The Wrong Sides of History

DELANO: THE STORY OF THE CALIFORNIA GRAPE STRIKE by John Gregory Dunne. 176 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

California contains--along with hippies, think tanks and computerized leisure--a number of anachronisms. From the fall of 1965 until late last year, the vast and verdant San Joaquin Valley was the scene of a farm workers' strike that, in its stark simplicity, seemed to re-trample Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. At issue were no such modern matters as automation and a guaranteed annual wage but merely the right of California's 500,000 fieldworkers, predominantly Mexican-Americans, to unionize.

Scene of the struggle was Delano (pronounced Delrryno), a grape-growing city of some 13,000 inhabitants, split by Highway 99 into a west side filled with lo-ball parlors, taco joints and strikers and an east side dominated by "Anglo" growers and indignation. As Author Dunne points out in this admirably dispassionate account of the yearlong strike, both camps were on the wrong side of history.

Strike Leader Cesar Chavez, a portly, near-paranoid disciple of Agitator Saul Alinsky, insisted that no Anglos could ever understand the confusion of injustices that his Mexican-American workers had been suffering. Anglo growers maintained that the workers had never had it so good. Both sides were partially right, but when the strikers began firing 4,000 marbles from slingshots and growers started dusting the picket lines with insecticides, right had clearly given way to wrath.

With the aid of unemployed civil rights marchers and militant priests, Chavez, Alinsky & Co. ultimately won their strike. The revolutionary fever was slow to cool. As one union organizer put it afterward: "Success in our business means getting workers to middle-class status. The guy who carried a banner in 1966--well, in five years you're going to have a hard time getting him to a union meeting." It is that mood of inevitability that makes the anachronism of the Delano strike such compelling reading--and the strikers' success such a meaningful victory.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.