Delano to Sacramento March
Around seventy farm workers left Delano on 17 March 1966 and walked 300 miles to Sacramento, arriving on Easter Sunday with a crowd of ten thousand. The Delano grape strike was six months old and going nowhere. The growers would not negotiate, farm workers had no legal right to organise under American labour law, and a picket line in the fields could be walked past. César Chávez conceived the march as a pilgrimage rather than a demonstration, and the word he used was peregrinación. It went at the pace of people who worked in fields, stopped in a different town each night, held a Mass, and read a proclamation. The banner at its head was the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the flag behind it the black eagle on red. The theme was penance and sacrifice as much as protest, which drew in the Catholic clergy and made the march difficult to characterise as subversion. Its target was the state government, and Governor Pat Brown left Sacramento for the weekend rather than meet it. What it actually achieved happened en route. Schenley Industries, facing a boycott and a Teamsters threat to stop handling its liquor, telephoned to negotiate — and signed the first contract between a grower and a farm workers' union in American history. DiGiorgio followed with an election. The march established the movement's method: the long public act, the religious framing, and the pressure applied at the point of sale rather than in the field. The two organisations that made the march merged that August as the United Farm Workers.
- Year: 1966 CE
- Category: Social
