400-8000 -- 408,316 gave their lives. thank you. [applause] >> thank you ladies and gentlemen. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> saturday, join american history tv on c-span3. .e will be live president obama is expected to join the opening ceremony for the smithsonian's newest museum on the national mall.

on theer teaches a class strike of the mid-1960's and their place in the larger civil rights movement. it eventually became the united arm workers. he describes the connection between the local history and the national civil rights movement. class is about 90 minutes. tonight, we will be talking about the strike in the bigger larger context of u.s. history, labor history, civil rights history. in terms of logistics and how the evening will go, i will talk about the topic and say a few words about my own research and how i came to pursue a topic in civil rights history and we will talk about a document i had you read before coming to class.

and we will talk a little about your oral histories as --. i want to start off by saying a few general remarks, things i hope you take away from the course of the evening. i will be argumentative and try to be bold in my statements. i will say that when we study the great strike that it is one of the most significant, important labor and civil rights movements for not only mexican-americans but also filipino americans in the 20th century. some might even take it a step further and say the united farmworkers conducted the most successful boycott in all of u.s. labor history since the beginning of this country. it's a really landmark significant event on a national and international scale.

another take away i want you to leave with tonight is this is a u.s. history survey course and if you think about everything you have learned up until this point, much of it has been focused on the american south. we started talking about the end of slavery, the reconstructive period about how slaves were reconstructed as free men and women into society. we talked about northern industrialism that we haven't talked a lot about the american west. we talked about the conquest of the west, the incorporation of native americans into reservations, but we haven't talked a lot about the american west and that is one way i wanted thing about tonight's lecture is that we are trying to integrate the american west into stories about the u.s. in the 20th century. in terms of civil rights history, you might recall last week we talked about two things,

the cold war as the struggle between the u.s. and the soviet union or between capitalism and communism. we connected this to civil rights because the things occur simultaneously. the cold war created a context for people of color, african-americans, to progress in terms of their rights under the government because communist countries were using the conditions of black people as propaganda. you would have the soviet union and china putting out propaganda, highlighting how poorly people of color were treated domestically in the united states. one response was let's make sure we have civil rights for african-americans. much of that history we spoke about last week focused on african-americans, the american

south and not necessarily the american west. as you leave tonight, a lot of your oral history simon's -- assignments talked about reform labor movement. know what you are doing is part of a larger effort by historians to capture the story of the american west. how does it reflect two broad themes within u.s. history. i went to start the evening by telling your story and trying to unmask myself a bit. and how i came to do my own research. i will start by telling you a story. many of you will go on to transfer to university. you might find yourself taking classes down and bakersfield. you will be in the walter stern library. that is who this man is. one of the most fascinating stories for me was finding a quote he said in the late 1970's.

he was a democrat, very progressive, had the support of labor unions in the central valley where he represented for over two decades. upon receiving an award, he said "this award doesn't matter because 100 years from now, only to names will be remembered from bakersfield and those names are boko went and caesar salad this -- caesar shabbos. if your viewer from l.a. or the san francisco bay area. bakersfield has a reputation of being a cultural backwater. for stern's point, even know he had been in the state capital trying to make things happen, his contributions to history were marginal, dwarfed by buck

owens and cesar chavez. we did talk about the okie migration. a few lectures ago we talked about how the great depression was solved by new deal policies. we talked about aaa, the agriculture adjustment act, and the federal government sending money into farming communities to stop production. people find themselves out of work and they stay in these southern states or join the migrant work in california. buck owens kind of symbolized the story of the okies, their westward movement, and their upward mobility. buck owens is an internationally renowned country music singer. he passed away about a decade ago. his music along with other

country music artists simply -- exemplified the bakersfield sound, which differentiated bakersfield as a site that produced a lot of great country stars. the story of the okies was large. it is something i couldn't necessarily relate to but i found interesting. of course the other side of stern's comment is about cesar chavez. here in this image you see him on the cover of time magazine in 1969 and the way that pundits and journalists referred to shah this is he symbolized -- shop as is he symbolized the awakening of latinos in the u.s. or the awakening of mexican-americans specifically. the way that journalists often refer to people of mexican descent living in the u.s. at this times, they called them the sleeping giant.

what does that really mean? what it meant at the time and someone argued it has application for today, is that latinos aren't necessarily politically active. they don't tend to be involved in civic affairs. that was the stereotype at the time. shabbos was absolutely blowing this up, the people at the bottom of society were set only becoming engaged in fighting for their rights, working conditions. also mobilizing for politicians. we will talk about this later. one of the best friends of the shabbos family is the kennedy family. starting with john and robert and their children. my point is shot this is challenging -- shah this is challenging that stereotype so there is this awakening of latinos in the 1960's.

when i was a college student, i started to read history. this shaped my learning as a student of history. when i went to graduate school, i went to graduate school at uc santa barbara in they make you read a lot of books in graduate school and i will talk about some of the most important books i read and how it relates to what we are talking about but i want to tell you a bit about my family. a lot of you did family histories and i kind of feel it's unfair you don't know a little about my family and why i'm making you do this assignment. my mother's family, this is a picture of my mother's family. her mother is one of the babies sitting on the left.

they were displaced from mexico in 1910 after the mexican revolution as were many mexican families who wanted to avoid the problems of a war-torn country. in this image, it was taken across the border and you can see they are very well-dressed in the early 1920's. this is a photograph later in the 1940's of the descendents of that same family. my grandmother is the woman in the upper left-hand corner. when they came to the united states, they came as farmworkers. they went to southern california and worked in oranges for many years and eventually, my grandmother migrated up to the central valley where we are today and she married my grandfather and they lived in button willow. it is about 20 miles west of

bakersfield and it was a company town. you have to think back a few lectures. the company town was a small town more or less founded by companies and their workers. but will know was a product of the miller looks company. i mentioned that company in one of our earlier lectures. it was based out of san francisco and they owned much of the land and they raised cattle. my grandfather worked as an accountant for that company. that is some of the story of how my mother's family came to settle in the central valley. they had a connection to agriculture. i will come back and say a little more about my grandmother but let me talk about my father's side. my father's side of the family, they were not displaced by the mexican revolution but they

migrated as railroads were -- workers. think that to some of our earlier lectures in the growth of railroads during the industrial age, i mention the railroads not only went east to west but north to south. from chicago downtown paso and south into mexico. there was no border prior to nine to 24. -- 1924. my family crossed in the 1870's and the sons would follow their fathers and they wound up working at the southern pacific railroad station in southeast bakersfield. it is basically like a historical relic. there were lots of folks in bakersfield that what to make that old depot into a historical monument. there was not a lot of money out there for it now. it's a historical relic. this is the men who worked on the railroad.

that was my father's side. through looking at my own family, one of the scenes that for my mother's side, you have the connections to agriculture and you kind of had a more urban and industrial history. i asked myself, this doesn't fit within that polemic i was talking about at the start of the lecture. this is an okie history, necessarily connected to the united farmworkers. i had to ask myself does the history matter at all and what i came to find out is that it did and that is what i want to unpack for you. let me explain about how i came to that process. after i graduated from college at berkeley, i started graduate school first at cal state bakersfield and then i

transferred to uc santa barbara. i was always attracted to colonial history but couldn't imagine myself researching the records of peer it tends or --. tens or slaves, ship wreckers. i wanted to do something that was closer to home that i could connect to. i was always fascinated by the civil rights movement. the image you see is 1960 three, martin luther king jr. and the march on washington for jobs and justice. martin luther king jr. as a community organizer got his start after the brown versus board of education decision. you remember the brown decision overturned the fluffy decision which had sanctioned racial segregation since 1896 and we talked a lot last week about

oral war and -- earl arren who said that it created this superiority complex amongst children. and we talked about massive resistance, white southerners not wanting to overturn the system of racial segregation. enter king in the southern christian leadership conference and they started to try to integrate society in the south. one of their first target was busing. they used a boycott of the southern busing system. in montgomery, alabama. you had large numbers of african-americans who rode the bus every day to go to work. what they did was encouraged those african-americans not to ride the bus and not affected the bottom-line of those busing companies and they couldn't

segregate anymore because they were losing money so that was a major victory for king and his organization and from 1956, they went on to try to integrate other industries in the south. it culminated in 1964 when the federal government will pass the first civil rights legislation that really has some teeth and then the voting rights act in 1965. as interesting as i found that history, as someone from bakersfield, i kind of view this as another country. i have ever been to the south. the story is very black-and-white. i have some trouble connecting to it even if i find it interesting and fascinating to read. other things that got me going as a student of history where the stories of malcolm x and the struggle for black people to secure rights and liberties and economic the end the north.

-- in the north. as fascinating as that is, it's in northern story. he is a muslim. ima lapsed catholic so i had some trouble connecting to the story even if i found it fascinating. for the purposes of our class tonight, one of the things you might note about a difference between malcolm max and martin luther king junior and this relates to cesar chavez, martin king was a practitioner of nonviolent. the boycott itself is a strategy of protest through nonviolence.

king believed in the power of love and moral persuasion, that you can shame your enemy into changing their ways. welcome x had a different philosophy of protest. he believed if you were being attacked violently by the state or the ku klux klan or racist neighbors, you were perfectly within your right to defend yourself by violence if necessary. again, another dichotomy there i found interesting but have some trouble relating to. as i progressed in graduate school, i was fortunate enough to read some books that helped to broaden my perspective and horizons about how the story of the american west fits within that civil rights narrative we have been talking about. i want to lay out some of the themes because they connect and really concrete ways to the work you guys are doing. randy shaw in 2008 published a book called beyond the fields. at this time, i had just

finished some of my course work at uc santa barbara and came back to bakersfield to do some research and i got to teach a class at the university and assigned some of the scholars and his book was one of them. he had a great thesis and it was basically that some of the most progressive social justice movement in recent history in america have been directly linked to the united farmworkers. when you look at the lgbtq movement, immigrant rights, justice for janitors, the growth of latino california politics, all these organizers were trained first in delano. that is what the brilliance of this book is. you have to connect the legacy of the farmworkers movement to

these other social justice movement struggles. frank bartee, these are people who were community organizers who went on to write books about the work they had done in their career. his story is super interesting. he was a berkeley student, anglo man fluent in spanish and eventually dropped out of school to pursue farm work it self. he was very attracted to the union and helped to organize farmers and the salinas valley. this book is about 800 pages. it's really long but some of the more interesting facets of the book that people are really attracted to is one of the tensions that exist within the

farmworker movement story and that is a tension between a union and strikebreakers or a union and what a lot of you talk about, undocumented labor. we talked a bit about the program in this class. many of you are defendants of russet arrows. the program was the world war ii labor program that introduced guest workers to come in and fill the labor shortage in the fields during the war and the program ended up lasting through the 1960's and made organizing farmworkers very difficult. it is hard to form a union that is affected -- effective when growers can bring in undocumented workers to break strikes. so that was a problem, a tension between the farmworkers movement story and the story of a doctor and peoples. this book is one of the first text to really bring that to light.

two other books i think are important in trying to understand this history, marion paul, a former journalist for the los angeles times. her book interviews a handful of people who were key activists. it's a multiracial group. she interviews latinos, filipinos, mexicans. she captures their story and tries to argue that in order to understand the history of the union, you need the stories of ordinary people. the story of the farmworker movement is much broader than cesar chavez. there are ordinary people who made the movement go. she also wrote one of the first biographies of cesar chavez from birth to death. two books also that i read that were really critical in understanding the diverse -- diversity of the farmers rights

movement, this looks at the alliances between african-americans and the dfw. the black -- black panther party helped run boycotts in california community, especially in the bay area. her book kind of walks you through how african-americans interpreted and aligned themselves and in some cases didn't align themselves with united farmworkers. below contributions from this text in my mind is he chronicles the history of the boycott as a strategy. when you think about the

farmworkers and the strategy of protest they use, there are two that are defining, the strike and the boycott. a strike is to not go to the worksite, to try to keep people from crossing the picket line. that is how you affect your employer. you set up a picket line, go on strike. the hard part is you have to convince your people not to cross that picket line. that is one of strategies that one of the more influential strategies was the boycott. that is what his book talks about. how the boycott emerged as a tragedy. it is when you prevent the consumption of a particular

product. while you go outside of this classroom and look across the field, what do you see? do the people of delano consume all of those greats? no, it's a world market. they sent for farmworkers from delano to new york, chicago, canada, europe where all the marketplace was for california table grapes and they want to stores, consumers, and convinced them not to buy those grapes because if you did, what were you doing? you were reinforcing inhumane working conditions for farmworkers. his text talked about the evolution of the boycott strategy. to recap that, these are some of the books i read in graduate school that i like a lot but still i have some trouble

relating to it because as a mention with my own family, my father's side, we work farmworkers. many of you talked to people who were supporters with a union and others who were ambivalent and in some cases hostile to the union. i think we will talk about that towards the end of class. i want to talk a bit about my own research. i was painting the picture for you about the research that is out there and how i carved out a small space for myself as a historian researching labor and civil rights in the west. one of the defining things you have to do is you have a primary source and the person you talk to. as i started today go around in the archives, i found some cool stuff and i just want to share a few pieces of this with you. this particular image comes from downtown bakersfield in 1965 and

this is a memorial march in solidarity with martin luther king jr. before he was assassinated. this is 1965. this is before he is assassinated. so it is a march to show solidarity. what happened at this event was a recognition of what was happening, not only with the strike, but with a broader agenda of what was happening locally.

ticket 1000 people in the street is not easy. and it there was organization locally called the current coalition for civic unity. and they are the ones that organized the strike. so as they started to research -- as i started to research more, i and covered a treasure trove of material. this group had been in bakersfield since the 1940's and had been active in organizing people of color to integrate bakersfield in a variety of ways. i will highlight a few of them. this is since the 1940's and 1950's. that is fascinating, because when i studied labor rights in the west, all you really hear about is the story of cesar chavez, you do not find out that there was a deeper concurrent movement that was happening on the ground locally. what i argue in my research, is that in order to understand the

legacy of the civil rights history in this part of the american west must central california -- west, central california, you need to understand the connection to the local urban history i will describe to you. as i mentioned, the kcc you -- kccu promoted integration, that was their agenda. what is racial integration? that is a term, so let's give it meaning. let's talk about schools, because that is the easiest way. so, one of the chapters in my dissertation had to do with the desegregation of the bakersfield city school district. i mentioned this last week that the bakersfield city school started -- school district today is the largest in california today and it is a very large district and in this particular photograph, this comes from potomac school 1953. it is hard to see the date.

but you see the teacher and you see the students. and what do you notice about the students? if you look at their faces? they are children of color, you see african-american boys and girls and some mexicans sprinkled throughout. my father, who i showed this picture to come it is the little boy at the top with two patches. that is my father. my father had seven siblings and they all went to these schools. and as i was doing research for my dissertation i started talking to my aunts and uncles, like many of you did in oral history. and i look at the yearbooks and it was a wonderful experience because i knew what racial segregation was, but to see it in these photographs was a very powerful. so again, my family attended predominantly racially

segregated schools, black and latino, from the 1930's-19 50's. think about the date, this is 1953 and prior to the brown decision. this is california and we talk about the mendez case, remember that from last week? southern california, 1947, the mexican schools overturn and it was argued you could not segregate mexican kids because they were white by the senses. california has been a progressive place, but this is something i learned in my dissertation, separating the story from -- the story of the south from the west. when you look at the american south, looking at segregation, it was segregation by law. you have white and black, the signs, you have hard at segregation by local institutions. you did not really get that out west. sociologists called it de facto segregation.

i can write these on the board, because analytically they could be useful as we do research. de facto versus de juro. it is practiced by will. what i found with doing research, that is not true. there were public policies in place of that segregated kids of color. one of them obviously is labor. you tend to live near your job and if your job does not higher people of color or only hires people of color, you will live in a certain part of town. so that is one commonality that segregated blacks and latinos shared. and another that was even more critical was something called racial covenants. we talked about it before, but i want to remind you where they are. these were agreements between

people who were buying property and selling property, that again you would not sell property to a person of color. if you are going to sell the deed on your house. there were certain parts of town where people of color were not allowed to buy property in. as i dug deeper i started to find this in bakersfield. this is another primary source that i found in my research process, this is at the library in downtown bakersfield. it is a map of bakersfield in 1940. and the brilliant thing about this particular map is it shows you city limits of bakersfield. so the city limits are the harder lines and the white inside of the dots symbolizes 20 people. and the black dots are those outside of the city. so one of the points i mentioned when i talked about the

migration was that the population of california, especially in the central valley, it dramatically grew in the 1930's and 1940's. you had okees, not just white, but black. and you also had mexicans. the cesar chavez family was displaced and if they joined the migrant trail. so, as i said the population grew dramatically in bakersfield in the 1930's and 1940's and i think that is map captures a little bit of that. my favorite part of this map is, it could be hard to say so i will walk over here, this right here -- does anybody know what this street is? i will be impressed. anybody know bakersfield yaqui? -- geography? union. do you know this one? california. very good.

you know your geography. nowadays, that part of town, if you can go to union and california in your mind, what does it look like? there is poverty, drugs, prostitution -- what was that part of town historically? this is the african-american enclave. you can see it is right outside the city limits. but the city fathers, the council, they deliberately excluded this part of the community because it was known as the negro part of town, the black part of town. and they were not allowed to buy property within the city limits. in part of my research, i looked at the struggle of that community to join the city. what are some of the benefits of being part of the city? tax benefits go with it, services, fire department, the police. all of those things become civil rights struggles for those living on the outskirts. to go back to the map, looking

across the river, you see the river on the north part of the map. i am not going to talk a lot about that area, but if anybody has been that, i remember growing up and i did not go to oildale. why not? you ask older brothers and uncles and your parents and they would tell you, well, they are not very kind to people who might look like you if you go there. it had a reputation of being what they called a sunset town, meaning if you are a person of color you did not let the sun go down on you in that community. you do not want to be cost there after dark -- caught there after dark, particularly if you are african-american. the first african-american did not attend north high until 1952. they had a very active ku klux klan chapter.

the point is, these are some of the things i was seeing as i was studying labor rights, it was connected to a deeper history of racial segregation and also racial integration. so going back to this slide, the movement was part of an organization to promote racial integration in the labor market and housing market in bakersfield. and they were also some of the biggest supporters of cesar chavez and the farmer movement. early on, when the farmers are a fledgling union, barely surviving off of donations of other people, you had an urban-based movement with attorneys, lawyers, people who had disposable income and again channeling support at that time to the national farmworkers association, which would be renamed the ufw.

a couple of other points to get you thinking about this place before we shift to other things, i mentioned in a previous lecture when we are talking about the okies, dorothea lange. she was a famous photographer working for the federal government and capturing the story of the agricultural workers, because of the depression. she was the one that took the very famous migrant mother image that you have seen. she also spent time in bakersfield. so the photos i will show you now come from her chronicling what was happening to the african-americans and the migrant population in that part of town. these are students walking home from the current high school district. and you can see where the area looked like. there were no paved roads and in some cases there was very poor sanitation and you have communities that were pretty much entirely racially segregated, so that gives you

insight into what those communities looked like prior to actually joining the city limits. i like these as well. this one shows you really what is essentially a shack that would have been rented by african-american cotton workers in cottonwood appeared which is in the southeast -- cottonwood. which is in the southeast part of bakersfield. when i see these, the thing that jumps out to me is, the condition of farmworkers and african-americans has not changed that much since the age of slavery. even by the 1940's, the standard of living is very poor. so that is the way as a historian, i connect the story of wasco, or southeast bakersfield, to the story of african-americans in the south. i start to see the connections there. this is an up close of the

previous slide with the boy standing in front of the wooden shack. this particular image gives you a sense of what the streets might have looked like, very impoverished community. and for those who interviewed farmworkers or interviewed people who were talking about experiences in mexico, again there is a point of comparison. we are analyzing poverty. on both sides of the border. a lot of you were talking about how the migration to the united states was a story of mobility upward, i do not discount that. in some cases, mobility takes generations to achieve. it does not occur with the migrants, maybe with their children. so i want to talk a little bit about the war on poverty, because again this is another subject that is very large within u.s. history and that is

a point i am getting you thinking about today, the story of how the farmworkers is connected to broader currents within u.s. history. i told you i would talk about integration in my dissertation and how they were integrating schools. i have an a in my recent -- in my research that is with poverty. lyndon johnson is elected president and assumes the presidency when john f. kennedy is assassinated. toward the end of his life, john kennedy was becoming very progressive. he was, in his early years as president, he was hesitant to overly support civil rights actors, but he definitely moved toward that prior to his assassination. so when lyndon johnson comes into office, he tried to carry forth some of the spirit of

reform that john kennedy wanted to enact. and one way that he does this is by launching what he calls the war on poverty. so when you're looking across the u.s. in the 1960's, it is a time of economic growth for certain segments of society, but for others it is not. and johnson has a belief that if we are the richest country in the world, we should not have people living in the conditions i've described to you. so in kern county, the same organization i was talking about, it was a coalition of many different organizations. one of them was called the community service organization. and the community service organization is where cesar chavez cut his teeth as an organizer, before he organized farm workers. so there was an organization in bakersfield, it was a statewide

organization and a spread beyond california. and the cso was one of the early organizations working with the civic unity movement to gain federal money to fight poverty. how you do that? how do you fight poverty? part of it is going into the communities i have been describing to you and trying to report on the conditions that people actually live in. so this fellow right here is a man who was very active within the cso. he was a community organizer in bakersfield, he did a variety of things from getting ordinary people to vote, getting them to attend city council meetings, to be aware of how local policies were affecting them. again, when they actually got federal dollars to fight poverty, they were able to go in and do very concrete programs to improve the living conditions of the people of southeast bakersfield. and they were also big

supporters of the union, of the farmworkers movement. so we can dial this back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this segment in the lecture. in the movement, we have talked about it, but we have also not talked about it. as i was trying to unpack what the story is before we talk about delano, as i said, cesar chavez in his family migrated to california and enjoyed the migrant circuit is of the depression. and a lot of you know what the migrant circuit is. you follow the crops essentially. i mentioned he became involved with the cso, the community service organization, and that is where he cut his teeth as an organizer. but the cso proved resistant to wanting to organize the farmworkers, said he left the cso in the 1960's and formed a new organization. suerta, who many of you have

heard -- delores huerta who many of you have heard of, probably one of the most prominent latinos living today. she still does work and was part of that organization. it was not a union yet. they were not quite ready when they were founded to start a union. in 1965, i know some of you know this history, the filipinos will go on strike. that is on september 8 1965. and cesar chavez will be joining the filipinos in that strike on september 16, which is a big mexican holiday. and the strike is to walk out of the fields and a protest for higher wages. and the strike is going to last five long years, and along the way i told you at the beginning of the lecture, there is a shift from the strike to the boycott of grapes. but it takes five years of the

farmworkers organizing themselves, boycotting grapes, protesting and trying to get consumers to not consume the grapes, to really get the industry to finally agree to sign contracts. it happens in 1970. so that is a short history of the u.s. -- of the organization. but i want to spend some minutes talking about the plan for delano. that is the document had you read. i think this document captures some of the spirit of the time, the spirit of the 1960's, particularly when we are talking about mexican-americans. i want to say a few words about luis before i open it up for discussion. luis velde says is it from the central valley, he went on to attend a college in the san

francisco bay area. when the strike was beginning in 1955, he made a conscience -- conscious decision to leave the bay area and his education to come to delano and work for cesar chavez paid and his contribution -- cesar chavez. in his conservations -- and his conservation's were many. he helped galvanize the movement in terms of -- when you are on a strike line all day, you need is somebody to entertain you, so people would perform skits. it was an effective way to communicate a message. many of the farmworkers were illiterate, said they did not read. so many of these plays where political in the sense they wanted to capture why it was important for farmworkers to organize. later on, his life and career,

he would go on to be a famous playwright. i mentioned that he directed a film and he has a play right now going on in san francisco and the san jose area that looks at world war ii. he is still doing great work. but he also co-authored the plan for delano with cesar chavez. it is a very short document and i drafted a few questions in a want to throw them out there and open it up for conversation and comments you might have about that particular document and how it connects to your oral history. these are five questions i posed about the document. i asked, what specific reforms were being proposed by the union? a little bit of context, in 1966, if you read at the beginning of the document, it was drafted during the march to sacramento. that is when the union was marching to sacramento to pressure the governor and the

legislature, again to pay attention to the struggles of the farmworkers. and when we are talking about a march, martin luther king jr. had marches in the south. gandhi had marches in india. and cesar chavez knew about these things, so he is implementing these in the valley. so what specific reforms are called for in the document? what does injustice mean in the document? what does revolution mean in the context of the document? religion, what role does religion play in the movement? and finally, how does the plan deal with other ethnicities or other ethnic groups? let me open it up to you guys who read the text coming into class. what were some of your reactions to this text? do not be shy.

yes. >> i noticed -- they were dehumanized. mr. rosales: dehumanization is absolutely the theme he is trying to elicit in the text. it could raise other questions that many of you could talk about in your oral history, like how hard -- how hard -- how are the farmworkers demonized? -- dehumanized? that is a question we can consider. what are some other general reactions to the text? >> them actually creating an understanding, saying they will have a change in the whole workplace, but they do not change it. they just all talk about it. and after that -- nothing really

changes. mr. rosales: yes. remember this is 1966, this is a very specific moment. your comments is related to -- what was your name? actually. what are the changes being called for? it is important to ground that in a specific. one thing they are doing is looking for recognition, they are looking for growers and recognition that there was a union. and that is one change that they are trying to call for, recognition from the employer that there actually is a union among farmworkers. >> they actually have a chance to join them in the whole -- mr. rosales: that people can join the union and employers will negotiate. what are other reactions to the text? so far we have, the idea of

workers being dehumanized and one of the changes they are calling for is union recognition. what else? >> i was reading -- i read that said they could not get everything pretty much past without using violence. one thing i did realize when i was doing the oral presentation, when i was talking to the person i interviewed. she said she was actually one of the workers that would work when they were striking and one thing they would do is throw rocks, the workers would throw rocks and insult them for working. mr. rosales: this is an important issue and there are some people that talk about this. during the strike, this was before the boycott, if you ever go into the fields it is very large. to set up a picket line is difficult in the field. imagine a picket line of not only farmers, but college kids people from out of town and

trying to prevent workers from going in to the worksite. how can you do that? you can shout, scream, say come join the struggle, but many people do not want to join because they want to work and they need to feed their families. they are scared. any people talk about fear in the oral histories. and here is another point about the balance. -- violence. any people who participated in the movement, like many social movements of the time, were compelled to use tactics that were in some cases violent or

destroying property. this is why cesar chavez was important. he held together the union based on nonviolence. if in fact people in his movement were being violent, he was able to pressure them to stop the behavior. how? he did not use this tactic, probably the most famous person who used this was gandhi. gandhi d colonized -- decolonized india from great britain. one way he kept the peace was he said he would fast until death, unless his followers stop being violent. they need to be peaceful. let them leave, you do not need to throw rocks or bombs. again, what you are hinting at is a reality during the strike, that it was very tense on the strike lines. and violence goes both ways. a lot of people in this room in the oral histories, they talk about violence from the police and sheriff and from the growers, for those on the picket line. so it goes both ways. but cesar chavez wanted to keep the peace.

it was a struggle for him. he -- a very good point. the reaction to the text? these are very good so far. other reactions? yes? >> you know how there are people who would prefer not to be violent at all, what about the people that are too passive and they accept it out of fear? they do not care. mr. rosales: let me respond. one thing you should know and i definitely think cesar chavez understood this, because i encourage everyone before you die, or even over the summer, go to lapaz, which is the headquarters of the united farm workers. they have cesar chavez's office, just the way it is since he passed away. he only had an eighth grade

education, but when you walk into his office -- he was highly educated, highly literate. to answer your quest, nonviolence is not being passive. nonviolence is a strategy. it is shaming the enemy into changing their ways. again, cesar chavez was not passive, the ufw through nonviolent strategies was not passive. they wanted to engage the public and the media to get people to cover this story. this is why internationally and nationally people today are studying delano historically, because it was a special moment of activism for the sleeping giant we talked about. and me talk about fear. i got this from the oral histories. for some families, they were undocumented. for those not part of the union, fair was a driver of them during this time.

they did not want to go join the union because there was a fear of being promised -- punish by their employer. and people talk about the fear of assaulted. it tended to work more with, where it can they feared being fired or deported. those are some of the big fears that people who lived this history, something that they reported. and i made this comment in your papers for those that talked about fear as a theme to focus on, because this goes for all workers in this country. when you look at the history of labor, we talk about the homestead strike in the 1890's, where the workers talked over -- took over the steelworks. it was crushed by the employer and guards.

so again, the idea of joining a union and the fear of doing that, it took courage to do that. but at the same point, i understand the other side and why people went to work. my grandmother was not a supporter of the union. she took it as a point of pride, as a consumer, to not be told by anybody where she could and could not shop. that was her view. these are good comments. others? again, i've questions -- i have questions on the board. maybe i should pick on some of you. clarissa, you had a chance to work with students in your tutor sessions for this class. could you say some remarks about what are some of the issues you saw the students engaging with? >> a big part of the movement

was the fact that violence did happen when on strike and it was a part of what we discussed about it and it happened with some of my family members -- my grandparents when they were working, they were assaulted by some of the people that were on strike.