The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement by Christian O. Paiz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement by Christian O. Paiz Terrell Orr The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement. By Christian O. Paiz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 412. Illustrations, appendix, notes, index.) While he was growing up in the Coachella Valley of California in the 1990s, Christian O. Paiz saw few traces remaining of the efforts made by farmworkers and activists just two decades earlier to make the Valley into a place of social and racial justice, one "dominated by farm workers and not by [ranchers]" (255). In The Strikers of Coachella, Paiz returns to his home county to recover the "freedom dreams" and "utopian futures" of those [End Page 237] who worked and struggled to remake the Valley and to understand why, ultimately, their visions went unrealized (255, 265). Paiz's The Strikers of Coachella is a rank-and-file history of the farmworker movement in the Coachella Valley. Paiz draws from a "field of stories" painstakingly gathered and beautifully retold from oral history interviews with sixty-eight participants. Paiz's central claim is that the successes, difficulties, and failures of the Valley's farmworker movement—from the strikes of the mid- and late 1960s, to the contract battles of 1970, the strike of 1973, and the 1975 passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA)—are better understood when seen as the result of countless "contingent meetings" of its members' often conflicting desires, expectations, and actions (10). This account is counterposed to histories of the farmworker movement that portray an undifferentiated, or passive, membership that lived or died by leadership decisions. Paiz minutely examines the fissures both within the United Farm Workers, between Mexican, Mexican American, and Filipino workers, between women and men, between younger and older members, and without, between union and nonunion members of the community, and between the union and the larger Chicana/o movement. The book's subtitle barely does it justice. In the first section, Paiz roots the field of stories in a social history of the hostile "Rancher Nation," Paiz's name for the world of strict hierarchy cultivated by the Coachella Valley's white farmers. These farmers ruled as "kings" atop a non-White "peasantry," which was itself divided hierarchically between contractors and workers, between women and men, and between workers of different legal statuses (35). In subsequent sections, Paiz looks at the challenges to the Rancher Nation, alternating between chapters on farmworker organizing and the efforts of the Coachella Valley's Chicana/o movement in education, police reform, community outreach, and local electoral politics. Paiz draws an insightful parallel between the UFW's fight for labor contracts and the Chicana/o movement's fight for citizenship rights, both of which offered radical new visions for life in the valley that struck at the heart of entrenched racial and gender hierarchies. Despite Paiz's claim to have only limited commentary on the UFW literature, the book offers sustained critiques of much of that literature. This is especially true of the third section, which covers the "failed" 1973 strike and the 1976 attempt to amend the ALRA. In both cases, the historiography attributes the failures to misguided, hubristic, or even deranged leadership decisions. Paiz insists on looking at both events from the rankand-file perspective and in a wider context of 1970s labor repression and conservative political backlash. Despite the 1973 strike pressing the resources and patience of members, Paiz found that fully half of the Coachella Valley's farmworkers participated. And leaning on Lane Windham's work on the 1970s backlash against labor organizing, Paiz argues that the [End Page 238] failures of both the strike and of the amendment did not reflect organizational malfeasance, but the political strength of an emboldened Rancher Nation riding on popular discontent with social movements. The limitations of the book are those of the academic monograph as an expressive form. Paiz's impassioned prose and personal investment often strain at that form. The final chapter is a moving autobiographical account of how Paiz arrived at the topic, which would have made a stronger and more...