ITEM: At a dinner party in New York’s Westchester County, the dessert includes grapes. The hostess notices that her fellow suburbanites fall to with gusto; the guests from Manhattan unanimously abstain. ITEM: At St. Paul’s, a fashionable New Hampshire prep school, grapes are the only part of the meal invariably left untouched. ITEM: In San Francisco, a Safeway official observes: “We have customers who come to the store for no other reason than to buy grapes. They’ll load up their car with grapes and nothing else.” ITEM: In Oakland, a conscience-ridden housewife explains apologetically to her dinner companions: “I really wanted to have this dessert, and I just decided that one little bunch of grapes wouldn’t make that much difference” ITEM: In Honolulu, the Young Americans for Freedom organizes an “emergency grape lift” by jet from the mainland, inviting “all of those starved for the sight of a California grape to come to the airport.” WHY all the excitement about this smooth, sweet and innocent fruit? The answer is that the table grape, Vitis vinifera, has become the symbol of the four-year-old strike of California’s predominantly Mexican-American farm workers. For more than a year now, table grapes have been the object of a national boycott that has won the sympathy and support of many Americans —and the ire of many others. The strike is widely known as la causa, which has come to represent not only a protest against working conditions among California grape pickers but the wider aspirations of the nation’s Mexican-American minority as well. La causa’s magnetic champion and the country’s most prominent Mexican-American leader is Cesar Estrada Chavez, 42, a onetime grape picker who combines a mystical mien with peasant earthiness. La causa is Chavez’s whole life; for it, he has impoverished himself and endangered his health by fasting. In soft, slow speech, he urges his people—nearly 5,000,000 of them in the U.S.—to rescue themselves from society’s cellar. As he sees it, the first step is to win the battle of the grapes. Magnified Movement To enter the public consciousness, a labor conflict must ordinarily threaten the supply of essential goods and services, like steel or transportation. Politicians and the public take notice only when there is great impact on the economy, when spectacular bloodshed occurs or when well-recognized issues are at stake. The grape strike seems to meet none of these criteria. Americans could easily live without the table grape if they had to, and even that minor sacrifice has been unnecessary. The dispute has been relatively free of violence. Neither great numbers of men nor billions of dollars are involved. The welfare of agricultural workers has rarely captured U.S. attention in the past, but the grape strike—la huelga—and the boycott accompanying it have clearly engaged a large part of the nation. The issue has divided husband and wife, inspired countless heated arguments at social occasions and engendered public controversy from coast to coast. As if on a holy crusade, the strikers stage marches that resemble religious pilgrimages, bearing aloft their own stylized black Aztec eagle on a red field along with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patroness of Mexicans and
