The 300-Mile March: Easter Sunday, Sacramento, 1966

The march left Delano on March seventeenth, nineteen sixty-six, with sixty-seven people. It arrived in Sacramento on April tenth with a crowd estimated at ten thousand. The three hundred miles in between were the most effective piece of political theater in the history of American agricultural labor, and what made it effective was not the distance. It was the date.

Jerry Cohen, who served as the United Farm Workers' lead attorney, documented that Schenley Industries, the wine company that was the march's primary corporate target, signed a union recognition agreement before the marchers reached Sacramento. The first time a major California agricultural company had recognized a farmworkers union, and the march had not yet arrived at its destination. The pressure of the march itself, combined with a consumer boycott that was gaining national attention, was enough.

The choice of Easter Sunday for the arrival was a deliberate calculation. The farmworker movement had never been able to penetrate the California mainstream labor movement, which regarded agricultural workers with a combination of legal indifference and racial condescension. But a Catholic agricultural working class, which is what the San Joaquin Valley's workforce substantially was, understood pilgrimages. Calling the march a peregrinacion, a pilgrimage, framing it as a Lenten journey toward Sacramento and Easter Sunday, translated a labor action into a moral event legible to a constituency the labor movement had never reached.

The specific route the marchers walked, the towns they passed through, the faces and the weather and the blisters, constitutes a period record that the oral history collections at UCLA and the UFW archive at Wayne State University hold in detail. Those accounts are not fully represented in the sources this production draws from. What the sources do establish is the structure: it began in Delano, it ended on Easter Sunday, and it worked.