Free The Crusades of Cesar Chavez by Miriam Pawel Page A

boycotters quickly went to work. While Chavez nursed his bad back, labor and religious leaders helped boycotters build coalitions among students, politicians, housewives, and business tycoons. They created serious havoc and soon demonstrated that the consumer boycott Chavez had rejected a few months earlier offered the best prospect for success.
    The creative peskiness of the best boycotters knew no limit. Priests sat in produce aisles and prayed over grapes. Picketers held candlelight protests outside the homes of supermarket executives. Supporters bought shares in Safeway and Jewel supermarkets and disrupted annual meetings. Boycotters stalled cars to block supermarket parking lot entrances. Shoppers loaded carts with frozen goods on the bottom, piles of cans on top, and then asked at the checkout counter whether the store carried grapes. Receiving the affirmative answer they expected, they abandoned their carts in protest.
    Again, Chavez had taken a law his adversaries had seen as protection for the industry and turned it against them. Farmworkers were excluded from the protection of the National Labor Relations Act—but that meant they also were immune from its prohibitions against secondary boycotts. That allowed the union to picket entire stores. Instead of asking consumers not to buy grapes, they could ask them not to shop at stores that sold the fruit. The mantra of the boycott became one that was difficult for many people to ignore: please don’t shop at this store so that farmworkers can earn a decent living and have toilets and water in the fields.
    Chavez, a skilled pool player who had learned the game as a child on the table left over from his father’s failed store, used the boycott as a carom shot. By pressuring a few major supermarket chains, the boycott aimed to make life so uncomfortable for the stores that they in turn would pressure growers to solve their labor problems.
    The new boycott alarmed growers. They appealed for help to a sympathetic Republican administration in Sacramento, where Ronald Reagan had become governor in 1967 after defeating Pat Brown.
    “They are immoral 5 to boycott grapes!” Reagan exclaimed at a June 5, 1968, cabinet meeting when his agriculture secretary, Earl Coke, explained the boycott.
    “We have little to fight with,” Coke explained.
    “This is simple blackmail,” Reagan replied. “What will it do to the grape market?”
    Coke told him prices were already $1 less per crate than a year ago because of the threat. Reagan said he would reach out to the Teamsters, with whom he had a close relationship, and see if they could help the growers. Coke’s sympathies were clear; he had been vice president of Spreckels Sugar and had run a company that imported braceros. “We don’t know how to get at it,” he told Reagan a few weeks later. “If the boycott spreads, 6 we will have growers who are innocent go broke.”
    In 1969, after suffering through the boycott for one season, a handful of growers in the Coachella Valley asked for mediation help from the administration of President Richard Nixon, who had proudly eaten grapes a year earlier during his campaign. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service set up the first direct talks, a milestone, although they mainly convinced each side of the other’s intransigence. The Delano growers, unhappy about any negotiations, turned the talks to their advantage: the Whittaker Baxter public relations firm assured supermarkets that a resolution was imminent and they should restock grapes. The boycott’s effectiveness dipped precipitously, 7 from affecting 18 percent of sales to only 3 percent.
    Chavez did not attend talks with the Coachella growers. He did not think they were serious, and he was holding out for the more important Delano growers. “We are the ones who should be negotiating from power 8 and they are the ones acting as if they have all the power,” Chavez said as he broke off negotiations.
    The 1969 harvest was