SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

December 10, 2006

Survivors of '66 farm workers strike will meet to assess their legacy

By Carlos Guerra

I was barely 19 when 400 Rio Grande City area farm workers voted in 1966 to send representatives to meet with owners of the produce farms where they toiled.

They did backbreaking work.

On their knees, they thinned seedlings and chopped weeds with short-handled hoes, and they were stooped, or moving hurriedly on their knees as they picked root vegetables, melons and onions.

Only when they were picking fruit from the wickedly thorny citrus trees did they ever look up.

And they worked at a feverish pace because they were paid by the box or the bushel, wages that were the equivalent of between 35 cents and 70 cents an hour.

The harvests were so short-lived — and there were no other unskilled labor jobs around — that they hustled for a few extra bucks before they would have to migrate again to fields in other states.

Often, parents had to take their kids out of school and put them in the fields just to survive — and in the process, yet another generation would fall into the vicious cycle of undereducated, low-wage misery.

After unionizing, the farm workers asked only for humane working conditions, and wages sufficient for parents to save their children from the peonage they lived.

When the growers refused to even talk, the campesinos walked out of the fields as the melon crop of 1966 came to its fragrant maturity.

The once-humble field hands' audacity shocked a South Texas still mired in a two-tiered society of Anglo growers and unskilled Mexican or Mexican American workers.

And growers and government officials responded angrily to the strike. Fourteen Texas Rangers and dozens of highway patrolmen were sent into the area to quell the insurrection. The farm workers — and the hundreds who, like me, went to the Valley to help — were peaceful. But our peaceful gestures were answered with the "peace officers'" taunts as truncheons and fists rained on us.

And at nearby international bridges, bus fleets assembled daily before daybreak — and federal border agents looked the other way — as hundreds of Mexicans were taken to the fields to break the strike.

As the casualties mounted, jail bond fees and soup kitchen costs depleted our meager resources.

A 400-mile march snaked from the Valley to Austin to dramatize our call for a state minimum hourly wage of $1.25 — since farm workers were specifically excluded from all federal wage and labor protections.

But in New Braunfels, then-Gov. John Connally and other state officials — in limousines — intercepted the marchers. Connally said that he would not consider the farm workers' demands or "diminish the dignity of the governor's office" by meeting them there.

When we returned to the Valley, the police violence ensued, and by 1968, the remains of our strike were dispersed by Hurricane Beulah, which devastated South Texas.

But the Rio Grande City Farm Worker Strike of 1966 changed Texas forever, primarily by eradicating the notion that Mexican Americans were a contented lot, satisfied to live powerless lives in the abyss of perpetual poverty.

Almost immediately after the strike started, the numbers of Mexican Americans elected to public office began to grow — and that process continues today.

And from the shards of our shattered strike, numerous causes and civil and voting rights movements emerged to usher in greater changes.

Monday, survivors of the Rio Grande City Strike will hold a 40th Anniversary Reunion in that city.

Tune in to hear from them.