Mexico. Her overriding aim is to throw light on the meaning and uses of environmentalism for subaltern (i.e., eco­ nomically, racially, or ethnically subordinate) groups, and to compare them with the often conflicting meanings of similar issues for main­ stream (predominantly white middle-class) environmentalists. Pulido’s theoretical introduction initially threatens to pile up race, poverty, class, and identity simply as one factor heaped on another, rather than showing how each is systematically related to or at odds with the others. Nevertheless, her well...

Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest

Ecological causes are championed not only by lobbyists or hikers. While mainstream environmentalism is usually characterized by well-financed, highly structured organizations operating on a national scale, campaigns for environmental justice are often fought by poor or minority communities. Environmentalism and Economic Justice is one of the first books devoted to Chicano environmental issues and is a study of U.S. environmentalism in transition as seen through the contributions of people of color. It elucidates the various forces driving and shaping two important examples of environmental organizing: the 1965-71 pesticide campaign of the United Farm Workers and a grazing conflict between a Hispano cooperative and mainstream environmentalists in northern New Mexico. The UFW example is one of workers highly marginalized by racism, whose struggle--as much for identity as for a union contract--resulted in boycotts of produce at the national level. The case of the grazing cooperative Ganados del Valle, which sought access to land set aside for elk hunting, represents a subaltern group fighting the elitism of natural resource policy in an effort to pursue a pastoral lifestyle. In both instances Pulido details the ways in which racism and economic subordination create subaltern communities, and shows how these groups use available resources to mobilize and improve their social, economic, and environmental conditions. Environmentalism and Economic Justice reveals that the environmental struggles of Chicano communities do not fit the mold of mainstream environmentalism, as they combine economic, identity, and quality-of-life issues. Examination of the forces that create and shape these grassroots movements clearly demonstrates that environmentalism needs to be sensitive to local issues, economically empowering, and respectful of ethnic and cultural diversity.

"Woman Power Will Stop Those Grapes": Chicana Organizers and Middle-Class Female Supporters in the Farm Workers' Grape Boycott in Philadelphia, 1969-1970

// Woman Power Will Stop Those Grapes": Chicana Organizers and Middle-Class Female Supporters in the Farm Workers' Grape Boycott in Philadelphia, 1969-1970 Margaret Rose //T am a farm worker, born and raised in California. I am here in JL Philadelphia coordinating the international boycott of table grapes," announced Hope [Esperanza] López when she arrived in Philadelphia in February 1969 with two of her five children and several others to reinforce the boycott initiated by farm workers against Delano table grape producers in 1965. "The two girls that came with me," she continued , "are also from California, also farm workers and both walked out on... a strike from two... ranches four years ago."1 Hope López and her two assistants, Antonia (Tonia) Saludado and Carolina Franco, represent examples of the many Chicanas and Mexicanas who were politicized and unionized during the 1960s by the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), the precursor to the United Farm Workers Union (UFW).2 These female boycotters launched a successful appeal to the local community, particularly to women in the "City of Brotherly Love," to support the farm workers' campaign for social justice during the turbulent struggles for civil, political, and economic rights in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Their actions offer a vivid contrast to the stereotypical view of Chicanas as socially conservative, homebound wives and mothers who demonstrated no interest or involvement in activities outside of the immediate family circle.3 Scholarship on Chicanas has begun to create a more complex historical portrayal of them as community builders, social activists, workers, and union members.4 As yet, however, the achievements of female UFWOC organizers rarely appear in historical writing on the UFW.5 This anonymity they share with many other women of color who were significant contributors to a contemporary movement, the black struggle for civil rights.6 Chicanas and Mexicanas figured significantly in UFW boycotts. "Approximately 200 persons are on the grape boycott," noted the union newspaper, El Malcriado, in 1970, "of this total about half are women."7 The majority of these women served in boycotts as part of a family unit. For example, Albert and Mary Elena Rojas directed the Pittsburgh effort, © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 4 (Winter) 1995 Margaret Rose 7 Alfredo and Juanita Herrera managed the Denver boycott, and Julio and Fina Hernández coordinated the Cleveland operation. Filipinos Andy and Luming Imuran administered the Washington-Baltimore venture, and Manuel and Marcia Sánchez organized the Miami campaign. This family pattern of boycott activism has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. My analysis of the Washington, D.C. boycott, headed by Gilbert and Esther Padilla froml973 to 1975, showed that although women made a critical contribution to the boycotts, the sexual division of labor gave more prominence to their husbands' leadership and community-organizing activities. As a result Chicanas' commitment to the boycott remained obscured because they juggled domestic concerns and child rearing with picket line duty, participation in demonstrations, and work in the local union boycott offices.8 Yet in a few cases, Chicanas emerged as independent boycott directors in their own right. This occurred as a result of the shortage of union volunteers to assume these responsibilities. The lack of a trained professional staff and limited resources contributed to the decentralized approach to the boycott which by default allowed more opportunities for women to rise to these positions and more freedom for both women and men to experiment with community-based organizing strategies . For Mexican-American women, in particular, these circumstances provided a new space to express a gendered resistance to the status quo based on their own views and experiences. Oftentimes female administrators were unmarried, widowed, or divorced, and they were usually young adults. Out of forty-three boycott coordinators in major cities in June 1969, thirty-nine were men and five were women.9 Dolores Huerta headed the New York effort, Jessica Govea managed the Montreal organization, Maria Saudado ran the Indianapolis office, Peggy McGivern coordinated the Buffalo operation, and Hope López directed the Philadelphia campaign.10 All UFW boycotts contribute to our understanding of Chicana activism in the farm worker movement...

Beyond the Ivory Tower: critical praxis in medical anthropology.

Recent discussion in critical medical anthropology has turned to the issue of application beyond the academy. Building on Gorz's notion of "non-reformist reform," that is, applied work that unmasks rather than mystifies the sources of social inequality and ill health, this article argues for the possibility of an applied critical medical anthropology, suggests concrete opportunities for such work in health settings, and identifies problems and social conditions that affect the development of a critical health praxis. These points are illustrated by reviewing case studies of anthropological work with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Indiana, the United Farm Workers Union in California, and the Hispanic Health Council in Connecticut. The article concludes with an examination of the skills and resources critical medical anthropology has to offer system-challenging movements in health care.

El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement

Born in 1965 as an organizing tool within Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union, El Teatro Campesino became the premier Chicana/o performance ensemble to emerge out of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This study demythologizes and reinterprets the company's history from its origins in California's farm labor struggles to its successes in Europe and on Broadway until the disbanding of the original collective ensemble in 1980 with the subsequent adoption of mainstream production techniques. Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez corrects many misconceptions concerning the Teatro's creation and evolution. She draws from a rich storehouse of previously untapped material, such as interviews with numerous ensemble members, production notes, and unpublished diaries, to highlight the reality of the collective creation that characterized the Teatro's work.Writing within contemporary cultural studies theory, Broyles-Gonzalez sheds light on class, gender, race, and cultural issues. Her work situates the Teatro within working-class Mexican performance history, the Chicano movement, gender relations, and recent attempts to mainstream.

Reflections on the Chicano Movement

The Chicano movement was a potent force in American society during the tumultuous decades of the Vietnam War, urban riots, the antiwar movement, and Watergate. One of several politically militant groups that began to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class in the 1960s and 1970s, the movement had several major components: Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California, Reies-L6pez Tijerina's Alianza de Pueblos Libres (Alliance of Free Peoples) and the land-grants struggle in New Mexico, Rodolfo Corky Gonzales and the Cruzada (Crusade for Justice) in Colorado, and the electoral movement of Jose Angel Gutierrez in South Texas. Out of this movement sprang hundreds of organizations whose purpose was to improve socioeconomic conditions for Mexican-American people. Today the Chicano movement lies dormant while the Latino population continues to grow. Were any of its goals accomplished? If it was a search for identity, then why has the term Hispanic come into widespread use, replacing Chicano? These questions have recently been addressed by several scholars in attempts at synthesis and analysis of this important era for the Chicano community. In United We Win Ignacio Garcia gives us a richly textured history of the meteoric rise of the Raza Unida party (RUP) in South Texas and its all-too-rapid disappearance from the political landscape. His book is based upon previously published and unpublished material, primary information from party members' personal files, and interviews of participants. It takes the reader from the early days of the Mexican

Decline of the Farm Labor Movement in California: Organizational Crisis and Political Change

This paper interprets the reversal of the farm labor movement in California during the 1980s as part of an overall decline in a general cycle of protest as well as a reversal of opportunities for changes in class relations that this movement stimulated. More specifically, three factors account for the failure of collective bargaining to become fully established in California's agribusiness. The United Farm Workers union (UFW) experienced a serious internal crisis during the late 1970s that resulted in the departure of key officials and staff members. A change in administration in the governor's office led to the appointment of officials antagonistic to farm labor unionization. In this climate, grower tactics to prevent or delay unionization became more effective.

Organization of American Historians

of class and individualism. Lorin Cary (University of Toledo) commented on oral history. And Mary Tyler (Southern California Library for Social Studies) detailed the development of a labor walking tour of Los Angeles. Finally, the association continued its tradition of honoring for distinguished lifetime service to the labor movement an individual who has worked in or been associated with the location of the annual meeting. This year the award went to Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers. John Fernandez, her brother, accepted the award on her behalf.

Free Speech and the Market Economy

The latest nationwide boycott of California table grapes launched by the United Farm Workers (UFW) of the AFL-CIO has resulted in scores of arrests on supermarket property across the country. Most of those arrested are what the union calls informational pickets, who gather at the supermarkets to warn consumers that table grapes receive more applications of the most toxic kinds of pesticides than any other California fruit crop, and to explain the special hazards faced by farm workers when such pesticides are used. Through the boycott, the UFW hopes to compel California's wealthy grape growers to sit down with them to negotiate an end to the use of the five most toxic pesticides currently in the grape fields.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism in the United Farm Workers of America, 1962 to 1980

One of the most inspiring social movements of the postWorld War II era was the historic struggle for the unionization of California farm workers that began in the early 1960s. Studies of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW), and the farm worker insurgency that developed during this period have focused on its leadership and provided a patriarchal interpretation of its origins.1 Perpetuating this view, a recent history textbook noted, [A] thirty-five-yearold community organizer named Cesar Estrada Chavez set out single-handedly to organize impoverished migrant farm laborers in the California grape fields.2 Such male-centered interpretations have distorted the history of the UFW and the role of women in its development. The following pages document the heretofore invisible participation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in the founding and management of the UFW and analyze the impact of gender on this union. Women's commitment to the union, however, was not uniform. To illustrate the wide range of women's contributions to the UFW, this investigation contrasts the experiences of the rare women, such as Dolores Huerta, whose style of leadership fit a male model of labor organizing with the more common but no less vital endeavors of women, such as Helen Chdvez, whose activism fit a more female model of collective action-that is, work performed, often behind the scenes, in an auxiliary or supportive fashion. During the past two decades scholarship in women's labor history has uncovered the diversity and distinctiveness of women's working-class heritage? Most of this work has concentrated on Anglo or ethnically European women, and more recently on black women in the South. The protests of Chicanas and Mexicanas in UFW campaigns demonstrate a continuity with women in other labor struggles in the United States. Thanks to a growing body of research that emerged during the 1980s, the experiences of women of Mexican heritage can also be considered in relationship to the past and contemporary struggles of their ethnic sisters-striking Mexicana laundresses in El Paso at the turn of the century, Mexican cannery operatives in California in the 1930s and 1940s, the wives of Mexican miners who formed women's auxiliaries