#106 Demi Garcia - Public Action workers in the Strawberry Campaign: Interviews with Public Action Organizers

This recording is from the 2024 National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies held in April 2024 in San Francisco. The three presenters are Brinley Carrillo, Demi Garcia and Violette Valencia. I have broken their presentation in to three separate podcasts to make it easier to listen. The abstract for the presentation is below.

Three years after the passing of Cesar Chavez in 1994, the United Farm workers under the direction of their new president Arturo Rodriguez began organizing Strawberry Workers in Watsonville. The Watsonville Strawberry Campaign followed the same organizing model the UFW had implemented during the grape campaigns of the 1960s-1980s. Taking on the Watsonville grower establishment through worker strikes and demonstrations

This panel will talk about the power dynamic between the growers, the UFW and the national community. Strikers and union members were treated poorly simply protesting and demanding their collective bargaining rights. The workers fighting in this campaign were known to be some of the most socially and economically exploited in the country.

Workers in Watsonville were fighting for a wage of $4.25 an hour and basic human necessities such as drinking water and clean toilets in the fields. This campaign was the biggest one for the UFW since the 1970s when it came to organizing farm labor. In addition, strawberry workers endured workplace conditions that made them even more susceptible to injuries, including no health insurance, which is especially serious when considering the amount of pesticides the workers were exposed to, and the health issues that arose from exposure.

Through interviews with public action organizers from several different states working for the United Farm Workers on the Strawberry Campaign as well as the President of the UFW at the time Arturo Rodriguez we will explore the perspective of those who were directly involved in the community organizing campaign and the reasoning behind their participation. What they saw as organizers across the country and what contributions they believe the Strawberry Campaign made to bettering conditions for workers in Watsonville.