To hold up the sky: Coachella Valley freedom dreams during the United Farm Workers Movement

In recent years, the historiography of the United Farm Worker (UFW) Movement has experienced a revisionist resurgence—one challenging the UFW texts from the 1970s and 1980s. In tracing the California farmworkers’ unionization campaigns from 1960s to 1980s, this scholarship has stressed that a diverse leadership contributed to the UFW’s unprecedented organizing successes. But, and in critique of the earlier hagiographic accounts of the UFW’s leader, Cesar Chavez, the recent scholarship has emphasized Chavez’s leadership failures and its determining role in the UFW’s decline in the early to mid 1980s. ❧ This conversation has been deeply contentious in Chicana/o Studies, and it is this conversation that this dissertation seeks to intervene in. While the contemporary scholarship provides significant insights, it remains (like earlier texts) narrowly focused on the UFW’s leadership. This dissertation, in contrast, traces the rank-and-file, inter-racial and transnational history of the UFW Movement in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, where Filipino grape workers initiated the 1965 Grape Strike and where the UFW won its first contracts in 1970. More specifically, it foregrounds the farmworker “freedom dreams”—to borrow historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s term for visions of egalitarian futures—animating the protracted social-labor movement. To highlight this largely forgotten membership, it uses original oral history interviews (over 140 recorded hours), as well as UFW archives, local Coachella Valley archives and a myriad collection of UFW participant papers. ❧ Through these sources, the dissertation shows that Coachella Valley farmworkers faced pervasive and overlapping sources of marginalization, from poverty wages and job insecurity to daily workplace sexual harassment, substandard homes, segregated neighborhoods and failing schools. In turn, farmworkers—men and women, migrants and residents, Filipino and Mexican laborers, “hard core” and reluctant families—articulated freedom dreams that were similarly expansive and layered. Reflecting their diversity, Coachella farmworkers voiced a kaleidoscope of freedom dreams. Some subsumed the UFW under the Chicano Movement, while others tied it to dreams formed in the Philippines or Mexico. Still others saw in ‘la causa’ a multi-racial American nationalism and/or a champion for farm working women’s fight against patriarchy. Despite the variety, the dissertation argues that farmworker aspirations commonly transcended material concerns. More than higher wages and better working conditions, UFW members demanded love, dignity and justice. For many UFW participants, the union campaign was nothing short of an existential transformation.