Word: delanoe
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...east side of town live Delano's growers and merchants. Most of the growers are sons of Yugoslav and Czech immigrants who bought the land forty to fifty years ago, and soon became wealthy...
...Delano is not among the larger valley towns, but it has long prided itself on being the unofficial grape capital of the world. The three counties grouped around the city grow 90% of America's table grapes and a fair percentage of the wine grapes as well, With a steady stream of migrant harvesters and a reliable supply of Mexican and Filipino resident labor, there was nothing in Delano to threaten good harvests and good profits but the occasional summer rains...
Last September the National Farm Workers Association, newest in a long string of weak, consistently unsuccessful farm unions, called a strike against several Delano grape growers, among them the giant companies Schenley and DiGiorgio. There was nothing new in that. Strikes had been called before in the Central Valley, several in the thirties, and more recently in Borrego Springs and nearby Bakersfield. But none of these previous strikes had been long-lived. Some had been violent, but all had ended with the farm worker in at least as bad shape as before...
Pickets were put out, and a boycott was begun against all of the Delano growers. Through the winter, however, the strikers began to concentrate on Schenley Industries, one of the nation's largest wine-producers (Roma, Schenley...
...picketing was never wholly successful. There is always an available supply of unskilled agricultural labor and most of the Mexican-Americans, knowing nothing of American labor history, felt no compunction about crossing the picket lines. The Delano Record, the town's conservative bi-weekly newspaper, and the California Farmer, the grower's newspaper, referred to the union as Communist-dominated. Berkeley students who came down to Delano to help in the Huelga were quickly labelled "outside agitators." The Catholic bishop in Fresno, at first a Huelga sympathizer, turned against the strike and claimed that the people were not being honestly...