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‘Don’t bite the hands that feed you.”

On this day - December 3, 1970

Cesar Chavez Jailed For Leading Boycott Against Coercive Farmers

On December 3, 1970, Cesar Chavez was jailed for his refusal to end a boycott on farmers who engaged in coercive, violent, and unjust labor practices against Latino migrant farmworkers. During the summer of 1970, farm owners in California’s Salinas Valley, with the assistance of the Teamsters Union, used coercive tactics to prevent Latino migrant farm workers from joining Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union. In response, the United Farm Workers union organized a massive strike in the Salinas Valley.

As retaliation for participating in the strike, farm owners fired hundreds of Latino migrant farmworkers and targeted the workers with violence. Striking farmworkers and leaders of the United Farm Workers were attacked and beaten throughout the strike, and in November 1970, the offices of the United Farm Workers in the Salinas Valley were bombed.

As the strike continued, movement leader Cesar Chavez organized a boycott of lettuce produced by farms that had used coercive tactics against the United Farm Workers. The farm owners sought an anti-boycott injunction, which was granted by a Monterey County judge. When Mr. Chavez refused to end the boycott, he was charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction. On December 3, 1970, Judge Gordon Campbell sentenced Mr. Chavez to an indefinite jail term and warned him that “improper and evil methods cannot be used to achieve even noble objectives.”

Cesar Chavez spent 21 days in jail before being released on December 24, 1970. He was held in an isolation cell but received visits from Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy. In early 1971, the California Supreme Court held that the injunction against the strike was unconstitutional, and Cesar Chavez's contempt conviction was overturned.

Farmworkers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

Victoria Ruddy paced in front of a pickup truck in the parking lot of a Bi-Mart discount store in Sunnyside, a farming town in the Yakima Valley, a vast semi-arid desert just east of the Cascades and the heart of Washington’s agricultural industry. It was barely 8 a.m., and the temperature was already in the 80s. Heat radiated off dirty concrete, mixing with gritty wildfire smoke to form an oppressive haze. About two dozen students, farmworkers and United Farm Workers Union staff stood nearby, loading gear into the truck. It was Aug. 12, 2021, and the second major record-shattering heat wave of the year had just struck the Pacific Northwest.

Over the next few days, temperatures crept into the triple digits. In Oregon, emergency rules to protect farmworkers go into effect when the heat index reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In California, additional rules are triggered at 95 degrees. But in Washington, which is second only to California in producing labor-intensive crops like apples, asparagus, hops and berries, the mercury has to hit 100 before employers are required to provide shade or guarantee rest breaks. In an industry notorious for not complying with labor standards and workers’ rights statutes, Ruddy, the UFW’s regional director for the Pacific Northwest, was skeptical that those rules would be enforced. So she and the others had organized a heat caravan: They would visit farms around Sunnyside to hand out water, Gatorade, KN95 masks and information on avoiding heat-related illnesses.

Before they left, everyone gathered around the truck. It was now 85 degrees, and the ice in a large blue bucket in the back of the pickup had already started to melt. Ruddy looked out at the anxious, excited crowd, and read three names from a list.

“Ricardo Sotelo,” Ruddy said, naming a farmworker who died picking blueberries in Washington on June 30, 2015, in 107-degree heat. “Presente,” the crowd responded, their voices muffled by their face masks.

“Sebastian Francisco Perez,” she said, speaking more forcefully now, referring to a farmworker who died in Oregon on June 26, the day after his 38th birthday, while moving irrigation lines during the previous heat wave. “Presente,” the crowd called back, louder, angrier.

“Florencio Gueta Vargas,” Ruddy yelled, her voice firm and clear.

“Presente!” the crowd shouted, their calls reaching a crescendo.

Gueta Vargas, a married father of six, had died only two weeks earlier outside the nearby city of Toppenish, under the kind of conditions climate scientists predict will become more common and extreme. He woke around 3:30 a.m. as usual, made coffee with cinnamon, pocketed the fresh tortillas his wife had made him, and drove to his job at Virgil Gamache Farms. He tended rows of hops, a crop notorious among farmworkers for being hard to work in high temperatures.

Hops are fast-growing leafy vines with pinecone-shaped buds, which contain a resin that gives beer its distinctive hazy citrus flavor. It’s a lucrative crop in the beer-obsessed Northwest; the Yakima Valley alone produces around three-quarters of the nation’s hops. But the plants also trap the sun’s warmth and humidity, raising the heat index by several degrees. There’s scant shade during the hottest part of the day, when the rows turn into sticky, humid tunnels of heat.

On July 29 — when almost all of eastern Washington was under a National Weather Service heat advisory — Gueta Vargas collapsed toward the end of his shift and died. The official cause was atherosclerotic disease, or problems with his arteries, but the coroner noted that environmental conditions were a contributing factor; it was around 101 degrees when he died.

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