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| UFW leader Cesar Chavez calling for boycott of lettuce |
One of the reasons for my eager participation in the recent student Palestine solidarity protest at Bowdoin College came to me while standing outside the student union with students occupying inside.
After getting out of the Air Force in 1974 I returned to Florida to be near family. When I volunteered for the military in January 1971, during the US war on Vietnam, I was still a young conservative having gone to schools on military bases for most of my young life. It was in the Air Force that I became exposed to the truth about our nation's foreign policy. It was there that I became an anti-imperialist and activist.
After leaving the military I first attended a community college in Orlando for two years before moving to Gainesville to finish my last two years at the University of Florida (UF). During the time in Orlando and Gainesville I was saddened because there was little to no movement organizing on either campus. Florida was already quite conservative but many across the nation had turned away from issues I suppose because people were tired after the years of intense conflict around civil rights and war.
At UF I completed a double-major in Sociology and Political Science and only had a geology, statistics and language requirement left in order to graduate.
One night while studying in 1978 there was a knock on my apartment door in Gainesville. The Rev. Fred Eyster entered and introduced himself as the leader of the Florida Farm Worker Ministry. He was a kind and gentle man and we talked for a long time. Someone had given him my name and he invited me to come hand out flyers the next day at the campus student union in a campaign to get the lettuce out of the cafeteria in support of striking California farm workers. I apologized and said I had a test in two days and was so close to graduation. He thanked me and left.
The next day I skipped class and went to the student union and handed out flyers to fellow students. The day following I went again, skipping my test. Before I knew it I did my first radio interview and the United Farm Workers Union offered me a job organizing citrus fruit pickers in Florida.
I accepted the post and was trained as an organizer by the UFW. After a month of training at the UFW headquarters in California, I returned to direct farm worker union offices in Apopka and Winter Garden, Florida. UFW assigned me as the note taker during two contract negotiations with Coca-Cola company which owned Minute Maid orange juice. Coke flew in big wig lawyers from Atlanta to do the negotiation with the farm workers.
We had citrus picking crews largely made up of black and Hispanic workers.
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| Up and down the ladder filling one tub after the other. Pay based on how much fruit one could pick. Many factors impacted the final wage. Weather, amount of fruit in a particular grove, amount of travel to grove, etc. |
I never regretted my decision. I never graduated from college either. I treasure my UFW days where I experienced and learned so much including almost barely functional Spanish.
While standing outside of the Bowdoin student union all of those memories came flashing back. I thought about the students currently involved in the Palestine solidarity campaign and wondered how many of their life trajectories will be impacted by these few days of raging protest for such a good and important cause.
I've continuously been an organizer since 1978. (I took one year off in 1999 when my son was a senior in high school. I got a 'regular job' and soon enough realized how much I missed organizing.)
Since 1982 I've been working in the peace movement specializing on space militarization issues.
So you could say I am a big believer in campaigns on college campuses centered around the student union - their gathering place.
Sparks fly when you do that kind of work.
Lives change too.
Bruce
6 comments:
I picked pears and peaches in southern Oregon in the early 60's along with Mexican Braceros.
If I remember correctly, we got fifty cents a lug box. It could be filled usually in two trips up the ladder and down.
I also picked beans in California, and cut apricots. Whole Mexican families worked along side of us. I guess the money might not be too bad with numbers on your side.
Later I remember in Florida labor activists fighting to get Port-a-Johns and washing facilities in the fields. The spread of disease linked to contaminated fruits and vegetables did more than anything to push the owners to get off their hands and provide basics for the workers.
We didn't have anything like that in Oregon 30 years earlier.
Thx for you very interesting comments John. Farm work is hard work. As we eat our fruits and veggies we rarely think of the pickers.
Each bite, each of many toothless chews is masticating mentally one upmanship for the pickers. I planted 100 fruit trees, 5 kinds of berries too? Each breath for the Cesar Chavez in us all??
Above comment by Joel Lincoln on FB..see
Interesting connections, Bruce. My (white) grandparents were fruit and cotton pickers in California after leaving Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. When I was a kid waxing romantic about my grandmother's garden and backyard chickens, she told me: You are smart. You don't want to work on a farm. Stay in school and become a doctor.
Many years later, I went to Bowdoin as a scholarship student. Was not radicalized there but in high school where a classmate shared a pamphlet on the Viet Nam war from the North Vietnamese point of view.
What a fascinating story! I never knew that about you Bruce. You haven't changed a bit - still as determined as ever.
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