Word: coachella
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scenes are straight out of the great grape strike of the late 1960s. In Southern California's Coachella Valley, Chicano laborers again cry "Viva la Huelga" (long live the strike) at flashy sedans roaring through vineyard gates, and priests who join them are arrested for illegal picketing. Cesar Chavez again summons his workers to talk up a grape boycott. But this time, his opposition is not confined to the growers whom he signed to contracts three years ago. Now Chavez's still tiny United Farm Workers Union (28,000 members at the end of 1972) is locked...
When a group of three-year contracts that Chavez had negotiated expired on April 14, only two Coachella Valley growers renewed them. Thirty others, who raise 85% of the valley's table grapes, signed with the Teamsters, who have long represented drivers trucking grapes out of the packing houses to market. Chavez bitterly told a group of laborers that the agreements "weren't contracts, they were marriage licenses. Tomorrow you will see the growers and the Teamsters skipping hand in hand into the fields on their honeymoon." He called a strike that last week began spreading into Arizona...
...WHAT of meetings held in a less formal setting and for political purposes? On July 4, 1968, Congressman John Tunney gave a campaign speech at an Independence Day celebration in Dateland Park, Coachella, California. A group of Mexican-Americans in the crowd of 6000 "engaged in rhythmical clapping and some shouting for about five or ten minutes" during the speech in protest against Tunney's refusal to support the grape boycott. Tunney finished his speech despite the protest, pausing to urge the demonstrators to be grateful that they lived in a country that allowed such protest. Neither Tunney...
Like water slowly dripping onto limestone, Chavez's patient pressures finally eroded the ground beneath his opponents. A handful of employers, chiefly in the Coachella Valley to the south, yielded earlier this year. Boxes of their grapes, bearing the union's stylized black eagle, were exempt from the boycott. After the May harvest, the unionized growers found their grapes bringing 250 to $1 more per box than boycotted produce. That hard proof of the eagle's economic pull broke the deadlock with the larger group of growers...
Mixed Appetites. Though Chavez and a group of Coachella growers had negotiated inconclusively for a month last spring, this time there was an extra factor that made the renewed talks successful. In November, at the request of both growers and union supporters, a group of five Roman Catholic bishops, headed by the Most Rev. Joseph Donnelly of Hartford, Conn., intervened to appraise the issues. The prelates then took an active part in the discussions. That, said UFWOC Lawyer Jerome Cohen, "created an atmosphere for conciliation." The union has yet to reach agreement with other Coachella growers or with any producers...