![]() ![]() Ostensibly, field workers were pushing for better wages and treatment. The goal, he said, was to cost growers fifty dollars for each dollar spent on the strike. High intent was a fine thing, but change would come the way it always came in California: by force of will.Ĭhavez’s own will was mammoth, and his battle against agribusiness lasted weeks, then months, then years. “No one in any battle has ever won anything by being on the defensive,” he liked to tell his picketers. And yet that strike, like many of his efforts, rose more from scrappy pragmatism than from any abstract ideal. People say Chavez fought for justice, which is broadly true. By the time Cesar Chavez organized a grape workers’ strike, in 1965, the agriculture business was the largest in the state. Then came gold and silver, the pursuit of which levelled hills, remade cliffs, and built cities along the Pacific Coast. First came missionaries, building churches out of clay and meting out God’s kingdom to the native peoples. The history of California is a history of will grafted onto the landscape. ![]()
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