Editors’ Introduction

Apart from an occasional parenthetical remark by the editors (each time so indicated), the following is entirely in EC’s words, except that they have been translated from Spanish into English. There are two levels of lessons that EC draws: 1) those that refer to the particulars of his own immediate situation and experience, and 2) those that are more generalized to an historical and worldwide perspective. The latter paragraphs, even though they are also EC’s words, we have put in parentheses—for easier reference to these general lessons later.

My Early Life in Mexico

Introduction

I arrived in the U.S. as a worker some 38 years ago (mid-1950s), with the illusion of improving my living conditions. From this vantage point, remembering all of the pain and difficult struggle I have had to go through, the best I can do is write down these few words of my experience.

What I am writing is by no means an isolated case for me as a worker, since the same has happened in the lives of millions of workers. Rather it should be a warning sign on the road for any to come who may have the same illusions of tempting "fate" with the best intentions of reaching their goals.

There are many curves on life’s road, especially in the lives of those workers, men and women, who will not allow themselves or the rest of the working class to be treated as slaves, humiliated and exploited in the midst of wealth.

I hope that these memories will be useful to those who, preferring the road of working class organization and struggle against exploitation, do not go on the defensive and fall for the traps placed in the road by enemies of the working class. By this I mean the capitalist ruling class and their agents. Traps will be disguised in such a way that it will be difficult to know how to avoid them if leaders and workers are not prepared.

The camouflage, the disguise, comes at workers hidden as wolves in sheep’s clothing, individuals corrupted up to their eyeballs with ruling class ideology who have been placed inside the working class, in many cases appearing as workers’ leaders, but in essence serving the interests of the bosses.

Karl Marx said a century and a half ago that so long as workers do not learn to understand what interests hide behind every political, moral or religious phrase, they will remain constant victims of their enemies. Organization is the best weapon to fight for a decent life, but it is necessary to find leaders who are free of traitorous disguises; leaders who are honest, who have no political, economic or religious commitments with the ruling class. This is to say, leaders armed one hundred per cent with a revolutionary ideology, a communist ideology.

I hope that the following experiences will be useful to all those to whom with respect and affection I dedicate this, to all of the youth and working men and women of the world.

It is possible to live without money

I spent the first few years of my life in the highlands of the Fourth District of the State of Tamaulipas, Mexico. It was the beginning of the l920s. In the area where I grew up there were a number of small ranches, with several families on each ranch. All told there were somewhere around 150 inhabitants perhaps. It was actually more like one single, large family with close relationships among brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, etc. Some of the ranches had names such as San Agustin (where I was born), Guadalupe, Santa Maria, among others. The villages that were the largest were Tula and Palmillas which took an entire day’s walk. Besides walking, people had mules and donkeys since the roads did not permit wagons, etc. People were as yet unfamiliar with other means of transport such as train and car. I myself did not see my first car until 1929, and I can still recall the fear it gave me when I saw it.

Clearly, the region was and still is dedicated to small agriculture. The peasants used very rudimentary tools to work their small plots of land. They grew basic crops such as corn, beans, garbanzo, etc, which made up the daily diet. There were also domestic animals raised for food like chickens, pigs, goats, and a few livestock to complement their diet.

I only spent my first few years here. In adolescence and afterwards I would only return to visit family and friends. Having lived in many places, I was better able to compare the lifestyle of the people here with that of those in other places.

In that region, you could say that to a certain extent people lived in a way that could be called communist. Of course, money existed, but it was not used the same way as in other places, with the exception of such things as paying State taxes and for religious services, etc. Neither the Church nor the State accepted anything as payment but cash, even when it could well have accepted some crops and taken it to those who didn’t have enough. But this is really something that can only exist under real communism. Under communism there will be no need for money. However, it was not the be all and end all in this region at that time. One didn’t have to work too hard in order to provide a home, clothes and food.

How is this so? Well in the first place, the peasants were the owners of the means of production. This "means of production" consisted of the earth itself, a pair of oxen (which themselves came from the cows on the land), a yoke and plow made of wood and other small things that they made themselves. When the crops were harvested they set aside enough as food to last to the next planting as well as enough seeds to plant again. The excess crop was exchanged among the people for whatever things they needed. In our house we had a dog that my older brother had given us in exchange for a chicken. When a hog was slaughtered, the meat was distributed among everyone so that no one went without. As such, meat came and went constantly from our homes.

My older brother, (the one with the chicken) was married and had no cows, but someone gave him a calf that grew up and produced more. My parents had no cows either but they got one in exchange for a sewing machine, and they named that cow "The Machine." All of this was done voluntarily among the people, not by any mandate or decree of authority. It was done as a matter of principle, through their own way of thinking, through their very ideology of sharing, rather than competing.

People there were not accustomed to luxury nor having things in excess. The women made the clothes that their families needed. One of my married sisters (who is still alive) made her own blankets. And although this took time, no one was in any hurry. The kitchen utensils (plates, bowls, jars, etc.), also were made by the women. There were many things that they made using their own ingenuity and without depending on money to enrich some exploiting factory owner, buyer or seller.

If someone needed assistance with some work on their land, others would come to their aid, not to earn money but rather as a loan of days worked there to be repaid in the same days worked at their own land. There were no judges, police or jails. Any problems that arose among the people were resolved by taking the problems to others with more experience.

These people had the most precious thing in common: love and respect for each other. Children who lived close to their parents went daily to visit them. Siblings loved and respected each other very much. In general, siblings, in-laws, cousins and other relatives became "compadres" (akin to being godparents) and this made the respect among them even stronger. Among the youth there was not rude behavior, rough joking or insults. They had a concept of camaraderie and sharing that was very special.

At later times I was reminded of how far from this place I had traveled and how more "civilized" ideas had made inroads into my thinking. I returned at one point when I was perhaps 17 years old and the community was celebrating something, I forget now what it was for. In any case, there was a woman with a soda stand at a small table, selling drinks for five cents each. Two of my cousins invited me for a drink. One went and bought a soda and gave it to me. Without so much as a thought I downed the entire soda in almost a single gulp. My two cousins were left with nothing to do but stare at me in surprise and shock. Their attitude caught my attention and in a fraction of a second I realized everything. I was very embarrassed although I tried to hide it. I asked the woman at the soda stand for two sodas and gave one to each of my cousins. What happened was that they were accustomed to sharing everything. So the one soda had been intended for the three of us to share together. To get out of that embarrassing gaffe, it cost me a soda for each one.

Dona Juana Zapata was a midwife. Each child that she brought into the world was also taught to call her Mama as well and to be respectful of her. She felt very proud to have so many children all around her. Dona Juana did not charge for her work. Nevertheless she never went without. Dona Juana was also my Mama, since she helped my mother birth me.

Traditional celebrations were on Christmas and New Year. People also celebrated this or that saint, weddings and others occasions. National holidays were never celebrated, nor were the death or birthday of any hero or politician. I don’t believe that people knew much about politics.

At celebrations and weddings there was never a lack of musicians to light up the party with their

tunes and verses. Don Lucino was one such musician. He sang songs of the time such as Las

Barandales del Puente, La Virgencita, Pajarillo Barranqueno, Cielito Lindo and others. Don

Lucino, the musician, was my father.

Whenever someone’s wedding was approaching, everyone pitched in to help the future groom construct his house. The houses there were cabins.

On the day of a wedding, women would volunteer to help cook since there was a lot of food to be prepared. Since weddings took place on weekends, animals for the feast were slaughtered on Fridays. Weddings took place on Saturdays and sometimes continued on into Sunday. All those who wished to marry, especially men, had to be a minimum of 25 years of age, otherwise the parents would not authorize the wedding in consideration of the fact that the couple was not yet sufficiently mature to run a household.

Mala racha (A run of bad luck)

We lived in this area until 1929. There were seven of us: my father, my mother, a 16-year-old sister and four younger children 15, 8, 6 and 4 years of age. Since there was no school, my parents decided that we would go live in the state capitol, Victoria. They wanted us to attend school.

Things began to turn bad when the oldest of the boys went to visit some relatives in a village on the edge of the Purificacion River. Several of my brothers’ friends invited him to go swimming with them. They weren’t aware that the river was rising quickly. My brother was unprepared for the strength of the current and was drowned there.

Shortly thereafter, my mother became ill. She said that she really missed the family back in the highlands where we had come from and she could not get used to living in the city where everything had to be purchased and the customs were so strange. She grew worse daily but we had no money for doctors to treat her. She asked my father to take her back to "our land", she said. My father sacrificed a great deal to take us back but she died soon afterward. With the death of my mother, our family practically began to disintegrate and the education that she wanted for her children became impossible.

After my mother’s death, my father sent me to live with my married brother in San Lorenzo. This was a village of about forty inhabitants, slightly removed from the place where we had lived before but with the same customs. I had completed the second grade before my mother died. As such, although I wrote badly, I was able to write letters to the people of the area. At that time as far as I can recall, no one could read and write. My ability in this made me feel good and even "important" because I was able to provide some small help to the people.

The mill

While I lived with my brother in San Lorenzo, the time came to mill the sugar cane to make piloncillo, a brown sugar. The sugar mill was operated by hooking a pair of mules to a long lever connected to the grinding pillar in the center that crushed the sugar cane. The mules walked around and around in a circle pulling the long lever. This was all installed underneath some giant leafy trees at the edge of a good sized stream.

There were some twenty men working at the mill including some young boys as well. I worked there too. My work consisted of driving the mules around in a circle for a couple of hours, until the container filled up with sugar cane syrup that was then processed under a wood fire. The other boys did work according to their abilities and ages. I felt proud and content because I was also participating along with the grown men in the production of something that I really liked: syrup, molasses, and the paste of concentrated molasses which became piloncillo (unrefined sugar loaf) through another process. All of the cane that was ground was the property of the peasants of the area. And all of the work, from planting the cane to processing it into piloncillo was done collectively. Anyone could go to the mill and eat whatever they wanted without paying a cent.

In the evenings, those who had finished their work stayed around sometimes enjoying themselves talking and smoking cigarettes made of corn leaves. They sang songs accompanied by guitar and inspired by a few drinks of liquor, though they did not drink too much. It all happened around a bonfire and at the edge of the stream.

The wives of the peasants came to the mill with baskets of food for all. Young women came too, and they were all lovely, some even more than others. This was really living for me. The only thing lacking was a school where we children could learn to read and write.

The ugly face of capitalism

Awhile after I had been living in San Lorenzo, something totally unexpected occurred:

politicians arrived in the area to work on a political campaign that I understood nothing of. These politicians in short order created such a division between the inhabitants of San Lorenzo and another village of peasants named Las Bayas that it ended in a massacre. Even the politicians themselves were killed in the fracas.

People said that the devil "had begun to run loose" and started to find other places to live. My brother also left. I ended up going to live with a brother-in-law to the north of Victoria, the capitol of the state, on the El Carmen plantation, property of a capitalist landlord named Francisco Benitez.

In recent years I have visited these places, but nothing now remains of that lifestyle except some good moral customs. Politicians, merchants and religious guides, who arrived continually, were really thieves who came with their ruling class culture and robbed the people. They caused such poverty that many people have left or have become aspirants to "the American dream" with all of the consequences of that path.

What I have written here is simply what I recall of that time and just my personal experiences. It is impossible for me to remember all of the details that made up that type of life. It is not that I long for that time. However, I like remembering it and writing what I can as evidence that people can be happy without the use of money. This lifestyle can be applied in reality, but at a higher level and in accordance with current circumstances. Money, being a tool of capitalism, creates individualism, social inequality and exploitation and corrupts good customs.

We need a total social change in which we can live as communists and not as salaried and exploited workers. We can live as dignified and free people, dedicated to work for the good of an egalitarian society.

Life that was not life

During the decade of the thirties the cry of "Long live the revolution!" was heard throughout Mexico. But these were not the cries of workers in the factories, nor the fields, nor the laborers of the cities. Rather they were the cries of politicians’ campaign speeches, of new generals, new landlords, those who had come out of the 1910 revolution having benefited financially or in terms of power. It was not a revolution meant to end poverty, although that had been its stated purpose at the outset. Ultimately, it only served the national bourgeoisie and its growth as a class, adding many new rich.

For our family there was only more poverty and sickness. My mother died leaving us three children without her. My father under these circumstances could not give us adequate attention and the family disintegrated for all practical purposes. The youngest of my sisters, she may have been six years old, was placed by my father with a good family. My father loaned my older sister to another family. I missed my sisters a great deal and decided one day to go in search of the older. I found her, but she had been badly beaten about the face and body; blows dealt by the young son of the family where she stayed. He enjoyed hitting her and was not reproached for doing so. I told my father and went for her. Afterward she was sent to live with another of our sisters who was married and living with her husband in a small village on the El Carmen estate, in the State of Tamaulipas, about a kilometer and a half away. Ultimately, I also ended up living there with my sister Josefina and Severo, her husband.

On the surface all appeared happy but my sisters and I were far from content. I am sure that my father was also unhappy, though all of us had been happy until the day that my mother died. Were we poor? We certainly were. But we had our parents and that was happiness for us. My father, (who died years later) had his partner for life and his family, and that for him was happiness. But now we were alone. Life was disastrous for my sister and me living with our married sister. In spite of her young age, my little sister was obliged to do all of the housework and I had to work as though I were an adult. The youngest of all of us, living with another family, wasn’t any better off

My older sister and Severo (my brother-in-law) were very poor and had many young children. In addition to being dirt poor, they argued constantly. My big sister was extremely jealous and spent her days whining and throwing fits for every little thing. My brother-in-law took out his frustrations on me and treated me worse than the dog.

Severo didn’t know how to read or write and had the character of a demon, but he enjoyed politics. He was very idealistic, always aiming for goals outside his reach. He dreamed of having a house like the big boss, etc. When happy he was always singing and whistling "The Internationale" (the worker’s hymn), though I have no idea where he learned it. He liked communism but from what I recall his saying, I now realize that he didn’t know very much about the theory. He treated my sister very well and it was obvious that he loved her a great deal. He used to tell me to get to know a lot of girls before getting married and other such things. But, shit! When he was in a bad mood or when his wife was annoying him with her stupid jealous fits, he lashed out at everything: his wife, the dogs, the chickens, the pigs, etc. I-Ic was very rough talking and anti-church; he swore a blue streak at priests. And he didn’t let me off easily either. He had little to no understanding of the limitations of a young boy for work. He was capable of working us to death without thinking twice about it.

Insofar as he was a servant on the hacienda, and I was living with him, he tied me to the wagon of exploitation as well.

The hacienda El Carmen, property of engineer Francisco Benitez, covered an area containing 26 enormous lots set aside for cultivation. There was also a large amount of land covered in brush. Benitez also had a huge reservoir of water one kilometer square that he used for irrigation of all his land.

The revolution passed his properties by without changing a thing. By 1933, the date that I came to be at this ranch, the revolution had been over for more than ten years. Nevertheless the ranch was at its peak. Besides his estates he also owned many cattle such as milk cows, as well as all types of animals for meat and beasts of burden. He had hundreds and hundreds of peons/slaves. All who lived in the area had to work for this boss as there were no others. This boss owned the only great orange groves in the region. And to protect his properties he had at his disposition a platoon of National Army soldiers. He could sing out "Long live the revolution!" He had a country. The peons of the ranch had nothing.

According to historic data, previous to the revolution there were in Mexico over 56,000 villages surrounded by private property. Cerrito Viejo, the village where we lived, was situated exactly on the private property of Benitez, the boss of the ranch. Being on his property, we were obligated to work for him. I say "we were obligated" because in spite of the fact that I was only 12 years old, he was also my boss. I started work weeding the corn fields with a hoe. We got a salary (if you can call it that) of sixty cents per work shift for adults and thirty cents for minors. Even though I was a minor and receiving only half pay, I was still held to the same standard of work as the adults. We weren’t paid with money, but rather with chits, something like a check, for the value of the number of days worked. The chit was valid only in the enormous store owned by Benitez (La Tienda de Raya.) My chit from an entire week of work was worth $1.80 and I was allowed 15 cents of it, with which I bought two pieces of bread and a squash candy, the remainder going to my brother-in-law. So, I was the slave of a slave. The workday had no fixed hours. The foreman had no watch. His yell was the quitting bell.

The struggle against Santo

At the time that our labors began to bring fruit in the form of sweet corn, young squash, etc., the boss arranged to have a guard at the main gate whom we called Santo (Little Saint). Santo was an old man with an arm cut off at the elbow. He always carried a curved machete in his remaining hand. He was called Santo because he called everyone else Little Santo.

His work was to search us high and low as we left, to ensure that we weren’t carrying something to eat hidden in our clothes or lunch bags. The workers cursed Santo when he searched them. I always felt that Santo pulled the hair on the back of my neck when he searched me.

I thought Santo was a miserable old man who refused to let anyone take even the smallest thing to eat. I saw him as the person responsible for the misery and want in our household and I harbored a hatred for him. But in truth, I judged that man wrong. Santo was just one more victim at the service of the boss, the same boss we all served. We were all slaves. Santo was a humble man, and he treated everyone respectfully calling us Little Santos. He didn’t use rough language toward anyone. He simply did the only work possible given his physical condition. What would he survive on if he didn’t do that job? I am equally certain that the pay he received was much less than what the other peons received. However, because I could not see the forces at work beyond Santo, I blamed him for the terrible conditions in our homes because he wouldn’t let us take anything to eat. Having the fruit of my and everyone else’s labor within our reach, to be able to see but not taste it, was martyrdom for us. I didn’t see that Santo merely symbolized the true essence of work conditions that held forth on that ranch in particular, but poor Santo wasn’t the cause of any of it.

"But damn, Santo!" I said. "One way or another, we’re going to eat squash and sweet corn in the house. You’ll see."

My brother-in-law had bought a mule for $3.00, he told me. I don’t know where he got $3.00 since with so many people in the family there was never anything left over. Anyway we had a mule that I considered mine since I was the only one to ride it. It was a tough little mule, a very hard worker that never refused to go where I guided it. All I had to do was get on, pull its mane and it would run. It was a good friend. I really loved my little mule. That mule was central to my plan against Santo.

When anyone wanted to enter the planted fields to cut some grass, Santo permitted it so long as the person consented to an inspection afterward. Now I also wanted to cut some fresh grass for my mule and Santo let me through. Once inside these enormous corn fields I began cutting fresh grass and bundling it, placing it on top of the saddle seat in front of me. I searched out some young squash and half a dozen sweet corn and I put it all inside the grass. Then I tied it up tightly, got on my mule, lifted the bundle and was on my way. Damned Santo was there when I got to the gate. He ordered me to get down and be searched. I pulled the reins on the mule to stop it but at the same time pulled the mule’s mane without Santo noticing what I was doing. Logically, since Santo was in front of the mule when I pulled its mane, it jumped forward and tried to bite him. I faked an attempt to stop the mule and spoke to it "Whoa, whoa, whoa." But at the same time, I pulled its mane even more. I passed by at nearly a full gallop. Santo just stood there startled and impressed, maybe trying to figure out why the mule had tried to bite him?

Very well. Now we had something to eat in the house. We had corn soup with young squash and spices. How delicious that was! I’m quite sure that my brother-in-law did not agree with what I had done but he pretended not to know about it. Besides it was preferable to say nothing so long as there was a little something to eat in the house.

I let a few days pass and then tried the same thing again. It was so easy! What’s more, my mule was getting the hang of what it was supposed to do when Santo was nearby.

Several days later, I tried again. But after the third time my brother-in-law said to me: "That son of a bitch Santo complained to old Macario Puente (the senior overseer) and told him what you’re doing. It would be better for you not to do this." But then quietly, as though not wanting to be involved, he said, "Just figure out another way of doing it, but be careful, eh! They can screw me for what you’re doing." He meant that they could punish him with a week without work for my actions. That is what they gave to those who tried to get something to eat. However, in my case the complaint was simply that I wasn’t letting Santo search me, not that I was stealing any food. So it was no big deal! So I thought.

A few days later, I was back at it. Why the hell not! I asked Santo for permission to go in and get food for the mule. I went through a corn field where there was a wire fence that separated the planted field with another that was full of long grass. I found some squash and sweet corn and placed them in a bag I brought with me. This time I didn’t have to take grass out because it wouldn’t be necessary. I raised the first strand of bottom wire on the fence and the support of the second so there would be more space underneath. I moved the mule next to the fence; I grabbed his front leg and speaking to him softly and petting him, he pulled in a backward direction. This way my little mule started getting stuck little by little until he looked as though he were laid out dead. Then I started pulling him by his front legs, then the rear ones, stretching him out underneath the wire until he was on the other side. Afterward, we ran to the other fence and did the same thing. The mule learned how to do it pretty quickly. Everything worked out well.

I don’t recall how many times I did this but not too many. My brother-in-law told me that Santo had complained again to old Macario, who had in turn called it to my brother-in-law’s attention. The complaint was that Santo saw me go in but never saw me leave. When my brother-in-law asked me how I was managing this, I explained it to him and he nearly died laughing.

Now it was a matter of waiting for the time to harvest all the corn; after which the corn and squash would be all hard.

After about a year living with my sister and her husband, I began to attend school. They decided to put me in third grade, as my mother had taken me through the second grade before she died. The little school was an adobe building that had been there I don’t know how many centuries. It had a tin roof that leaked a great deal. There was no yard at all and no potable water. The teacher, Rosalia Solis (my respects to her), was a teacher of a caliber of which I think there are very few. She taught four groups of students; first, second, third and fourth grades. They were small groups, but it was still a lot of work for her. She lived on the ranch. Her father was the ranch blacksmith and ran the mill where the nixtamal (corn grains cooked with lime) was ground up for the housewives. He started work at three in the morning.

Around this time, Lazaro Cardenas became president of Mexico with a so called socialist platform. The teacher clearly liked that political line. Our favorite songs to sing in class were "Red Flag," "Round Red Sun," "La Pajarera" and others whose names I don’t recall. She also organized parties with dancing, recitations, comedy, etc, all having to do with socialist politics, and she still had energy left over to give adult classes in the evenings. For our studies, the third graders had a primer called River of Flowers. The book dealt with how the peasants should organize themselves to expropriate the land of rich owners and form cooperatives.

On days when classes were held, the teacher stayed the night with a family near the school instead of returning to the ranch. She arranged with my sister for me to take her lunch every day for $3.00 a month and I got to eat lunch there as well. No one else could do this task as well as I could, thanks to my flesh and bone bicycle (my little mule.) So 15 minutes before leaving for lunch she sent me to get her lunch. I lived a block from the school so I would rush toward the ranch. I got to her house and ate and was on my way back. My mule got so much exercise that it could compete in the Olympics (we ran three kilometers a day).

When I finished third grade my schooling was complete. I told my brother-in-law that I wanted to continue studying and he promised that the following year he would send me to study in the city. But he never did.

My sister didn’t care for grinding nixtamal to make tortillas. On one of her pre-dawn trips to buy nixtamal from the mill at the hacienda, she came up with a devilish plan--and it only took one time for her to get used to it. It became a custom for her and an obligation for me to wake up at three in the morning while in the deepest sleep, get my mule, and go to the mill. My sister started telling her friends who also liked the idea (lazy old women) so I got to bring masa (corn dough) from the mill to them as well. Now I was delivering masa for the house and for the neighbors also. Since I couldn’t manage so many bundles of masa, the ladies started sending their kids to go with me. We were a group of five or six boys and girls. My mule started to buckle from the weight of so much masa. One morning when we were almost to the mill, the mule suddenly went head over heels and we fell along with it. All of the nixtamal went falling along with it. Since it was so dark the mule hadn’t seen a piece of barbed wire in the path and had gotten its legs tangled, which caused it to fall. We gathered up all the nixtamal that we could along with a little dirt and some stones. When Felipe, the mill worker, was grinding our corn he began to scream, "What the hell did you put in with the nixtamal that’s making the mill sound like that?" But we pretended not to hear him and just looked at one another. That day we all ended up in debt to the mill. The eggs that we used as money had all broken in the fall.

The days went by and the corn was ready to be laid down. The overseer assigned areas by lengths of his horses’ steps. Forty double steps of the horse long by fifty meters wide was one assignment. For this job the boss had raised the pay to sixty cents per assignment. And now he was paying in cash. The chits had been discontinued.

Laying down the corn consisted of cutting the stubble, piling it in sheaves of a certain length each one, and carrying the piles off by shoulder. An assignment beginning at six in the morning or earlier could be completed by two in the afternoon, working as quickly as possible. So for me, at the most thirteen years-old, an assignment was too much work. Nevertheless, if my brother-in-law ordered me to do it, there was nothing I could do about it. That’s how it went.

At the outset, my brother-in-law told me, "It would be good for you to put your hand to the work to see if you can at least do half an assignment." The next day I started very early in the morning and gave it my all. Later, other peons arrived and got started on their assignments. But they were very experienced in their work and it didn’t take long for them to overtake me. They finished and left and I was still there working another hour or so, but I completed the assignment, more out of a sense of personal pride than anything else. Once I got to the house, my brother-in-law asked me if I had done half an assignment. When I told him that I had done an entire assignment he was pleased and said: "Great! Tomorrow you can do another."

But I alone knew how exhausted I was. I don’t recall if or what I might have eaten all day because I didn’t have breakfast and hadn’t taken any lunch. The next day I started before anyone else, and I nearly finished along with the others. Then I came up with the brilliant idea that would help me finish quickly. The following day, I arrived before anyone else. The first thing I did was change the assignment markers that were on either side of my own. I mean, I moved mine inward. This way my assignment got smaller than the other two on either side of me. The other workers were very curious to know how I had finished before them. I pulled that trick every day, I think, for the rest of the season. It worked too until Gregorio Lopez (another peon) discovered my trick. He went to see his friend, my brother-in-law, and said: "Hey bastard! You’re boy is even slicker than you! We figured out how he’s been finishing faster than us." And he told him everything. I didn’t do that any more. But it didn’t matter at that point. I had gotten so practiced in the work that I didn’t need to use any tricks.

Afterward came the harvest. This was another job that was paid by the quantity of sacks of corn harvested; twenty five cents per two sacks.

My brother-in-law sent me to harvest corn. "Give it your all. Don’t go in half assed," he said to me. "And see if you can’t sneak out a few pieces of corn for tortillas." Damn if that wasn’t some hard work! Because Santo already knew what I’d do. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and I loved to pull the wool over his eyes.

To the measure that the peons advanced in the harvesting of the corn and clearing of the remaining stubble they were allowed to go through the remainder and take away any corn that may have been left on the ground. One merely had to ask Santo’s permission. Well, this was not so difficult. While I had been working I purposely left several dozen pieces of corn behind in the stubble.

About three days later, in the afternoon, I asked Santo’s permission to go in and look for any corn that might have been left. "Okay little Santo, go on in over there and see what you find," he told me. Well, that was where I had wanted to go. I took a little while so Santo wouldn’t suspect anything. Soon I returned with the corn that I had hidden all bundled up in a sack. "How did it go, little Santo? Did you find anything?" he asked me. "I found this," I told him. "Well done little Santo, well done." There was nothing else he could say. It was all "legal." I did this a number of times to ensure that we had some corn in the house for tortillas.

My brother-in-law asked me every day how many sacks of corn I had picked, because the total number varied: sometimes eight, other times nine sacks, etc. But he was never satisfied. He always pressed me to pick more.

One day, Mr. Bonifacio Castillo asked me how much money Severo gave me each week and how many sacks I picked each day. When I told him that I was only given fifteen cents a week, he told me: "Look don’t be a fool. When you pick eight sacks tell him that you picked seven and when you pick nine tell him that you picked eight and that way you can keep a little extra for yourself." Really! I thought. How had that not occurred to me before? The very next day I began to give skewed accounts to my brother-in-law. But he scolded me bitterly. He said that I was only goofing off and not putting my heart into the work. Nevertheless, I got to keep an extra sixty cents a week. Damn! I had never had so much money in my hands. Now I had the problem of how and on what to spend the extra money so that my brother-in-law wouldn’t figure out what I was doing. I could only buy sweets but I didn’t have anywhere to get them. On the other hand, I was scared and ashamed to do it and it made me feel bad. I only skewed my results for a couple of weeks and then stopped. It was better that way.

With respect to the money: perhaps if I had had somewhere to spend the extra pennies the trick would have been a little more fun. Maybe then, in spite of the fear and shame, I might have continued cheating and even made it a habit. That’s how money begins to get into the heads of youngsters and corrupts them, with all of the consequences that it brings. This is what capitalism creates with its money. Although the money that I kept through my cheating was money that I had earned through my own labor, this was not the way to deal with things. However, cheating is exactly what the boss did to us. All problems that workers have are related to capitalism.

Workers are always in contradiction with capitalism because they are exploited by it, and they always seek a way to get the yoke off their necks. Sadly they rarely choose the correct path to do this and end up in the hands of inadequate and corrupt theories, such as unions, political campaigns for elections, pseudo-leftist organizations, forming cooperatives and even bourgeois revolutions, or acting individually, etc. That was the case in my struggle with Santo. My brother-in-law Severo hated bosses and priests. He said that both were the same thing. That the bosses with their exploitation and repression and the priests with their lies kept the workers stupid and manageable. I hated Santo because he refused to let me take food that I had grown home to our hungry family. I blamed him because in our house there wasn’t enough food. But that poor bastard wasn’t to blame for anything. He was more screwed than we were. And it wasn’t just me who hated Santo; many others hated him as well. Several times people burned the small grass hut that he improvised wherever he was sent. My brother-in-law didn’t agree with what I was doing but he didn’t stop me because it was through my tricks that we had a little more to eat. He saw it as one way to take back from the boss a little of what we produced. Nevertheless this wasn’t the correct way to resolve the needs in the family. Actually, it was more a symbol of the hatred that workers feel for the ruling class, a hatred they are constantly seeking ways to express. The correct way of struggle against ruling class exploitation is the organization of the entire working class under revolutionary communist Marxist Leninist leadership that will lead to political power and the establishment of communism.

Cooperatives without political power

Later I discovered that for some time there had been a group of peasants from Cerrito Viejo who had organized themselves very discretely. They were planning to expropriate land from the ranch and form a cooperative with the assistance of the government. However the government simply dragged the matter out without end and nothing was achieved.

Now I understood why my brother-in-law left me to do so much of his work at the ranch. What happened was that in spite of the fact that he couldn’t read, he was the group leader and spent his time carrying out the tasks of the organization. Meanwhile it was I that was putting my shoulder into the work.

The years went by and for me everything was shit. There were no clothes or anything. I only had my brother-in-law’s old clothes, his hat and even old sandals, etc. They didn’t buy me anything. I was ashamed to put on those old clothes, which were not just old and ripped but also very large for me. I was thirteen and I wanted to wear the same clothes that other boys my age were wearing. These boys were given their parents’ permission to use their wages to buy clothes for themselves. But I could not get permission.

The year 1937 arrived and the government of Lazaro Cardenas finally expropriated part of the ranch and distributed it among the peons who had been seeking it. On the day they received the land they all got drunk. At last poverty had ended they thought. But it didn’t end.

Now they had land. But they couldn’t eat land. They required the means of production to make the land produce and the means of production belonged to the boss. The government gave the boss the right to take from the land everything he owned before it was turned over: livestock, tractors, planting tools and beasts of burden such as oxen and mules—in other words all the means of production. The peasants through much sacrifice had to look elsewhere to obtain farm animals to work the lands. The government’s actions were worthless. The means of production should have been expropriated at the same time as the land. Everything the boss possessed had been gotten from the exploitation of the peasants and it all belonged to them, not him.

There were some changes, but nothing important. The coop members and owners of the land were not able to produce what they hoped for due to lack of the means of production.

Later the Cooperative Bank lent them money to work the land at interest and in exchange for the harvest and at the price set by the bank. The bankers were the same owners from whom the government had expropriated the land, including our boss. In this manner, the harvest continued to belong to the bosses and at the prices that they set. How about that!

And what about me? Well, for me the stinking situation continued the same or worse. Now I worked the land for the new boss (my brother-in-law). And not just by day but by night as well, when he tried to irrigate the land. Now it was sunup to sunup. This shit seemed to never end.

After my mother died I cried secretly every day because I didn’t want anyone to see me. My brother-in-law scolded me whenever he saw me with teary eyes. "Are you crying again, you little ass?" he would say. I felt alone and vulnerable when I missed my mother the most, and I looked for a place to hide and cry. When an orphan child cries, it’s not because he wants toys. The child cries because he has no mother to look after him, to protect him; to give him a blanket when he gets cold or feed him when he’s hungry, even if that might mean she won’t eat. For a child that knew his mother and knew what she meant for him, nothing else can take her place.

In this world there are millions of children who don’t eat and who die. They die because someone else has their food. Poverty is not natural; poverty is the product of looting and exploitation carried out by the owners of the world against the disorganized and defenseless working masses. The entire working class should rise up against these looters and exploiters. We should rise up against war makers who dedicate their lives to possessing the world, even at the cost of leaving children to die without food. Rise up against these parasites with a working class revolution for communism—to take political power, their riches, land and all means of production from them. So that the workers become the owners of all they produce and there are no families or children who are hungry.

And now, what was going to happen next? How much longer would I be able to live as a slave? Would I rebel against my brother-in-law? Would I just leave for parts unknown? How many adventures awaited me?

My life takes a turn for the better

Time passed. I was fourteen years-old. I continued working my brother-in-law’s land. On days when there was nothing I could do on his land, my brother-in-law sent me to work the boss’s land. Now I knew how to do other jobs such as plow the land with a team of oxen, cultivate corn, irrigate fields, load crops onto wagons, etc., etc. But I was still suffering for lack of shoes and clothes, as I was still using my brother-in-law’s hand-me-downs. I had nowhere to sleep. My bed was the wagon in the pasture. If I was cold I covered up with a few sacks, which was all there was. This form of living had become unbearable and even more so when I saw that youngsters my age were treated very differently by their parents than the treatment I was receiving.

When I turned sixteen, an older friend offered to loan me three hectares (about 7.5 acres) of land to plant on if I wanted it, for as long as was necessary to bring in a crop. The offer was very good. But how could I do it if all of my time was spent working on my brother-in-law’s land? In spite of this I decided to take the offer. I was oniy able to work on it at night so that I could still fulfill my responsibilities to my brother-in-law by day. But I worked my land with heart, thinking about the coming harvest and the money I would use to buy new clothes, shoes and other necessities. All of the work was done by night. I only slept when I could no longer move myself in the work.

At last the harvest came. I invited a few friends to help me bring it in. I had to get it done in one day which was the agreement that I made with my brother-in-law.

There was a businessman (Mr. Rutilio Tones) who bought corn on the cob. He was going to pick it up in a truck. I sold Mr. Rutilio that day two tons of corn at $90 pesos per ton. Aside from the two tons, I loaded ten sacks of corn (a little more than half a ton) into the wagon and took them home as a help for costs. When I arrived home I unloaded the corn into the little storehouse that we had for that purpose. When my brother-in-law came home he asked as to the whereabouts of the rest of the corn. I told him that I had sold it and I could see that he was not pleased. Then he asked me for the money. I told him that I was keeping it, and he demanded that I hand it over to him. I refused and he threw a fit. He told me, "If you don’t give me that money this instant, get the hell out of my house and don’t ever come back." I said nothing because I was accustomed to remaining silent when he scolded me. It made me sad and angry that he would throw me out this way and I just lowered my gaze. But I felt like an abused dog. All I did was grab the machete that I worked with and considered my own, although it was not. Slowly and crestfallen I left walking in no particular direction and with nowhere to go, simply walking.

Finally I decided to go to the house of a friend, Santos Aguilar, to talk with him. When I arrived at his house, only his father Benigno Aguilar, a fine person, was home. While speaking with Mr. Benigno it occurred to me to tell him that I was no longer living with my brother-in-law Severo and asked if he would do me the favor of letting me stay in his house if I committed to give him my weekly wages. Mr. Benigno said to me: "Of course you can stay here, son. You can sleep in the house with the other boys." He had three sons: Santos, Francisco and Santiago, a little boy of six years old, happy and playful, who we lovingly called El Bandido (Bandit). So for the time being I had somewhere to live.

After talking with Mr.Benigno I asked him, "Do you have a sharpening stone? I’d like to sharpen my machete." He showed me where to find the stone.

The day was drawing to a close and I began to sharpen my machete. It was maybe six in the evening. It had been an exhausting day. I had been working since before dawn and had not eaten all day. And of course when I had gotten to the house with the corn, thinking that I would be helping support my sister’s house, my brother-in-law ran me off. My head was spinning and a macabre thought was forming in my mind. Yes, I’ll do it, I thought as I sharpened the enormous machete of perhaps thirty inches. I’ll kill him. Why not kill him? I wasn’t thinking of law or prison, but rather nothing more than taking my vengeance on him for so much humiliation. What he had done was not the way to pay someone who for years had contributed his labor to the welfare of the family, without even the least thanks.

Night fell. There was no light anywhere. And there I was in front of my brother-in-law’s house right at the door. I had it all planned out. I called his name a couple of times. Then I saw a silhouette in the house. It was he, and he came toward me but not all the way to where I was standing.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"I want to talk to you"

"Tell me what you want."

"Well, come out of there. Let’s go under the mesquite tree."

"No. Tell me why you’ve come."

"Come over here by the mesquite."

"I told you, tell me why you’re here."

"Look, if you don’t want to go to the mesquite, come outside the house a bit."

I noted that he was scared and didn’t even want to get near the door, much less go to where I suggested, which was under a tree some 20 meters away, the place where I intended to kill him. I could’ve gone in and killed him there in the house, but I didn’t dare. I felt that it would be cowardice on my part to do it that way.

On seeing that things were not going to work out as I had planned, I decided to leave. Nevertheless my attitude demonstrated that everything has its limits and that my life as his slave had come to an end. His fear of leaving the house saved his life. He paid nothing for the years of exploitation which I suffered at his hand. That experience caused a deep wound on his conscience and a terrible humiliation to his pride, which he had always lorded over me. He could not look his friends and coworkers in the eye. Everyone found out one way or another what had happened. Later I discovered that several of his friends had warned him of what might occur some day if he did not change his behavior with me.

This was very symbolic of the system of exploitation. A worker who rebels against his exploiter and frees himself is similar to the working class that rebels against the ruling class and wins its liberation.

So in that short time and in a dramatic form, a stage of my life ended and gave way to another. When one thing ends, another begins. However, in the future I would never again quietly accept such a humiliating way of life.

With the money from my harvest, I went to the city. I went to a tailor and asked for three pairs of pants of the best gabardine available, at $3.00 each. Wages then were $1.00 a day, so each pair of pants was worth three days’ work. But what difference did it make. Now I would have the pleasure of wearing new clothes that were my own size. Then I went to a garment store and bought shoes, shirts, underclothes and socks. I also bought a wool blanket and a green chest made of lamina. I felt like the best dressed man in the world. Now I could go the dances and show myself to my friends and above all to the girls—ah yes, the girls!

When the weekend arrived I spoke with Mr. Benigno to pay him what I had offered to live in his house. I pulled six pesos out of my pocket and gave them to him, but he refused, telling me,

"No, no! You don’t have to give me that." I reminded him that that is what I had offered him and was the motive behind my payment. In truth that was how I had become accustomed over the years and was why I insisted that he take it. But he refused. Finally he said to me, "Look, give my wife a peso and that’s plenty." I had never had it better in my life.

What would be the next thing in this new stage of my life that had just begun to develop? Time would show me how much there was for me to learn yet.

As regards my brother-in-law, one can say that when it rains it pours. His life got harder and harder after he ran me off. Since I was no longer there to work with him, he was unable to keep up with all the work. Soon two of his beautiful girls got sick, and they both died within a week. His work fell behind. And since he had no one to help him, two of his best work oxen drowned in a canal. The harvest was not as good as before. Concretely, his life went from bad to worse.

Perhaps six months passed when he came looking for me. To tell the truth I no longer felt hatred for him. His attitude had changed so much that I couldn’t believe it was he. He was humble and paid attention to me, and it made me pity him. He humbly asked me to come back and live at the house and work with him. He promised things would be different, that he would pay me for each day’s work and there would no longer be problems between us. I didn’t doubt that he was telling the truth. I accepted his proposition and returned to work with him, but I did not live in the house. Now things were different. Every weekend he paid me my wages and at times more than he owed me. We became good comrades and good brothers-in-law. We joked in a healthy way and he never again spoke a coarse word to me. The work normalized as did the production. He always asked for my opinions and suggestions in his work. He asked my advice over how to deal with his children to make them more respectful of him, and he asked if I would speak with them about it.

After some years, I left for other parts. While I was north of the border I heard that he had died, but I was unable to attend his funeral.

It was June 6, 1955, when I crossed the international bridge between Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico and Brownsville, Texas, USA, legally for the first time. I had come as a permanent resident to the U.S.. After I presented my documents to the immigration agents they took me to an office and put me through a supposedly routine interrogation. To tell the truth, I couldn’t see what relationship some of their questions had with my entering the U.S., nor their meaning. I simply answered their questions with nothing more than a yes or no. During that interrogation they asked me questions such as, "Are you a communist? Have you ever belonged to a communist party? Are you a sympathizer with any communist party? Do you have any communist friends?" Following the questioning, they allowed me to go on my way.

I traveled with a Mr. Green and his wife in their luxury car. They had come to the border to pick me up. Mr. Green was the administrator of the place where I was being taken to work. He had provided me with some of the most important documents for arranging my residency in the U.S. He knew me very well as I had worked with him previously as an undocumented worker. In addition he spoke very good Spanish.

As we traveled down the highway toward Corpus Christi, Texas, I was thinking to myself, "I’ve seen the end of harassment from Immigration agents. They won’t deport me now as they had so many times before when I was without papers. Now I’ll work very hard, earn a lot of money and enjoy the same privileges as the rest of the legal residents in this country. If it’s true that the U.S. is the land of opportunity for everyone and only those without desire do not get rich, I will not be left behind. What’s more, who can ask for a better boss than Mr. Green?"

I was also happy to escape a jail cell in northern Mexico where I had been incarcerated 15 days as a vagrant, ironically for the crime of being out looking for work in a strange city. Not having a job was sufficient motive to be convicted and set to sweep the streets eight hours a day without even a right to food. They made you find your own food while they had you out of the jail sweeping the streets, picking up other peoples scraps in the street. No! I would never have to go through those humiliating experiences again. A lack of work and the humiliations rained down on me by the Mexican authorities obliged me to seek in another country what was not possible to find in my own.

Dreams or Reality

While we traveled, I allowed myself to leave behind all of the previous run of bad luck that I had experienced in my life. At the same time, I nurtured a world of illusions for my future. We pulled into a town called Raymondville. Mr. Green parked in front of the restaurant and asked me: "Would you like to eat something?" Or probably he said, "Would you like to experience something?" Whatever it was, I said, "Yes." Upon entering the restaurant he said, "Wait a minute," and he turned to a man, perhaps the owner or manager, he was a Mexican man.

"May this man come in to eat?" asked Mr. Green. "Yes," the man said. We went in, but Mr. Green directed me toward a table apart from the one where he and his wife sat. I only asked for coffee. The enormous hunger I had felt moments earlier had disappeared. All the while I asked myself why Mr. Green had asked if I could come into the place? Why he had sent me to a table separate from where they sat? Were they ashamed to have me sit with them? I felt frustrated. I was trying to figure out if what I had been thinking about moments earlier on the road with respect to my future, privileges, work, money was reality and what I was experiencing was a dream. Or if this was the reality and what I had been contemplating before was the dream.

Only one thing was reality for me in that moment: I now felt like an abandoned dog. I lived through enormous humiliation in Mexico, and now it seemed that I would experience the same here as well. Nevertheless, what I had just experienced was nothing more than the beginning of another stage in my life. In the U.S. discrimination and racism were not a new thing. It had existed and exists still. Some restaurants had signs saying "No Mexicans Allowed," and on the city buses the seats in front were only for whites, just to mention a couple of things. Naturally, I had not known this before coming to live in the U.S.

I had considered Mr. Green with a great deal of respect and good will, but after that experience I

began to see him in a different light. This became even more acute when he became despotic

and repressive at work. He explained to me that he had learned Spanish in Mexico where he was

a foreman in the mines in Chihuahua, Mexico. I would have liked to ask the workers at those mines what kind of foreman Mr. Green had been.

Work and slave wages

My work consisted in doing whatever was necessary at the Holy Cross Cemetery, including digging graves alongside another worker named Benito Romero. The cemetery was the property of the Catholic Church where Mr. Green was the administrator. It was one of those jobs in which the conditions are so bad, no one wants to do it. The worst part was digging the graves and burying the cadavers. We also had to dig up cadavers when families wanted to transfer them to another site within the same cemetery. The new graves had to be dug in plots where there had been other cadavers many years before, but this was done so that they could continue selling the plots. Each new grave that we dug meant that we had to pull out old skeletons. Some were totally dried out, while others still carried a terrible smell. Besides that, we found some old skeletons face down and others in a sitting position.

Mr. Green’s theory was that these skeletons had been persons declared dead without having actually been dead and were buried alive. Finding themselves buried perhaps they moved around and simply died in those positions.

The wages were $35.00 per week, for both me and my co-worker. However, in the letter Mr. Green had given me as one of my documents for residency, he had specified that my wages were to be $1.25 an hour. In practice, he only paid me $0.74 an hour, and nothing on those Sundays that I had to work. Now I knew more or less what type of son of a bitch old Green was.

One day as I was digging a grave, a woman approached me and asked, "Aren’t you afraid of the dead?"

"No," I said.

"Do you remove skulls when you dig these graves?" she asked.

"Sometimes," I told her.

"Would you be willing to sell me any of the ones you remove that are still in good condition?"

"How much would you pay me for each one?"

"I’ll give you five dollars."

"What do you want them for?" I asked her.

She told me that she belonged to a long line of I don’t remember what kind of devils. Some sort of religious sect that exists to further confuse anybody who gets involved in such garbage.

I thought it over and accepted the woman’s offer. All the while I was thinking, "If, in the end, all of this mess of bones doesn’t do anything else, and if I’m going to one day end up the same, it’s better to get a few pennies to eat with and help myself out a little and avoid ending up in a grave any sooner than I have to. After all, for now I have no other way to increase my wages. Is it a sin? Well maybe so, but what the hell! If the Church as owner of the cemetery sells used graves to make more money why the hell shouldn’t I sell some of this trash as well?"

I cleaned each skull that was still in good condition. I put them in the trunk of my old car so that on the weekend I could take them to the lady, but she never returned so I had nothing else to do but return the trash to its place.

Around the same time I decided to take a drive one Saturday to Matamoros, Mexico, on the other side of the international bridge. I wanted to look up some old friends of the opposite sex! Damn! Why not say it straight, after all I’m just flesh and bone!

No sooner said than done, Saturday came and I started on my journey, which was some three hours, more or less. I stayed around Matamoros on Saturday and carried out some of the activities I had been contemplating. On Sunday I got in the car for the return trip. I crossed the bridge, came up to the checkpoint and gave the agent my documents and was off. When I got to my house, I don’t know why, but I thought to open the trunk of my car and the first thing I saw were the two skulls with their ear to ear grins as though they were saying, "Well I guess we got back with no trouble, right?" What a mess it would have been if the immigration agent had decided to search the car when I passed through the checkpoint. With all of the hurry to take my trip, I had forgotten to get the skulls out of the car.

I continued working under the above-mentioned conditions for two years without a sign that Mr. Green had any intention of raising our miserable wages. One day I spoke with my co-worker about the possibility of Mr. Green giving us a little raise if we requested it. My co-worker liked the idea of getting a raise but wasn’t excited about asking for it. He was timid and argued that it would be futile to ask since the old man would never accept.

I thought it over and decided to speak with the old man. On payday I went to get my paycheck. When old Green gave me the check I remained there without saying a word. I couldn’t find the words to say what it was I wanted. The old man, seeing me like that asked, "Do you want to say something to me?" "Yes," I told him. Finally the words came out and I told him that I wanted a small raise. I wanted to explain my reasons but he interrupted me and in a short manner said,

"No. I am not going to give you any raise and it doesn’t matter if you like it or not because you can’t leave this job. If you do, I’ll pull your papers and turn you in to Immigration."

I definitely had nothing left to do there. I didn’t vacillate for a moment in telling that miserable old Green, "Take the papers if you can, but I won’t work for you a single hour more." As I left I heard him almost yelling,"Wait, wait. I’m not serious." But I was, I told him.

Damn! I had come to the promised land to work as a slave my whole life in exchange for a miserable wage that didn’t buy anything, under the threat of having my papers taken away (Green had paid $20.00 for them to the U.S. government at the American Consulate in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.) From that day forward, I never heard another word about the slave driver Mr. Green.

Poverty is not natural. Poverty is imposed. It is imposed by the ruling class and supported by its government. And it is against that class and government that we must fight to the death in an organized way as a working class. This struggle is what is called class struggle, the one about which we need to be conscious and describe what it means to the workers.

I retained the hope of finding a better job and better boss and always with the idea of realizing my economic ambitions. However, I went searching for it in other states. I went to Oklahoma to work picking cotton where for one hundred pounds the bosses were only paying $1.50. That work was done by pulling the branches of the cotton plant up and down with all of the leaves and blooms. The blooms weren’t picked like other types of cotton. So the pay depended on how many thorns the worker broke. For me to earn $15.00 a day I also had to work at night under the light of the moon. I kept my clothes and food in my car and for some time slept there also, parked in the cotton fields.

The work was called seasonal, it lasted two or three weeks in each region and since there were so many people doing the work it lasted even less time.

Afterward I went to Arizona, to Eloy and Picacho, some small towns in the cotton region, following what was known as the "cotton run", where I didn’t do so well. The contractors were thieves who altered the scales on which we weighed the cotton, so that for a bag that weighed 80 pounds a worker only received the value for 65 pounds.

After a few weeks I went to the Coachella Valley in California. There I worked in jobs that only contract workers (braceros) would~do. During those years there was a program for obtaining braceros from the interior of Mexico. These workers were contracted by bosses in places such as El Empalme, Sonora, Mexico. The work was in the date palms. Dates are a very expensive fruit in the market, but the workers that harvest them are very badly paid. I earned $0.85 an hour and lived in a tiny room. The boss there was named Mr. Michel, and was very similar to old Green. "These are bad bosses that give the others a bad name," I thought. "What bad luck I have that I keep getting the bad bosses."

After working two months in the date palms I went to Delano and afterward to Yuba City. Later to San Jose and then I returned to Coachella, always searching for better work. Finally I went to McFarland, a little town in the San Joaquin Valley of California. I established myself there temporarily in 1958. It was also there that my hour arrived and I ended up getting married in 1959. That same year saw the birth of my first girl.

In 1958 I began to work for the rose company Montebello Rose. One of the most difficult jobs in that company was grafting rose plants. The work was done in pairs with one of the pair being the grafter and the other tying the plant. You worked bent on one knee with the face about twelve inches from the ground because the graft had to be at the base of the plant only some two inches from the ground. Given that the position to do that work was extremely uncomfortable for both workers in the pair, at the end of a nine hour shift, you basically had no more energy for anything. I recall that at the beginning of 1959, Montebello sent us to Glendale, Arizona to graft some plants. One grafter named Agustin Vargas, who we called Champion, went back to the old motel where we stayed after a day of intense work, laid back on his bed to rest for a moment and never got up again. He died right there. Champion was a Mexican citizen and legal resident of the U.S. Nevertheless who investigated his death? What organization took charge of the matter? What Mexican Consulate bothered to compensate the family, or what union did anything? As far as I know, no one did.

Recently, although workers have sought other ways to do this grueling work, yet nothing has been found to replace it.

Other rose companies existed such as Konklyn Nursery, Mt. Arbor and others in the same area with whom I also worked and under the same terrible conditions. The wages for grafting work at that time was $10.00 per thousand plants for the grafter and $8.50 for the tying worker. No matter how hard we pushed ourselves we were never able to surpass between three and four thousand plants per day and then we ended up almost dead at the end of the shift.

The bosses retained $2.00 for every thousand plants grafted as a guarantee that the work would be well done. So 90% of the grafted plants were guaranteed to survive. If 90% of the plants survived, the worker would receive the retained money, according to the boss. But in actual fact, whether the survival rate was high enough or not, the worker never saw this money. We workers were always unhappy about this because we recognized it to be theft from our pockets every year.

For my part in the last two years (1963-1964) that I worked with Montebello, I recouped my money. To do so I waited for either of the two owners of the company to come to my workplace and there I demanded payment. The first time both of them came and I practically threatened them. One of them, named Frank, asked me to give him 24 hours. The next day at the same time he came and gave me my money. The following year, 1964, when the work was finished I demanded that Frank tell me what day he was going to pay me the rest of my money and he said that it would be paid by October ₃₀th• I went to his house at ten in the morning for my check and knocked on the door. He answered it with check in hand. That was better.

I also worked for Konklyn Nursery in 1964, grafting just 33,000 plants for which they retained

$66.00 as always the guarantee that the work would be well done. By March 1965 the owner

Konklyn still had not showed any signs of payment for the money he held onto, even though the

work had been well done.

That time it came to me to ask all of my coworkers to go with me to demand our money at the bosses’ office in an organized way. The workers accepted my proposition. However we didn’t all go, just ten of us. I was chosen to speak to the boss for all of us. After listening, the boss replied that he didn’t owe anything to any of us as there had been an insufficient percentage of surviving plants. Since we knew that was a lie, we told him that we were going to the Labor Commission to enter a complaint about the matter. The bOss just smiled and said: "That’s fme. Go wherever you like." Right there, we decided to go to the Bakersfield Labor Commission 30 miles away.

The next day I was the only one to go. The owner Konklyn had informed all of the rest of the workers that any of them that went to enter a complaint would be fired from their jobs, effectively intimidating them. When I found out, I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew those workers and had seen more than one of them acting very forcefully and bravely in the bars around town, when at the slightest "screw you" they were the first to pull a knife against another worker in a display of machismo. However they didn’t even dare look into the eyes of a miserable boss who bled them dry daily.

I was the only one to enter a complaint. I filled out an enormous questionnaire and they told me they’d send me a letter telling me when and where to go for the hearing.

The card arrived. I don’t remember the date except I recall that it was in the first few days of the month of April 1965 in a court in McFarland where I lived and still live. The letter asked that I bring witnesses to attest to my claim. But on the appointed day, I was unable to convince a single one of the workers to accompany me to the court as a witness. I only found one friend who offered to go with me as a translator.

Nevertheless, Konklyn did bring a witness, another boss from the company Mt.Arbor to testify that they did not retain any money from the wages of the workers. Although I did all I could to demonstrate that what I was saying was true, the judge would not rule in my favor. The owner claimed that what I was demanding was not part of my wages but rather a tip that the company could give to a worker depending upon the quality of his work for the year. And since I had been a good worker they were going to pay me my tip, whereupon the owner put a check on the judge’s desk.

When the judge gave me the check and I saw that it was in the amount of $30.00 I said, nearly yelling, "Thieves! Robbers! Shameless men! I don’t work for tips and I don’t feed my family on charity." At that moment the judge interrupted me to say: "You workers should be thankful for the privilege of having bosses who give you money you haven’t earned," while pointing to the check that I left on the table. I did not accept it. The boss picked up his check and the judge ruled the case closed. I kept talking so the judge ordered the police to throw me out, which they did.

Now I understand why I could never have won in that hearing. The Labor Commission as a functionary of the State would never rule in my favor since the State is never neutral in class conflict. In spite of the façade of governmental neutrality it is enough to merely glance at our history as workers to see that it is replete with examples of strikes crushed through judicial mandate, police billy clubs and soldiers’ bayonets.

When I got to the house after the hearing I told my wife what had happened. It was just one more theft. I would continue working as always. I had already gotten another job with the company Germain of Chafter, another rose company where I would begin work the following week. However when I arrived for work at the company, the supervisor Frank Beltran told me without explanation that, by order of the owners, there was no work for me.

I looked everywhere in the area but no boss would hire me. I realized that the bosses had all agreed that none of them would hire me. They all had my name and knew my social security number and had me on a black list. All of this because I had the audacity to demand payment for my stolen wages and for having shouted at the bosses accusing them of being thieves that day in court. All of which for them was a grave insult, a lack of respect and a flagrant disregard of their sacred Scriptures (1st Timothy Chapter 6:17-19).

So now what? Go elsewhere? Or continue to look and hope for better luck? And what luck, since I didn’t believe in luck anymore? Return to Mexico? No! Since I no longer desired riches and no longer believed in good bosses; then why should I go anywhere? I started to think in one thing: organize workers. But which workers? The ones I knew were so intimidated by the bosses that they would no longer even speak with me, especially now that they saw the example that had been made of me. Although to tell the truth seeing workers act timidly was no longer such a strange sight for me. In my wanderings on numerous occasions I had seen workers quietly accepting humiliations from bosses. Maybe this is why I had little confidence in them.

I recall once being witness to something equally bad or worse in El Centro, California. In that region of the Imperial Valley, the bosses did not want to hire resident workers who they called "local workers." They only wanted braceros, workers contracted to come from Mexico. Workers would apply for work at the ranchers’ association there in the valley. To hide the discrimination, the bosses would not refuse employment to resident workers. Instead they made special job arrangements with the supervisors. The arrangement consisted of making life intolerable for the local workers so that they would have to quit the job.

I had applied and was sent to work for a lettuce company whose name I no longer recall. When I arrived the supervisor asked me, "Do you know how to cut lettuce?" I responded that I did. He looked me up and down and said, "Start carrying the boxes instead." When he directed me to the truck, he yelled to the driver, "I’m sending you another." I didn’t like his attitude and I soon figured out what he was doing.

There were enough loaders but they pulled one off and put me in his place. Two loaders were above and two below, with two on each side. The truck moved forward between two rows of boxes full of lettuce. Each box weighed forty pounds, more or less. The loaders below lifted the boxes and the loaders above received and placed the boxes on the truck. When we started loading the truck, the driver slowly began to accelerate in an effort to make me quit from exhaustion, which, according to the driver, would get to me quickly. At the end of a half hour perhaps, I wasn’t the one who was beat but rather my co-worker on the other side, who looked pretty completely done in. When the driver saw what was happening he stopped the truck and got down, came over to me and asked me if I had been a loader before. I told him that I had not but that the work was easy. Without saying another word he got back in the truck and continued at a normal pace.

In truth I had been a loader of lettuce boxes in the state of Arizona. That had been the last job I held before coming to California. I had said no to the driver to make him feel that his best efforts to tire me out were coming to nothing. That was the same test that they forced all local workers to go through. At that time, only Mexican workers (braceros or local workers) held these jobs. Nevertheless, I am sure that had white or black workers come for the jobs they would have forced them to go through the same trials.

The reason the bosses preferred the bracero workers was that they could do anything with them they wanted to. They could treat them badly, work them to death, humiliate them, whatever, and the workers would accept the treatment. They didn’t know that they didn’t have to accept it quietly or didn’t know where to complain. They slept in barracks like prisoners. They bathed and washed their clothes in dirty canals.

On these crews the loader’s job was horrible. The way the supervisor treated them was humiliating. The supervisor was repugnant, tall, fat, a despot and a true son of a bitch. He always carried a knife in his hand that he would occasionally use to cut a head of lettuce. He was constantly yelling at the workers, "Hurry up, you sons of your f___ing mothers. Get a move on." Meanwhile he would throw rotten heads of lettuce at the workers. At midday a truck would come by with food. It consisted of undercooked beans in a big vat, with bread. The workers were not permitted to sit while they ate and they were not permitted to finish their food. The supervisor would yell and the workers had to return to work with uneaten bread still in their hands. That and much more occurred every day.

Seeing all of this, I became angry with the workers because they wouldn’t say anything and they put up with all of these humiliations quietly. Things hadn’t gotten to that point with me. Also, I brought my own lunch. But I knew that I was within an inch of getting into it with a boss. And I did.

One day after loading one truck and waiting for the next to enter, a matter of two or three minutes, I stopped to catch my breath a little. I heard a loud whistle at my back. It was the supervisor who shouted at me, "Don’t just stand there. Work!" Almost shouting, I answered, but with a cascade of obscenities.

When he heard me he told me, "You come here to do what I tell you, not whatever it is you want." I answered again but this time in much more defiant terms so that this man would have no doubt that I was challenging him to a violent, physical confrontation, in which he would pay for all of the bad treatment he had dished out to the bracero workers.

From among the workers who stood there observing, I heard someone say, "No brother, don’t talk to him like that. Don’t you see that he’s the supervisor here!" "I don’t care who this bastard is," I answered. I stepped in front of him with a knife that I had taken from another worker. When the guy realized that I was serious he decided not to push it and backed off, humiliated, "with his tail between his legs." His attitude with the rest of the workers was very different for the rest of the day.

A few hours after that incident, the owner came up and in a friendly tone said, "Say, son, if you don’t like this job we can find you another." I didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. I told him, "Sir, the deal is that I’ve had it up to here with you guys. I’m going to finish out the day then I want you to pay me and I’m gone because I don’t want to work here anymore." He told me I could pick up my check at the office in a few days. It was there and I never returned again.

Now I see that these individual fights with supervisors and bosses never resolve the problems we have as workers because it is not the appropriate form to do it. Nevertheless, they treat us badly as a way to intimidate us and make us produce more for them. There is always the chance that they are going to push someone over the edge that will make them pay for it.

This is why it was not so strange to me that my friends in McFarland, my coworkers, were intimidated by the threats they received from the owner Konklyn. While I had all of this to think about, I was also thinking about my family. What’s more, my second son was about to be born. I had to bring food home, but how? I had applied for welfare but the application was going to take time to determine if I qualified for it or not. For the time being all I could do was go by night to the fields where potatoes had been planted and to the fruit orchards to expropriate something to eat for my family. My wife and I canned whatever we could to eat and subsist on.

Meeting with Cesar Chavez

Although I didn’t know how to begin, I kept thinking about organizing workers. I spoke with this or that worker, searching for a like-minded person so that at least we would be two workers who could then win more and more until we would be many. But I could find no one.

Finally a man named Manuel Rivera told me that in Delano (a town five miles north of

McFarland) there was a man who wanted to form an organization for farm workers, for what

purpose he did not know. I immediately went to look for this man, who turned out to be Cesar

Chavez.

In reality, Cesar Chavez wanted to strengthen an organization which had already begun. He told me that he had many members already enrolled. He really only had a few, as the majority had withdrawn. They had gotten in and when they saw that there was nothing substantial to offer them, they withdrew.

The organization went by the name National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), and a person could join by paying $3.50 a month. I immediately joined. The benefits that Chavez offered to the membership were actually just social services, such as helping fill out forms, translation, or assistance with Social Security. Obviously for workers who don’t even have beans to eat, this wasn’t going to resolve anything. Nevertheless, it was someplace to start.

Chavez’ principal objective, according to what he told me, was to make the organization as large as possible, live off the membership fees and create a strong political force that could be used in favor of this or that bourgeois (boss-run) political party, be it Democrat or Republican. And through these politicians obtain laws for farm workers that would help make their lives better. Sure!! That was an illusion. These ideas from a bird’s eye view were very pretty. But in practice it might not work out quite so nicely, as we have seen.

During the conversation with Chavez I suggested the possibility of a strike in demand for better wages and conditions of work, even though I didn’t know how to organize a strike nor all that it implied. Nevertheless I did understand that it was the only way we farm workers would be able to improve our miserable economic conditions, and for that reason I was willing to come face to face with whatever the consequences might be.

But Chavez was unwilling. His position with respect to a strike was, "No, no! Strike is a big word. Perhaps in a few years we can take on something like that but not now."

I insisted on a strike and he finally told me, "Invite workers to a meeting at your house and we will discuss it more then."

I tried talking to workers but since the bosses had prohibited speaking with me, many workers wouldn’t even open their doors. I only succeeded in talking to a few. Only four of us attended the meeting: Jose Magana, Lauro Rodriguez, Ruben Lopez, and myself. Cesar Chavez and a friend also came.

At the meeting we discussed more about a strike, and finally we decided to call a second meeting. To do this we had to change our strategy somewhat. Owing to the fact that the workers at Konklyn Company were very timid, we decided to target Mt. Arbor, also a rose company, to declare a strike if we could convince the workers there. The conditions for the workers everywhere were miserable. The four of us who attended that first meeting, and now we were more than just one, gave ourselves the task of speaking with the Mt. Arbor workers to invite them to the next meeting.

The meeting occurred in a room that was loaned to us. About 30 workers attended, which was now quite a lot more than the four that attended the first meeting. Chavez’ wife and an older lady who accompanied him also attended.

The discussion turned on whether we would strike or not and things looked somewhat gloomy. Those who rose to speak simply said that we were very few and not the majority, that they came from Mexico and needed to take advantage of the season. Those who spoke made more or less the same argument, and things looked pretty bad.

But something significant happened. By coincidence all those who spoke in such a defeatist way were physically very large men. After they spoke the little old lady who had been seated in the back row and said in a loud voice, "Excuse me, Mr.Chavez. I’d like to say a few words." Chavez was leading the meeting and he gave her the floor. She continued, "I’d just like to say that, as the saying goes, the biggest men are the biggest cowards." Those who had spoken, the big men, upon hearing this made themselves small in their seats and didn’t look so big anymore.

After this, Chavez turned to me and asked, "And you brother, what do you think?"

Making an effort to change the situation, I answered that yes it was true that we were few, only about thirty. But I am quite sure that each one of those who have come is worth a lot more than those who did not come. That each one who came to the meeting must surely be worth ten of those who didn’t come. Which all means that for the thirty who are present, we are worth three hundred or more and are, as such, the majority. Everyone applauded. Perhaps the spineless people applauded to get out from under the criticism and the others just to avoid being called spineless. Everyone without exception joined in and we unanimously decided to declare a strike at Mt. Arbor.

Now we just needed to call a third meeting to decide what would be the principal demands and what day the strike would begin. That third meeting followed closely the last one and we met in a room in a Catholic Church in Delano. I don’t recall how many attended but we were a lot more than just the thirty from the last meeting

We decided to begin the strike on the following Monday, May 3, 1965. Our principal demands were to be the recognition of the NFWA as the representative of the farm workers, to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement and an increase to $2.50 for every 1000 rose plants grafted for grafters and binders, and a raise for all other job classifications, as well as other demands.

I cannot remember the exact dates that each organizing activity took place, but I do recall that it was in the first days of April 1965 when I lost my claim for wages in the hearing mentioned before, and that by May 3 we began the strike. This means that all of this activity took place in about one month.

The strike began as planned on Monday morning. It was very effective and no one dared cross the picket line. The bosses were under pressure to find scabs (strikebreakers), and on Tuesday they managed to slip in six scabs from the Philippines. But these scab workers didn’t know how to do the job and failed in their attempts to break the strike. Wednesday came and the bosses were so desperate that they were on the verge of accepting collective bargaining negotiations. However, they decided to play one last card. That evening they sent each of the supervisors to speak to every worker telling, them that the pay raises were going into effect, but only for those workers who showed up for work Thursday morning. On Thursday, everyone showed up for work. The leaders and myself were furious. We turned on our heels and went home. One battle had been lost but not the war.

In spite of not obtaining a work contract in that little strike, it was not all bad. The owners raised the wages as we had demanded. The grafters and binders began to earn between $40 and $50 a week more and the other workers also got raises.

What’s more not just Mt. Arbor raised wages, but four other companies found themselves obliged to raise wages in order to avoid possible disputes with workers at their plants. Those four companies were Montebello, Konklyn Company, Germain and Jackson and Perkins.

Very well, and myself? My bad luck streak continued. Since we hadn’t achieved a contract with

Mt. Arbor and since I wasn’t a worker there in any case, I continued without work. Nevertheless

it gave me pleasure to know that all of the workers in those five companies got wage raises. And

I felt better then I had a month before. I no longer felt alone.

Besides rose production for the above companies, during this time what really predominated was the production of table and wine grapes in the area of Delano, California. But where is Delano? Well, Delano is more or less in the center of the San Joaquin valley in the state of California. It is a city of about 20,000 inhabitants. Seven miles north is Earlimart, a town of about 4,000 people. Five miles to the south is McFarland with some five thousand inhabitants. And to the southwest is Wasco with eight thousand people. All of these towns are situated in one of the most productive agricultural areas of the state.

Among the vineyard workers of the area the Mexicans and Filipinos predominate. These workers upon seeing the small triumph of the strike at Mt Arbor also began to catch the bug to strike in the vineyards.

At this time there was an organization in northern California known as the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) that was made up of Filipinos. That organization found out about the rose strike and came to Delanoto organize the Philippine workers for a strike. They succeeded in organizing a strike in the vineyards within four months but it only included Philippine workers.

Strikes are contagious

in a strike gain a consciousness about who the bosses are, we destroy the deceit and show our comrades that the supposed benefactors are actually parasites and bastards.

The AWOC declared a strike on September 8, 1965, against the agricultural companies M. Caratan, Dan Tudor, Anton Caratan and others that employed hundreds of workers. The principal demands were recognition of a union and collective bargaining contracts.

The Mexicans, through our organization, tried to organize in the vineyards, but since AWOC began the strike first, we wanted to join that strike. However the leadership of AWOC, egotistically, did not accept us. They said the strike was for Filipinos and that they would win it alone. Consciously or not, the AWOC leadership was committing a grave error, applying stupid nationalism—a poison to the class struggle.

AWOC’s refusal to allow us to join their strike resulted in stepped-up NFWA organizing activity. Another strike quickly materialized in the entire area which included 33 grape-producing companies.

Pacifism—another obstacle in the class struggle

When a definitive decision had been made by the NFWA to call a strike, the instructions from the principal leader Cesar Chavez were very strict: Do not commit any violent act against the scabs nor against the bosses. A volunteer organizer named Hector Avitia, member of a political organization (MAPA) said, "If they hit you, make yourselves into a ball and throw yourselves to the ground, but do not respond to the attack." This, like nationalism, is another anti-worker error.

The strike by the NFWA began on November 20,1965, during the grape harvest. The principal demands were: recognition of a union and collective bargaining contracts. I had just gotten work at Jasmin Company when we went out on strike.

So there were two strikes, one by the Filipinos and another by the Mexicans, vying at the same time for recognition by the bosses as representatives of the workers. The workers on strike with the NFWA were greater in number than the Filipinos and that was an advantage over AWOC. In addition, the majority of striking Filipinos lived in the bosses’ fields. That made it easy for the bosses to cut their water, electricity and cooking gas, forcing them to leave the fields and end their strike.

Effectively that is what the bosses did. They turned off the utilities a week after the strike began. The workers had to abandon their houses and their strike crumbled.

Once their strike was defeated the Philippine leaders didn’t want to be left out of the action and they sought an alliance with the NFWA. It wasn’t because they wanted a multiracial alliance, but rather for reasons of personal convenience. That is how the Filipinos became involved in the strike with the NFWA. Once the Filipinos united with the Mexicans and workers of other nationalities such as Puerto Ricans, the strike took on more power. But police repression on behalf of the owners also increased.

I had been assigned to be captain of the picket line at Jasmin Company. And it fell to me to be the first striker arrested in a dispute with a scab who crossed the picket line. That scab accused me of being responsible for an accident he had had in his vehicle. The picket line was very strong and so no scab was able to cross. A few days later, without knowing why, I was changed to another picket line, ten miles south of Delano, also as captain. At that picket line even the bosses didn’t get in. The police were always nearby but they didn’t dare intervene. Several days after I started at this line, Chavez told me that the police were pressing that I be removed from the line because I was dangerous. That is when I was removed and Jim Drake, a pastor from a church, was put in my place.

Instead, Chavez made me his body guard—an interesting contradiction to his pacifist policies when it came to response to attacks on workers. Chavez wouldn’t let the striking workers defend themselves, but when it came to his own person he had to be protected against physical attack. Worse yet, now it became very easy for them to kill us.

After three days as Chavez’ body guard and without doing anything, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I escaped back to the same picket line. But the line had become very weak, with nothing more than a few strikers. The day after I had been removed, a number of scabs had been passed through without the picketers being able to do anything because the new captain would not allow action. This depressed many strikers and they left and never returned. Pacifism began to have its terrible demoralizing effect. After that, racism began to appear within the movement.

These are a few of the obstacles that will cause workers’ struggles to fail. This is why a clear understanding of class struggle among the workers’ leaders is a necessity. When there is revolutionary communist consciousness, there is no room for nationalism, pacifism or racism. Without revolutionary communist theory there can be no revolutionary movement, and even smaller struggles, like strikes, will generally fail to achieve their goals.

So the bosses, seeing that no advanced theory existed within the strikers’ movement, began to see also that it would only be a question of time until they would win.

I was arrested and jailed several more times. I think that I was jailed some fourteen or sixteen times. I lost count. Every time I was arrested, Chavez used it to intimidate the strikers, telling them that my arrests were because I was a violent person and that they had to be careful not to commit acts of violence against the scabs. Meanwhile he was hypocritically using me as his bodyguard. Since this was Chavez’ continuous song, the strikers grew more pacifist every day and fewer went to the picket lines. At that point the bosses began to see the weakness of the strike.

The other thing that was causing strikers to leave was the lack of food and money to maintain the strike in an active state. All of the strikers owed money for rent, car notes, house notes, etc. The workers every day came to the strike asked, "What are we going to live on?" And the strike looked like it would fail.

Seeing how difficult the situation was, Chavez and I made a tour of some cities north of Delano like Visalia, Corcoran, Tulare, Selma, Dinuba, Fresno and others, to speak with various community leaders and ask for help in the strike. Days later, workers began to arrive with boxes of food in their cars. The food didn’t go very far at the beginning. But as the days went by, more and more food came as well as some money from strike sympathizers. Sympathizers also put programs and announcements on the radio to support the strike. Although in a very limited form, some of the problems began to resolve themselves.

Another problem revolved around the many single workers who had joined the strike while living in the bosses’ fields. It was necessary to find them places to live, and we had to rent space or houses for them. I took responsibility for some of these workers.

We also had to establish a kitchen to feed those who had nowhere to cook. People also needed a little money to buy personal hygiene items. Seeing this, I suggested to Chavez that it was necessary to give $2.50 a week in cash to them. While we were discussing it though, Chavez agreed that all strikers should receive $5.00 a week in cash including me. Payments for cooking gas, rent, electricity and water for the strikers was paid with money from the fund for these costs.

The march to Sacramento

1965 went out and 1966 arrived without the bosses giving any signs of surrender in spite of the economic losses they suffered during 1965. January and February passed and the strike movement didn’t look any too strong. For this reason many of the strikers were very worried. But one of the strikers named Jorge Zaragoza got the idea to have a big march to publicize the strike movement. To discuss this, four strikers got together: Manuel Uranday, Jorge Zaragoza, another whose name I don’t recall and myself, as well as Chavez. In that meeting we planned to march to Sacramento, the capital of California, 300 miles away. In other larger meetings we discussed more about the march. Finally in one of these meetings it was definitively decided to do the march. Chavez proposed naming a captain to direct the march to Sacramento. Without saying more the people began to shout my name to serve as the march captain. Cesar Chavez looked at me and said: "You Brother, are going to lead the march." I accepted with pleasure but I made some conditions: no religious symbols like signs, crosses, statues of this or that, etc., and no nationalist flags either; only many, many red flags of our movement. I felt that religion and nationalist flags should not be mixed with the struggle against exploitation. But Cesar Chavez and others in the leadership disagreed. Others who were involved with churches such as priests, nuns, pastors and the like also didn’t like the idea. So they proposed another person: Manuel Camacho. Manuel accepted, but he made the same conditions as I had and so he was also not acceptable to them. Then they named Jorge Zaragoza. He accepted but also named the same conditions. Supposedly they were naming the best but as could be seen, all of us imposed the same conditions; so they sought out someone more religious than us and settled on Manuel Vazquez, who accepted without conditions. Sadly, Vazquez could not lead the march and three days later resigned and they named an emergency replacement.

March 15, 1966, was decided upon as the march date, and 50 strikers volunteered to make the trip. The police had a plan to stop the march and not allow it to continue. They were misinformed that I was leading the march so they planned to arrest me the night before and so stop it without risk. I got to my house at about 7 pm the day before the march and my wife told me that the police were searching for me. I had an idea what it was about, so I took precautions. With the lights of my vehicle off I left McFarland and went to Richgrove, a little town 15 miles away in another county (Kern). That night I stayed in the house of Eulogio Martinez, a good friend and dedicated striker. The march was going to pass through and I would join in at that time. But the arrest warrant was in both counties (Kern and Tulare). The police located my old car and me too. They threw me in jail.

Hours after my arrest, at ten in the morning of March 15, the march started. A block later it was intercepted and detained by the police. Afterward, through negotiations with the police as to if the marchers have the right, if the law prevails, if the constitution states, telephone calls, prayers and intercessions, etc., and at last the march was allowed to continue but not until one in the afternoon. They turned me loose that night on the same day and I went to meet the march in a town called Ducor that was the furthest it could get to that day.

The march continued the next day and following days. Every day something would happen:

some happy, others sad, groups of workers who joined us, people whose feet gave out, parties at night, this or that couple who got lost, etc. But the most important was that the size of the march increased every day.

During the march, the month of March went and April began. We were surprised by the news that the Schendley Company had just announced that it would recognize the NFWA as the representative of the workers and it was ready to negotiate a collective bargaining contract within sixty days. That was the first company that, pressured by the strike, gave in. It was a happy day for the strikers and all those who voluntarily had joined the march. With that occurrence, the march and the movement in general achieved new strength. At last April ₁₀t1i arrived and the march entered Sacramento with a contingent often thousand marchers. It had been a 25 day march.

As the proposal of the march was to go to Sacramento to ask for justice from Governor Pat Brown, the march would stop in front of the capital. However, for Mr. Governor, it was much more important to go on vacation in Palm Springs than speak with ten thousand people asking for justice for farm workers. So the good Governor left us with a lot of nothing, having to be content with making speeches on the steps of the capital.

It is worth mentioning that only one Filipino striker and one black striker participated in the march from the beginning—a demonstration of what nationalism does to workers’ solidarity by breaking us into segments that dilute our strength.

When the contradictions between the working class and the ruling class sharpen, the bosses, supporting themselves in their laws, declare their properties untouchable and guarantee their right to appropriate the work of others.

In a strike, bosses will do what they did with ours back then. They ran to their Courts (the State) and asked the judges to declare our strike illegal to force us to return to work. That way they use their right to continue exploiting us. We had to redouble our efforts on the picket lines, in marches, protests and violent actions against scabs, and the last having been the most decisive in spite of having been against the will of the leadership. That was the only way for us to avoid being defeated by the owners.

Our fight against the bosses was undermined every day by the philosophy of the leadership that workers and bosses could work together through a collective bargaining agreement. In other words, we were not involved in class struggle but rather a struggle for the collaboration of classes—but collaboration from one side only.

The march to Sacramento created a lot of publicity throughout the country. Agricultural labor strikes broke out in other states such as the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and the region around Yuma, Arizona. But the damned bosses stubbornly refused to surrender even as the struggle sharpened. The DiGiorgio Corporation entered into an agreement with the powerful, Mafia-tied truckers union, the Teamsters, to compete with the NFWA to dispute the representation of the workers at that company. An election was held and the NFWA was victorious and the company was forced to recognize the NFWA and negotiate a collective bargaining contract on August

30, 1967.

After the victory at DiGiorgio, the biggest attack by the striking forces centered on the Giumarra Company declaring a boycott on the sale of their product. This time all of the grape producing ranchers reorganized and united to protect the company from the boycott, lending them use of their labels so their grapes went to market. When the NFWA discovered the maneuver, it decided to declare a boycott on all the ranches at the end of 1967.

This point became contradictory. The NFWA had to send many people to different cities throughout the country to organize picket lines in front of markets where Delano grapes were sold. This caused the security lines to end at the point of production. Only a few strikers remained behind, most being elderly, on one single picket line in the agricultural fields of the company Giumarra. The scabs were able to get to the fields without incident.

The devil shows himself to the scabs

Owing to my wife’s worsening long-term illness, I was unable to travel with the boycott. I stayed behind in charge of the only remaining picket line with some fifteen strikers.

It was February 1968, time for pruning in the vineyards. In the mornings there was, and still is, so much fog that one can barely see even thirty feet ahead. The scabs arrived almost before dawn with their windows down and their heads out to better see where they were going in the fog. It is said, and was reported on the news, that it was at this moment that the devil himself grabbed some strikers by the neck and rained down more blows at one time than even their grandmothers had ever given kisses. As fast as they were able, they ran into the vineyard like people who had seen Satan himself, leaving their cars stuck behind them between the vines. Meanwhile, the invisible devil awaited the next scab to wish him a good morning as well. It is said that this happened to many scabs who never again tried to break a strike and even less cross a picket line. And those who escaped, for fear that the devil would appear again, never returned.

That is how the fields of the Guimarra company remained scab free. I recall that on a Friday around nine in the morning I was on the picket line when Chavez showed up and very happily said to me, "I don’t see any scabs around. Why don’t you all take the day off?" But the happiness was short lived. Without a bit of proof the owners threw the book at me. They charged me with I don’t know what all, and I don’t know how many violations of anti-worker laws and orders of the court. And for being the most pacifist and saintly leader in the world, they charged Chavez with all the same violations.

The height of pacifism

This caused such a panic in Chavez that, ironically, the Monday after the devil appeared to the scabs and the courts had leveled their charges, he declared himself to be on hunger strike for 25 days in protest of the supposedly violent acts committed by strikers on the picket line against scabs.

Chavez was so frightened that he called a huge meeting to make his announcement of the hunger strike. He strongly denounced those of us who had been on the picket line that day. I couldn’t have cared less what he did or said about the action. But I was concerned about the elderly that were on the picket line with me because they had done nothing and were also being criticized unjustly, and the criticism could provoke them to abandon the struggle. Since there were a lot of people at the meeting and the majority were workers and sympathizers who were not strikers, they obviously didn’t know who had been on the picket line. It was then that I rose to ask for the floor. I asked my coworkers on the picket line to stand up so that everyone could know them and judge for themselves if a few elderly people were capable of such a violent attack on the scab bastards and thereby deserving of this blistering attack by Chavez. I felt that this would exempt my coworkers from any misinterpretation by the people present there.

Chavez hoped to use his criticism to impose his philosophy of pacifism on the people present and make them see that the violence would cause him to suffer through a hunger strike. His hunger strike provoked so much publicity that people came from far and wide to participate in the masses and vigils that were being made in front of him. All of this was helped along by priests, nuns and pastors from different churches as well as a doctor. There were also people in tents on constant vigil in front of where Chavez lay.

At the same time, politicians of all stripes from local to presidential candidates like Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey lined up to be seen with Chavez. Supposedly this was to be symbolic of their unconditional support for his hunger strike and the cause. What they really wanted was to give Chavez publicity, a favor they hoped he would return by participating in their political campaigns in search of votes. And so, when Robert Kennedy was named presidential candidate at the Democratic Party Convention on March 19, 1968, it was the fulfillment of a dream Chavez had entertained since he had begun the NFWA. Now he had the political clout that he had always sought which, according to him, would be used in benefit of the farm workers and would also make him into "an important person."

During his hunger strike, Chavez was idealized and he became the subject of a personality cult.

Meanwhile, my life was going from bad to worse. Criticism was raining down on me by all

those who cultivated the Chavez cult of personality at that time. (Eliseo Medina, Antonio

Mendez, Luis Valdes, the director of Farm Workers Theatre and others.) I was blamed for Cesar

Chavez’ hunger as a result of my violent behavior against the scabs.

I lit into these bastards. I told them that while many don’t eat because there is nothing for them to eat, others stop eating because they want to; because if there was anything that Chavez had plenty of it was food. Then they criticized me for expressing myself in such a way. I responded, "I am not a diplomat, nor a damned politician. I am only a worker, and as such must express what I feel, think and want in the best way I know how."

When Chavez decided to end his hunger strike because he had become too weak, it occurred to him (or he was advised) to tell everyone there during the daily 5pm mass that he would starve himself to death if necessary, unless everyone took an oath not to commit any acts of violence.

And everyone there at that moment swore what he asked, putting an end to his hunger strike.