10/13/2021
Latinx Hispanic Heritage Month
Latinx/a/o labor leaders dominate California's labor history. The Labor Archives contains many collections that highlight workers leading the fight for justice, ranging from improved working conditions for farm and cannery workers to fighting for back pay and ethical treatment for domestic, hotel and restaurant workers. These leaders fought against violent repression and sustained long strikes through community support and unwavering solidarity.
The Watsonville Cannery Strike is one such fight that was led predominately by Mexican and Mexican-American women, including many single mothers. They went up against the cannery owners, the powerful agribusiness machine, and their own union which had become entrenched and unresponsive.
Watsonville, in the heart of the agricultural Salinas Valley, was once known as the "frozen food capital of the world" with a large number of canneries processing the majority of frozen food products sold in the United States. In September 1985, nearly half of the town's 4,000 cannery workers went out on a strike that lasted 18 months to protest wage cutbacks against the Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food Company.
Over the course of the strike, not one of the 1,000 Watsonville Canning strikers returned to work. They convinced previous employees to not cross the picket lines, which forced the companies to bus in scab labor from outlying areas (this tactic failed). Workers staged a hunger strike, and some of the devout Catholic strikers participated in a manda y peregrinación, or offering and pilgrimage.
This steadfast determination and worker solidarity was key to the strikers' ultimate victory, but community solidarity also played a large role. The frozen food workers all lived and worked in the local community and went to the same churches. Their children went to the same schools. Large numbers of strikers were members of the same extended families. They were comadres and helped each other with child care on the picket line when some of the women found other jobs.
After an initial poor settlement and a fight within the union that represented them, they were able to push back against a larger pay cut, and won medical benefits for all workers, seniority rights and striker amnesty. But most of all, they gained organizing and leadership skills. The strike attracted national attention, but it also changed economic, political, and social relations in the union and the wider community. The Watsonville chapter of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union used the strike to challenge the authority of the entrenched Teamsters Local 912 leadership, advocating for more democracy and representation. The union's leadership was ousted and its first Latino Secretary-Treasurer was voted in.
Finally, after being denied representation on the city council due to redlining, the Latino community supported the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s redistricting lawsuit led by attorney Joaquin Avila. The Court's decision on behalf of Watsonville's 60 percent ethnic majority allowed, for the first time, a Latino to be elected to the Watsonville City Council.
LARC Watsonville strike-related collection include: the papers of Frank Bardacke, one of the founders of the Watsonville chapter of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and a local resident of who was active in the strike support committee; the Teamsters Local 70 records that contain the files of the Watsonville organizer Alex Ybarrolaza; audio recordings from the radio news program Labor on the Line; oral histories by Peter Shapiro author of Song of the Stubborn One Thousand (yet to be digitized); People's World news coverage by Antonio Garcia; and posters and ephemera.
