Voices Unheard

Documentary sheds light on the United Farm Workers movement in Texas

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By Rudy Arispe

Blanca Rojas could not have been more than 3 years old when she was introduced to migrant life, although her earliest memories of being surrounded by vast acres of Michigan strawberry fields are happy ones. Because she was too young to work, the toddler sat patiently in the middle of the field as she stuffed her tummy with the plump, juicy strawberries and watched as her father, mother, two brothers and six sisters packed their small pails while toiling under the hot sun. But at age 10, it was her turn.

That’s when her father, Antonio, a native of Léon, Guanajuato, Mexico, began taking Rojas with him during her summer breaks to pick cucumbers and squash in the Rio Grande Valley. Up at 5 a.m., she made sure to eat a big breakfast, knowing that breaks would be few. Then she would pack her lunch, which consisted of a few tacos along with a Thermos of water.

“We started working right before the sun came up and worked until the sun went down,” says the 32-year-old Weslaco native who now calls San Antonio home. “It was pretty unbearable. I remember my fingers would get lots of stickers on them from the cucumbers, and they would sting. We used to get 50 cents per bucket. We didn’t take many breaks because the more breaks you took, the less number of buckets you brought in.”

Rojas’ story is representative of the countless Mexican men, women and children who descended upon the Rio Grande Valley agricultural fields and harvested their bounty—the fruits and vegetables that, ironically, they picked in order to earn money to put food on their own family tables.

The story of the Texas farm worker movement, particularly the involvement of women, has never been fully told, says Raquel Marquez, UTSA associate professor of sociology and department chair. One reason, she says, is that while farm workers in Texas were demanding better working conditions and higher wages, United Farm Workers (UFW) leader César Chávez was grabbing national headlines with his 1966 boycott of California grapes.

Now the professor hopes to educate high school and college students and the public about the origins, struggles and accomplishments of Texas farm workers like Rojas with her film documentary, Voices of the United Farm Workers Movement in Texas, which follows the grassroots movement in Texas from its inception in 1966 to today.

“It’s a key part of Texas history that is missing and needs to be told,” says Marquez. “The contributions of … farm worker women who devoted their entire lives to the people who are out there picking crops are important in understanding the history of Texas.”

Marquez believes this significant piece of history largely has been ignored by academics and researchers, although there is a wealth of information regarding farm workers’ activities in California. The hard-fought struggle of the UFW began in 1966 in Delano, Calif., and was co-founded by Chávez, Dolores Huerta and Gil Padilla. Their intention was to organize farm laborers to protect them from exploitation and inhumane work conditions. Aware that Texas farm workers also needed protection from unscrupulous growers, Chávez sent farm worker activist Eugene Nelson with Huerta and Padilla to the Rio Grande Valley.

With the trio’s assistance, Texas farm workers began to call for better working conditions and wages, and, more important, to take action so that their voices could be heard. The La Casita melon strike in Starr County occurred in May 1966 and was the first labor strike organized on behalf of Texas farm laborers.

In July 1966, the UFW march from San Juan, Texas, to Austin brought together some 15,000 farm workers, labor activists and supporters who walked more than 400 miles to the Capitol grounds, calling for an increase of wages from 85 cents to $1.25 per hour. Then in October 1966, the Roma Bridge Protest, which was intended to keep Mexican national strike breakers from entering the United States, forced the closure of the bridge. It also resulted in the arrest of several UFW leaders.

“It was a pivotal protest because farm workers learned that if they came together they could bring about change,” Marquez says. “They were able to get Mexicanos from Mexico, whom the growers were using as strike breakers, to join them. That’s pretty powerful.” The efforts of farm laborers finally paid off. In the 1980s and ’90s, legislation was passed that gave them workers’ compensation, minimum wage increases and unemployment compensation.

Other legislation mandated that toilets and hand-washing stations be available in the fields. It also eliminated the forced use of the short-handled hoe that required laborers to work in a bent- over position as they crawled along dirt rows for hours on end. Marquez says that during her research she was surprised to learn that women played such a prominent role in the leadership and membership of the Texas organization.

“If you come to the state of Texas, you better know women are in charge here,” UFW National President Arturo Rodriguez says during an interview for the documentary. “They have demonstrated leadership, courage and sacrifice necessary to take on the struggles and have included their families and communities and really made this something special in terms of what’s taken place throughout the years, and what continues to take place these days.”

Ann Cass, a former UFW organizer who was also interviewed for the film project, knew firsthand the impact of female farm workers and how quickly they could mobilize.

“They would get together in the colonias or in the fields and have meetings and talk about problems they were having—if there was no water or toilets in the fields, and how much they were getting paid,” Cass says. “So they took those issues to the union where most of the union organizers were women.”

It was also during this time that many politically conscious Mexican Americans who had actively supported the UFW began to run for political office with the strong support of union members, Marquez says.

“Union activities in Texas and the timing of it in the ’60s and ’70s, along with the Chicano movement, all coincided,” she says. “So for young Chicanos, this became a key part of their experience in becoming politically active and developing a group consciousness. “As people matured, some went to college, some stayed in their towns, but their original experiences influenced them on how they continued to be politically active and engaged in working for the Mexican community.”

Rebecca Flores, who served as director of UFW Texas from 1975 to 2005, says that as union membership grew in South Texas, Mexican Americans had the power to influence elections.

“The Valley is 85 percent Mexican, and almost everyone has roots in the fields,” Flores says. “A lot of leaders who went to college understood the conditions in the fields, so they sympathized with laborers. There were a lot of people we helped get into office with the understanding they would carry our bills.”

Born in Atascosa County, Flores is a prime example of a former migrant worker who pursued a higher education out-of-state and returned home to advocate for field laborers’ rights. She recalls going to Wisconsin to pick cherries, sugar beets and onions in 1955 with her family after her father lost their 40-acre farm during a drought. Her story is also included in Marquez’s film.

“Looking back on how we lived, conditions were substandard,” the 66-year-old San Antonio resident says. “We didn’t always make money, either. There was no drinking water or sanitation in the fields. We carried these tall, heavy, wooden ladders on our shoulders from tree to tree because we had to scale the cherry trees. If you left one cherry on a tree, you had to go back and get it. That was the rule.” After getting an undergraduate degree in sociology from St. Mary’s University in 1970, she received a full scholarship to the University of Michigan. One day, Flores and her friends learned that Chávez would be visiting Detroit to speak to union members. After waiting in line, Flores and her classmates finally got to meet him.

“We told him who we were and where we were from,” she says. “He said, ‘OK. So you’re getting your master’s degree, and after you graduate you will get swept into the system and we will never see you again. You have to make a commitment to go back to support your community.’ So I made a decision to work for the union as an organizer.”

One of her proudest accomplishments as director of UFW Texas, she says, was organizing farm workers so they could speak on issues that affected them in the fields. She witnessed the results of that when the first Texas UFW convention was held in Pharr in 1979. “This was a momentous event because of the hundreds of farm workers who attended,” Flores says. “And here were farm workers who never thought they could be leaders, and they were standing up at the microphone and could speak on issues they determined were a priority. César led the convention, and politicians took notice because they saw the potential of the union. When I was growing up we wouldn’t admit we were migrants. Now farm workers were saying, ‘We matter.’ ”

The face of the farm worker today is different from decades ago, Flores notes, in that more immigrants and undocumented workers now labor in the fields.

“A majority of the immigrants are young and don’t bring their families to work with them,” she says. “Young men come here to work hard and send money home. If you try to organize them and say, ‘don’t you want to form a union,’ they’ll say yes but they’re afraid they will get fired. I admire those workers who say they want to form a union, but growers have so much power. They’ll scare [the farm workers] and threaten to call immigration, so many are afraid to speak up.”

Today, much of the advocacy for farm workers continues through the nonprofit organization La Union del Pueblo Entero, founded by Chávez in 1989. Its national office is in San Juan, Texas, and serves farm worker families in areas such as city services, immigration and social services.

Marquez, whose expertise is in border studies, Chicano studies, race and immigration issues, has been researching the UFW of Texas since 2007. But she says that she always has had an interest in labor unions and how they came to be a form of empowerment for Chicanas. “It counters the stereotype of Mexicanas that they’re passive women and aren’t actively engaged in community affairs,” she says. “Mexicanas have a long history in Texas of being active in labor unions going back to the early 1900s.”

The film project includes interviews with 19 people, including UFW local and national leaders, activists, farm workers and elected officials. Marquez and videographer David Sims have shot 60 hours of footage that still needs to be edited into a one-hour documentary. When the film is completed in 2010, as Marquez expects, it will be screened at UTSA, the University of Texas–Pan American, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at El Paso, San Antonio College and the CineSol Film Festival in Edinburg, among other locations. Funding for the documentary comes from grants from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Raynier Institute & Foundation, Humanities Texas and the Yip Harburg Foundation.

“It’s another venue for people to learn that Mexican Americans were active in trying to bring about change and improve the lives of their families and communities,” Marquez says. “Everybody knows who Dolores Huerta is, but nobody knows who Rebecca Flores is. My goal is to write a book after the documentary is released that will tell the bigger story.”

Meanwhile, Blanca Rojas cherishes her early memories of the strawberry fields in Michigan, and still remembers the not-so-pleasant experiences picking cucumbers and squash in the Valley as if it were yesterday. It was the bitter taste of migrant life as an adolescent that convinced her that an education was her ticket to a better future. After graduating from high school in 1995, Rojas was accepted into Brown University in Rhode Island, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology in 1999. Later, she obtained a master’s degree in English as a second language and in administration from the University of Texas–Pan American. Today, she is an ESL teacher specialist for the San Antonio Independent School District.

“I think [working in the fields] made me stronger because I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life,” Rojas says. “I wanted to be able to support myself with my intelligence rather than with my hands in the middle of the heat.”