Word: grapes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Barbara Kunhardt, an organizer for the Cambridge Committee to Support Farm Workers, said yesterday that the most important thing to the UFW now is the commitment to grapes because of upcoming strike activity by grape workers this summer...
...afternoons around 3:30, Joe ("Green") Verdi, Angelo ("Foots") Colombo, John ("Detroit") Agresti and other properly and not-so-properly nicknamed neighborhood men gather at Rose's Tavern for a glass of beer from the 7-ft. wooden cooler. Then they drift out back toward the grape arbor for a game of boccie. On Wednesdays, Amelia Garavaglia, 76, flours her plump, competent hands in the back room of Gioia's Corner Market and begins rolling out 5,000 ravioli for sale hi the front room. Each evening, Ida Galli switches on the spotlight hi her front yard...
...aroma of lasagna and meat balls fills the air, and amateur Carusos croon over the loudspeakers. There are grape-stomping contests and a step-by-step demonstration of how to make sfinge, an Italian confection. At the evening's end a spray of fireworks flares over the neighborhood as proud residents and guests clap and cheer, aware that they have seen the past and that on the Hill at least, it still works...
Those fiery words of five years ago illustrate the charisma that made Cesar Chavez a liberal hero and his United Farm Workers of America a power in the grape and vegetable fields of the Southwest. Today, another side of Chavez's personality is becoming painfully apparent: his talents as a union administrator scarcely match his gift for inspirational leadership. Partly as a result, his prediction has a hollow ring; the U.F.W.A. is fighting now to stay alive. Membership, which totaled 50,000 in California alone in 1971, is down to 10,000. Faced with the certainty that still more...
...work assignments that made the contractors hated. Members of large families with only one car between them have been sent to widely separated fields. In some cases, workers say, U.F.W.A. dispatchers have played favorites. "Once I had to wait four hours last year before I could get dispatched," says Grape Picker Gloria Esquirrel, a former U.F.W.A. member. "The people who had put in time on the picket lines were sent out first." Since farm workers are generally paid by the hour (average wage: $2), such delays can result in serious financial loss...