The Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: Part Four, United Farm Workers Tell the World, ‘We’re Still Here.’

A year after the death of labor rights activist Cesar Chavez, workers organize a march and 15,000 workers join in.

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Editor's note: We’re delighted to share the fourth of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s thirty years of photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library. 

Part Four tells of a march held a year after the death of human rights and labor organizer Cesar Chavez and subsequent rebuilding of the union. Chavez, with Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and others, co-founded the United Farm Workers. 

For a year after the April 1993 death of human rights and labor organizer Cesar Chavez, I heard reporters endlessly inquire, “Will the United Farm Workers survive his death?”

But I remembered what workers attending Chavez’s funeral march kept telling me about the union that Chavez helped create: “We’re still here.” Having spent twenty-five years as an organizer, I knew they were saying, “We are the union.” The media question was irritating because the way it was framed made the workers invisible, as though they didn’t count.

I’d been hosting a community radio station labor interview show for two years by then. When Chuy Varela, our program manager (who disliked the media question as much as I did), heard that the United Fruit Workers were going to retrace the route of their seminal 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento, he gave me one of the station’s battered tape recorders, an old mic on a cable, and told me to go.

I put my camera strap around my neck, the recorder strap over one shoulder, and the mike and an extra lens in a pocket. They weighed a ton, especially at the end of a day’s marching. But they helped me discover a way to collect sound and images that stayed with me for many years. 

The first person whose voice and images I put together was Dolores Huerta, who’d known Chavez, married his brother Richard, and worked with union cofounders Larry Itliong and Gilbert Padilla from the very beginning.

Arriving at the UFW’s old headquarters at the Forty Acres in Delano, I learned the march would start with a mass, which they often did, and also with another ritual. In the Catholic tradition, Dolores and the union’s new president, Arturo Rodriguez, would wash the feet of the veterans who’d walked in the 1966 march, and who would walk to Sacramento once again. The march itself was called a “peregrinacion” and the marchers “peregrinos”—pilgrimage and pilgrim in Spanish.

As things got underway, I squeezed myself into position so that when Dolores dipped the damp cloth into the water, and then gently wiped the feet of her former husband Richard, I was facing her with the feet and bowl clearly in view. In the background were the two dozen photographers, whose cameras, unfortunately, only captured the back of her head.

Washing the feet of those older workers was not just an emotionally moving tribute, it demonstrated the continuity of their leadership. 

Washing the feet of those older workers was not just an emotionally moving tribute. For Arturo and Dolores it was intended to demonstrate the continuity of their leadership with Chavez, at a time when the union had to change in order to survive. 

Over the years I’ve taken many more photographs of Dolores Huerta. Her interactions with other people fascinate me. The photographs show her reporting about negotiations in the front of a room full of workers, sitting with them and gossiping, or taking a hard line with a grower across a negotiating table. In interviews she always said what she really thought—no canned messaging—a rare thing in a union leader. 

By 1994, the famous grape strike was twenty-five years in the past. A majority of the workers in California fields were small children when the formative battles of the union were fought. People joked that to these youth, Chavez Chavez was the name of a Mexican boxer, not a union leader.

Also, at that time workers were drawn much more from Mexico’s indigenous population. Most of the Mexicans who walked out in 1965 came from the states of central Mexico, especially Michoacan, Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Jalisco, where the colonial European legacy is strong. Starting in the mid-1980s waves of immigrants began arriving from Oaxaca and Chiapas in southern Mexico. Many spoke the indigenous languages of Mixteco, Triqui, Zapoteco, and Purepecha. Recognizing this shift in demographics, the UFW had begun a relationship with the Mixtec/Zapotec Binational Front (now called the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations). 

Growers also recognized the changing demographics of the workers, however, especially the lack of familiarity among the new migrants with U.S. labor laws. Between 1965 and 1980, the UFW had helped raise the base wage for field work in California from $1.25 to about $5.50 per hour—at the time more than twice the minimum wage. But between 1980 and 1994, the field labor wage in California actually fell. Labor contractors—who assemble crews of workers and then sell their labor to growers—returned to the fields after being virtually eliminated under earlier UFW contracts. 

By the time of Chavez’s death, things were so bad that farm workers began organizing spontaneous work stoppages to force a change. In 1989, workers struck in the tomato fields around Stockton. In 1992, 4,000 grape workers in the Coachella Valley walked out, and won their first general wage increase in a decade—40 cents an hour.

The 1994 UFW march from Delano to Sacramento was aiming to build on those uprisings. As the long trail of Chavistas with their red and black flags wound through the fields and small valley towns along State Route 99, workers were its main audience. As many as 500 a day signed union authorization cards as marchers stopped along the way.

As many as 500 a day signed union authorization cards as marchers stopped along the way.

And while the march wound up the San Joaquin Valley, the union sent organizers into the fields in other valleys. I accompanied two organizers to Salinas, where we went to talk with a crew cutting broccoli for the D’Arrigo Brothers. The union and the company had been fighting since the first 1969 lettuce and vegetable strike. The company bitterly opposed unionization, but under the farm worker labor law, organizers could “take access,” go into the fields to talk with the workers on their lunch break.

We found several broccoli machines stopped for mealtime. The women who sorted and packed the broccoli above the conveyor belts climbed down. As they sat eating, the organizers told them about the march to Sacramento. Several took flags with the union’s black eagle and wore them as bandannas. The men who’d been cutting the broccoli heads in front of the machine, tossing them onto the belt, sat down to eat in the rows. They too listened to news of the march, and stuck union buttons on their hats. 

“We have to go back to the tactics we were using when we first built the union in the sixties and seventies,” Dolores told me when, back at the march, I described what I’d seen.

Passing through Stockton and Lodi, the march grew from a couple of hundred participants to 5,000 as it approached Sacramento. We’d become a sea of 15,000 people as we reached the state capitol on the last morning. And although supporters arrived by the busload from cities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, it was overwhelmingly a march made up of farm workers.  

At the rally at the end of the march, the union announced that it had affiliated with the United Farm Workers of Washington state, whose leaders shared the platform in Sacramento. The union in Washington had been locked in a years-long struggle with Chateau St. Michelle winery. The affiliation bore fruit a year later, when the winery agreed to an election that the union won. With the help of skilled organizers, workers then negotiated their first contract, which has been in place ever since.

In the year that followed the Sacramento march, the union won eight elections to represent farm workers, and negotiated contracts covering 3,700 workers.

We’d become a sea of 15,000 people as we reached the state capitol on the last morning.

In Stockton, the march involved over a thousand tomato workers who were fighting for a contract. At the world’s largest rose company, Bear Creek, whose fields have supplied flowers to California cities for over a century, workers decided to participate as well. “We just got angry at the injustice of it,” one of their leaders, Daniel Sanchez, told me. “That helped make us strong enough to organize.” Like workers at D’Arrigo Brothers, they formed union committees, and eventually won an election and negotiated a union contract.

After the Delano-to-Sacramento march the UFW also began organizing marches to protest Proposition 187 in small valley towns throughout the state. Proposition 187 would have prohibited education and medical care for undocumented immigrants, and forced public employees, including teachers and librarians, to turn anyone without documentation over to immigration authorities.

Generating anti-immigrant hysteria through Proposition 187 was key to the successful election strategy of Republican Governor Pete Wilson. For a time that hysteria kept Republicans in power in Sacramento. Even San Joaquin Valley Democrats who supported 187 lost in that election. “Why vote for a fake Republican if you can get a real one?” Dolores asked bitterly.

But Proposition 187 became the Republican Party’s undoing. Immigrants holding green cards flocked to citizenship classes. In rural districts they and their citizen children became a new force in California politics. Democrats retook the San Joaquin Valley’s Congressional seats. In the state legislature, Latino elected officials, some of them from farm worker families, led the effort to win overtime protection for agricultural laborers, eighty years after they’d been excluded from Federal labor standards.

So Chavez’s death and the march a year later, did turn out to be watershed moments for the United Farm Workers. These photographs of the marchers, and the workers on the broccoli machines, reveal what they felt at that critical time.

Photo 1: Veterans of the 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento.

Photo 2: Dolores Huerta and Martin Sheen, before the 1994 march begins.

Photo 3: Dolores Huerta, with UFW President Arturo Rodriguez holding the carafe of water, washes the feet of Richard Chavez.

Photo 4: Fred Abad and Pete Velasco, Filipino veterans of the United Farm Workers and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.

Photo 5: Arturo Rodriguez and Dolores Huerta.

Photo 6: The 1994 march leaves Delano, as reporters converge on marchers to get interviews.

Photo 7: D'Arrigo Brothers workers cut and pack broccoli.

Photo 8-9: Two UFW organizers walk into a D'Arrigo Brothers broccoli field.

Photo 10: An organizer talks with a worker with a union button on her cap.

Photo 11: The marchers on State Route 99.

Photo 12: Arturo Rodriguez talks with a class from a school in Atwater, where the marchers have stopped for a break.

Photo 13: A priest says mass in the morning before marchers start from Merced.

Photo 14: A marcher outside of Sacramento.

Photo 15: A tired Dolores Huerta in Sacramento, as the march reaches its end after a month.

Photo 16: Arturo Rodriguez, Dolores Huerta and other UFW leaders are accompanied by former Governor Jerry Brown.

Photo 17: Veterans of the 1966 march wear the wooden cross that means they've walked the whole way.

Photo 18: Marchers in Sacramento.

Photo 19: Marchers head for the state capitol building.

Photo 20: Filipino community organizations from the Bay Area arrive in Sacramento for the conclusion of the march.

Photo 21: Thousands of marchers and UFW supporters in front of the capitol building.

Photo 22: D'Arrigo Brothers workers, after the 1994 Sacramento march, are inspired to march to the office of the company to demand a union contract.

Photo 23: In Salinas, a D'Arrigo Brothers worker gets off work, ready to join a rally to demand a union contract.

Photo 24: D'Arrigo Brothers workers show their support for the union. It took another ten years before they finally won their first union agreement, but the union committee kept pressure on the company for all that time.

Find other installments in this series here.