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Cesar Chavez — Part 5
Page 90
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368 AMEND. . MIGRATORY LABOR LAWS
very strongly to our shouting or advising the people in the field that
the strike was in progress.
In fact, there were quite a dispute over the word “hue!lga,” which
means strike in Spanish, and at one point 44 of cur people were arrested
because they were shouting and insisted on the right of shouting
“huelga” to inform the people who were working in the field that a
strike was in progress and they were using the word “huelsga” because
most of the strikers were people of Mexican descent who had been
brought in from the outside.
Senator Murrny. May I ask a question, Mr. Chairman? In this ; ;
imstanme, when the strikers wanted to shout the word “huelga” at the _
people.they were shouting to. in order to let them know there was a se
strike on. had those people been working in those vineyards previous ~
to that or were they the new ones that had just been brought in and ~
didn’t Gow there was a strike on?
Mr@€navez. No, the majority of them were the new people that
had brought in.
r Murrnr. And didn’t know there wasa strike?
Mr. Cnavez. Yes. Fd say there were one or two that had been act-
ing as foremen who knew there was a strike in progress. But our
experience has been that we know when they are bronght in and we
follow them. If they’re brought in at night, we get the tipoff from
the people whose job it is within our——
Senator Mureuy. Don’t you let them know immediately that there’s
a strike going on?
Mr. Cuavez. They bring them into a camp, and we cannot go into
that camp, and the only time we can see them is when they re working
and hopefully when they’re working near the roadway we can get to
them ; otherwise we can’t communicate with them.
And so also we can’t claim here that we were abused physically by
the sheriff, but we can sure claim that there were many things that they
did to harass us.
For instance, at one point after we had “been on strike for about
5 or 6 weeks, we were stopped constantly and every striker was photo-
graphed and every striker was—a field report card was filled in on
every striker. In some cases it took as much as on hour and a half to
rocess, to go through this process of photographing and taking state- a
ments and identification papers from the strikers. =
In some cases this was repeated every time we moved from one field
to the other field because our picket crews are roving picket crews, and
this went on for many days. So we have a man in Delano who was
photographed and the same report was filled in on him no less than
12 times.
Senator Murpny. The picket crews, were they mostly workers from
Delano? a ; _ ~
Mr. Cuavez. Yes; they were in large part workers from Delano. pe eto oF
Occasionally we had people who came in from the outside to help us, a rie i. ee Ts
ministers and students, but it always happened that the workers were MSI, fire
the onesen strike that were out there picketing. ya MOR ee ee a A
Senator Mvrruy. This hasn’t always been the case, and I’ve been a a ne
around workers for a long time, 40 years now. But I wondered PE As
whether the pickets were actual workers—people who were off the f . Fe
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