Cesar Chavez in Salinas Jail: The Lettuce Boycott of Nineteen Seventy

December nineteen seventy. Five months had passed since the United Farm Workers' victory in Delano ended the grape strike that had made Cesar Chavez the most famous labor organizer in the United States. The lettuce fields of the Salinas Valley, fifteen miles from the Pacific and within sight of the same landscape that Filipino workers had struck for forty cents an hour in nineteen thirty-four, were the next front.

The Salinas Valley lettuce growers had moved preemptively. Earlier in nineteen seventy, they signed contracts with the Teamsters Union, a competing labor organization, specifically to prevent UFW organizing in their fields. The contracts locked out the UFW without the farmworkers ever having voted for them. Chavez launched a national lettuce boycott.

A Monterey County judge ordered him to stop the boycott. Chavez refused. He was jailed in Salinas for contempt of court.

Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., and Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, came to Salinas to visit Chavez in jail. The civil rights movement and the farmworkers' movement had recognized each other as part of the same struggle, and the women who had buried two of its most visible leaders had not stopped showing up.

The people doing the striking in nineteen seventy were working the same soil as the workers who had struck in nineteen thirty-four, and been burned out, and gone back, and been replaced by Bracero workers with no legal right to strike, who had been replaced in turn by a new generation of farmworkers in the same fields doing the same work for the same essential reasons.

The specific jail dates and full resolution of the nineteen seventy lettuce boycott are documented in the UFW's own historical record, which the UFW Chronology makes publicly available. The fields are still there. The work is still being done.