SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS December 12, 2006 Starr strikers remember landmark walkoutRIO GRANDE CITY — They take slower steps now, but the laborers who walked out of Starr County fruit and vegetable fields 40 years ago in a landmark strike for better wages — and those who organized them — are still passionate about "la causa." Influenced by a successful César Chávez-led grape-pickers strike in California, the walkout here lasted two years and ended in failure. Strikers didn't get contracts with the large producers in the Rio Grande Valley, where field workers were and continue to be among the lowest paid in the nation. And their highly publicized march to Austin, with stops that included a Catholic Mass in San Antonio where cantaloupes were left in offering plates, didn't lock in the $1.25-per-hour wage they sought. Yet the 75 who showed up for a reunion here Monday said their hunger strikes, brief jail stays and roughing up by peace officers helped push civil rights forward for Hispanics. "I think what transpired here was a group of people who stopped fearing the awesome task of speaking up," Arnold Flores of San Antonio, a former union organizer, told the crowd. Flores, 70, who went on to be head of special projects of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, spoke from a chair beside a walker. "We awakened the conscience of the people in Texas," added Gilbert Padilla, 79, at the time the vice president of what would become the United Farm Workers union. One of the principal targets of the strike was Othal Brand, called the "Onion King" because of his large agricultural market share. He later became a longtime mayor of McAllen. Also slowed by age, he recalled by phone that his pay for workers was limited by what he could get for selling the product. Brand said the strike had a "totally illegitimate approach" but agreed that it "served some good." "It focused attention upon the lack of education, the low level of income from seasonal work," said Brand, 87. "It did a lot of things that certainly were helpful, but there was too much violence." Bill Chandler, 65, an organizer, recalled approaching field workers to try to persuade them to join the strike, finding Mexican laborers bused from the international bridge at Roma who "were poorer than our folks were." The strikers protested at the bridge. It's unclear how many people were arrested by Starr County sheriff's deputies and Texas Rangers, but the list included at least two Catholic priests. Many arrests were led by Texas Ranger Capt. A.Y. Allee, whom the U.S. Supreme Court found in a 1974 lawsuit ruling to have violated farm worker rights by breaking picket lines. Alex Moreno, an attorney in McAllen and former state representative, said Allee "baptized" him his second day at the strike by ramming a shotgun barrel into his ribs before throwing him in jail for allegedly interfering with an arrest. "There were other people who got beat up more than I did," said Moreno, who was an economics student at the University of Texas at the time. The picketing was losing steam, the strikers bored, when about 40 of them decided to march to the state capital. Several hundred joined the last leg in Austin on Labor Day 1966. According to news reports, many towns accepted them, but in New Braunfels the Jaycees "charged they had communist support." Gov. John Connally stopped on the roadside near that city to declare he wouldn't call a special legislative session to address a minimum wage law. Herminia Trevińo, 54, participated in the march with her father and sister. Many in their family of 13 were seasonal workers in the Valley. "I was 13. My dad got us together and said, 'You are not going unless you really feel in your hearts that we need a minimum wage. ... You can't complain you are tired,'" she said, noting she didn't gripe. "I walked, and I had my sign." She said she recently told her son on his 13th birthday how the marchers got a feast at the King Ranch, slept in hotels — many for the first times in their lives — and how she learned the power of, "United we stand, united we have victory." But victory didn't come until years later, everyone here agreed. Bob Hall, 75, a Houston attorney who worked on the federal case against Allee, joked to the crowd that the high court's decision was like a good surgery on a patient who had died. It would pay off for future patients. "It was something where I could be involved in an effort that actually changed the way people lived and worked," Hall said. "That's kind of a rare thing." He reiterated the Spanish saying, "La esperanza muere al último" — hope is the last to die.
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