Clean Revolution

ONE EVENING early last week Marcos Munoz and four fellow California farmworkers stood in front of DeMoulas's Supermarket in Lawrence, Mass., asking patrons to shop elsewhere. DeMoulas had twice broken a promise to Munoz that he would stop carrying grapes for the duration of the national grape boycott, so the farmworkers decided to picket the store until DeMoulas signed a written agreement.

The adversaries--supermarket and picketers--seemed woefully mismatched. The store was brightly lit, cleanly efficient, inviting. Sturdy, serious teenage boys, carrying packages from the outside conveyor belt to the cars waiting along the curb, hustled past the picketers who circled slowly and unevenly along the length of the storefront.

The farmworkers distributed wordy mimeographed leaflets explaining the connection between grapes on the shelves in Lawrence and exploitation of farm labor in Delano, California. But the shoppers seemed unimpressed. Most of theim ignored the leaflets or grabbed at them perfunctorily to avoid an eye to eye confrontation with the picketers. Those who did stop were generally confused. They weren't going to buy grapes anyway, so why shouldn't they shop there? Wasn't this a secondary boycott, and wasn't that illegal? When the store closed at ten o'clock, the picketers tallied the two, three, or five shoppers they had each turned away, added to the total a few who might have seen the picket line from the parking lot and gone to shop elsewhere--and counted the evening a relative success.

Munoz, New England coordinator for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers Union, stayed well past closing time talking with a group of Puerto Ricans from the large public housing project opposite the supermarket. Speaking rapidly and easily in Spanish, he explained that DeMoulas was making lots of money on the Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood, but that there were no Puerto Ricans employed in the store, at least not in the front counters. Munoz, a disarmingly affable Mexican-American, spoke enthusiastically about the pressure the Puerto Ricans could bring against DeMoulas, urging them to help their fellow Spanish-speaking Americans who were suffering, 3000 miles away, just so that DeMoulas could make a few extra dollars. If the Puerto Ricans would all shop at the First National Supermarket a few blocks away, Munoz told them, DeMoulas could quickly be brought to his knees.

FOR THE PAST eight months Munoz, his wife and son, and the other four farmworkers have been living in a church-donated house in Roxbury, on a $5 per person weekly allowance from the union. Their task is Herculean--to clear the grapes out of every supermarket, fruit stand, and corner food store in New England. But Munoz is remarkably sanguine about his chances. He claims that the number of grapes coming into Boston has already been cut by about 40 percent, and that all of the major chain stores inside route 128 have been cleared. The fruit stands and smaller stores have proved much harder to crack. And some chain stores, like DeMoulas's tend to backslide after the picketers have left. But most of the larger supermarkets, Munoz reports, fall into line at even the mention of possible picketing.

Munoz's effort is part of the third and largest boycott that the Chavez union has attempted since it first went out on strike against Delano Vineyards in September of 1965. Similar groups of farmworkers have been stationed in large cities throughout the country.

That the union which he helped organize in 1962 has come far enough to mount an effective coordinated national effort in such a short time is a source of pride, almost awe to Munoz. He recalls first meeting Cesar Chavez in the early sixties: "He was just a bum like the rest of us. We were working down in Bakersfield picking potatoes. Chavez started talking around and we decided none of us could make it any longer on the wages we were getting. We knew we had to do something--get organized or something."

Chavez, Munoz and several other Mexican-Americans from the Delano area then began to lay the groundwork for the National Farm Workers' Union. Beginning in the Mexican-American community in the small farm town of Delano, they established a credit union and a food cooperative, and began making plans for further community services. Then, in 1965, the Filipino grape pickers in the Delano area spontaneously went out on strike. The National Farm Workers were unprepared for the move, with only $52.50 in the union treasury, but voted anyway to join the Filipinos in a massive walkout of some 5000 grape pickers.

SINCE THE first strike, and a wine boycott against the Schenley company, the farmworkers have held and won union elections on seven of the grape ranches in the area, including Schenley and the California giant, DiGiorgio Farms. The remaining holdouts have proven more resistant, and the target of the present boycott, Giumarra Vineyards, has issued statements indicating that it never intends to negotiate with the Farm Workers on any basis. Still, the union has established itself in California as the strongest organization of agricultural workers since the thirties.

Munoz claims that the success of the Farm Workers' Union in resisting the growers' attempts first to ignore it, and then to destroy it has enormously boosted the confidence of Mexican-American migrant workers. "In the old days," Munoz relates, "the boss told us we were cows and we just smiled and said nothing. They can't get away with that now."

For many of the strikers, the union represents the first chance to establish a settled, reasonably stable community. Like a number of California's two million Mexican-Americans, Munoz was born in Mexico, but came to this country when he was thirteen to join the stream of migrant fruit and cotton harvesters. Whether migrating, or working at seasonal labor in the Delano area, he had no job security, no defense against the high risk of injury in the fields. One of the union's first moves was to write a life insurance policy for every member, and each union contract signed so far contains carefully spelled-out guarantees of employment security.

In the past, too, there was bitter friction among the racial minorities in California's central valley. If the Mexican-American was not as good as the white man, Munoz explains, at least he felt better than the black. But when the Farm Workers Union launched its attack on the growers--the core of Anglo economic power in central California--and when the union won several significant victories, the Mexican-Americans began to see their fight as a part of a larger struggle of the rich against the poor. "Now I know I'm a black man, too," says Munoz.

"THERE IS NO such thing as a middle class in this country," he argues, "There's just two ways--rich and poor. Right now the poor are still fighting the poor and the richos are just sitting up there laughing."

The tendency among Chavez' strikers to split the world into rich and poor has strained relations between the United Farm Workers and their sister AFL-CIO unions. In 1965, Chavez' National Farm Workers Association joined the AFL-CIO simply because it could not survive without large-scale financial aid. There is no question that a $5000 monthly contribution by the United Auto Workers has kept the Farm Workers above water. But, as Munoz puts it, many of the farmworkers feel that "the man who makes $50 a day cannot ever understand the man who makes $5."

The cooperation of the local AFL-CIO continues to be important to Munoz' boycott--farmworkers have been given an office and office supplies gratis in the AFL-CIO building downtown, and several locals make contributions fairly regularly. But misunderstandings are common. Several times this summer when local unions received no acknowledgment for their contributions, they wrote irate letters citing the farmworkers for lack of gratitude. But before this month, Munoz was often the only man in the office for long periods of time. And he could not acknowledge the contributions because he does not read or write.

IN THE PAST MONTH, the grape strikers have become increasingly concerned over the probability of Nixon's election. Whereas Humphrey has endorsed the boycott, Nixon has strongly opposed it, terming it "a descent into lawlessness."

Particularly galling to the farmworkers was Nixon's remark that the boycott was "illegal and unnecessary" because "we have a National Labor Relations Board to impartially supervise the election of collective bargaining agents and to safeguard the rights of organizers." In fact, as every farmworker is well aware, the National Labor Relations Act specifically excludes agricultural labor from protection, as does every significant piece of labor legislation passed since 1935.

On another occasion, in a speech in Fresno, California, Nixon ate a symbolic bunch of grapes and told the crowd "I will eat California grapes and drink the product of those grapes whenever I can."

If Nixon wins, and tries to block the United Farmworkers, Munoz says, there could be violence in the struggle which so far has been remarkably non-violent. More militant Mexican-American groups--particularly the followers of New Mexico firebrand Reyes Tijerina--have scored the farmworkers for sticking to peaceful, non-violent tactics. Chavez has insisted on non-violence, even calling off organization in areas where the threat of violence on the part of the growers seemed too high. But as Munoz puts it, "A donkey can only carry on so long before he starts kicking."