The Art of Protest: The United Farm Workers and the Delano Grape Strike | BRIdge from the Past

0:00 Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bridge from the Past. Art across US history. This series is for students like you to get ahead in your US. History class just by looking at pictures. Believe it or not, images tell us a lot about the American story. Today we’re looking at images of the Delano Grape Strike to help us think about how protest can be used to call for change.

0:21 Let’s jump in. Before you look at any images, here are three things that we need to know. First of all, in California in the past and in the current day, agriculture is kind of a big deal. So I say that’s a little tongue in cheek, but it really is a huge part of their economy.

0:43 The climate, especially of the South Central Valley, is prime for growing things like grapes, lettuce, peas, a lot of produce, a lot of nuts come from this region. And Delano, which the Delano grape strike is named for, is in the South Central Valley region of California. Growers in this region, again, even in the present day, rely on migrant workers to do a lot of the harvesting.

1:07 We’ve talked about migrant workers before on Bridge from the Past. This is really difficult backbreaking work to bend over in the field all day long, picking whatever is harvesting at that time. And by nature, a migrant worker is always on the move to whatever needs to be harvested at that time. So they’re not ever settling in one place, which would say make it difficult if

1:31 you’re trying to organize a group of these people. And lastly, spoiler alert. The Delano grape strike lasts from 1965 to 1970 and it ends with a victory for the farm workers. So the grape growers signing in contracts for the first time. So workers do get better pay, they get some benefits and they do get some protections.

1:52 So that’s just a little bit of context. And now let’s jump into some images. So here is our point of departure. UFW. So I know this stands for United Farm Workers. So this is the group that’s going to be behind this strike of grapes. And this image is pretty straightforward, it’s pretty simple.

2:13 It’s black and white, it looks like an eagle. It looks like he has sort of stepped wings here on the side. So that’s kind of interesting. I’m not sure what all that is about. So I don’t know where did the UWF come from? How did they get involved in the strike? I have a lot of questions. Let’s see if I can get some answers by looking at some pictures here.

2:38 I mentioned that before, we’ve looked at migrant workers on Bridge From the Past. So these two images on the screen here were actually taken by Dorothea Lang in 1937. So sort of in the middle of the Great Depression. And over here on the left you have Filipino migrant workers harvesting lettuce. On the right you have a Mexican migrant worker holding his child.

2:59 There’s another little girl, sort of in this shanty shack home that they’re living in in 1937. So you can see there’s a lot of poverty in the life of a migrant worker. And you can also see this stoop labor. So these men so it’s also worth pointing out these are all men. The Filipino workers are bending over, harvesting lettuce.

3:20 So it’s really difficult backbreaking work. It doesn’t pay well, very long hours. A lot of these workers live on the actual land that’s owned by the growers. So the growers would actually deduct their rent, very high rents from their paychecks. They’re around chemicals a lot with the pesticides used on the crops. So it’s very difficult, really difficult backbreaking work.

3:43 This picture here of a woman and a child picking teas is from 1966. So not a heck of a lot has changed in almost 30 years. The life of a migrant worker is still dangerous. It’s still very hard work, and there’s still a lot of poverty. Enter our labor organizers.

4:04 So in the story of the grape strike, here are three important people to know. So this first figure right here with the glasses, smoking this amazing cigar, this is Larry Itliong, and he’s actually a Filipino American. So in that very first picture, we saw Filipino workers and we saw Mexican workers. So in what would happen a lot with these

4:25 migrant workers is that groups would be played off of one another. So if Filipino workers tried to strike, mexican workers would be used to break the strike and vice versa. And growers would do that on purpose. So he is an organizer of Filipino workers, and he is going to join first is with this man right here. This is Caesar Chavez. So he and this woman right here, Dolores Huerta, were organizing Mexican migrant workers

4:50 to demand changes, to demand protections, better pay for these migrant farm workers. So Caesar Chavez is usually more known than Dolores Huerta. He’s very soft spoken. He’s sort of the public face. He’s going to become the public face of this strike. Huerta was really brilliant with details and organizing, and you really couldn’t have one without the other.

5:13 So these are the three people who sort of say, look, our people, these migrant workers, we have a really difficult time and we need to strike. And Larry Itliong is actually the person who starts the strike, and he convinces Caesar Chavez and where to join with them. All right, so here are some people that we need to know. So what happens next?

5:35 So Caesar Chavez in particular was a firm believer in nonviolence. He studies Gandhi. He studies Martin Luther King. So again, this is 1965, and the civil rights movement is in full swing. The Montgomery bus boycott has already happened. It’s been successful. So Chavez is studying these tactics. He wants a nonviolent protest.

5:57 He wants to make sure that he’s going to sort of follow the model of these two men. So what he does is he stages march from Delano, California all the way to Sacramento. That’s over 300 miles. So that’s quite a long way to march. And you can see we have the press here with their cameras. I have someone here filming.

6:19 So he’s got press attention. He’s going to draw attention to what’s going on here. We can also I’m going to try to zoom in for you here. I’m going to zoom in here and we can see a little bit more of who’s actually striking. So I have young men, I have women. There’s a priest here. You can see right in the front, I have the Virgin of Guadalupe.

6:41 So that’s a significant religious, cultural symbol for Mexicans and Mexican Americans. So there’s an element of faith, of culture, of pride. Here you can see people wearing armbands, carrying the Mexican flag, carrying the American flag. You can see that eagle again. So this is the symbol. It’s going to become the symbol of the National Farm Workers Association,

7:05 which is the group that Chavez and Huerta had formed. So these people are marching peacefully to basically demand changes for migrant workers in California.

7:26 So here what I can see is this is a poster for a benefit in 1968 at Carnegie Hall. Oops, I kind of crossed it out, in New York City. And over here on this fabulous late 1960s car, I can see a bumper sticker that says, don’t eat grapes, with sort of grapes looking like a skeleton. So what I can take from these images is that these tactics that are being used by

7:51 these strikers are gaining attention and are gaining widespread support. So I have significant entertainers putting on benefit concerts. I have what I would assume is an ordinary person with a bumper sticker drawing attention to this cause. So the momentum is sort of gaining and gaining and gaining on this slide. I have now an artist actually creating art

8:14 to support, as it says on the bottom here, support the United Farm Workers Union. So it’s right down here. And this is from 1973. So this is after the grape strike ends. And it was successful. But what I can take from this is that the movement sort of continued and they won some victories in 1970, but in fact, United Farm Workers is going to go on and keep working for better

8:38 conditions for farm workers and migrant workers. This image is really interesting. I can see again, I have that eagle. So this is basically the logo of the United Farm Workers. And this is the group that’s formed when Larry Itliong and Chavez and Huerta just sort of join forces and say, okay, we’re going to work together and we’re

8:59 going to strike, and we’re going to try to have people boycott grapes. People throughout. We’re going to draw attention to our cause. Even if people just refuse to eat grapes that will help our cause. And that’s actually what ends up happening. So this is the logo of the farm workers. So the stepped pyramid here refers to the Aztec stepped pyramids in Mexico.

9:23 And you can see here, this man here crushing the grapes which are bleeding, right? To refer to sort of the hardship of the workers who actually harvest grapes that come to say, a table of some family in Washington, DC or New York City. And he has sort of this mesoamerican headdress on. So there’s this real pride in what’s been accomplished, pride in this cultural legacy.

9:47 But there’s also this idea of the work is going continues on, even though they were successful in getting some gains for labor in 1970. So all of that to say, what do these images tell us about protest and creating change? Is there an art to a protest?

10:08 Is there a certain way that you need to go about it? I would love to know your thoughts on this. You can leave us a comment below. And I’ll also read you one final quote from Caesar Chavez. The whole essence of nonviolent action is getting a lot of people involved. Vast numbers doing little things.

10:28 That’s all we have time for on today’s episode. Please, if you like this video, if you learned something, go ahead and like us. Punch that like button down there. Subscribe to our channel. I’m back every other Thursday with the new primary source to talk you through. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all the pages. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks so much.

10:49 And until next time, take care.