I walked a picket line with Dolores Huerta. It was just the two of us walking back and forth in front of a Safeway in Oregon in the 80’s. She was in Oregon to visit one of her children and to support PCUN, Oregon’s Farmworker Union. I was a supporter of the union, an activist in my own Legal Service Workers Union and mother of two.
I was trying to balance work, family and activism. I wanted to learn from her. I had no idea what I was asking. By then she’d given away two daughters fathered against her will by Cesar Chavez, the President of the United Farmworkers Union, UFW.
It’s hard to give words to the visceral importance the UFW had to my generation of urban Chicanas. I was twelve years old the first time I saw the Agila Negra, the Black Eagle, the UFW symbol. The UFW shut down the Johnson’s Super Market in Boyle Heights. My stepfather in a car loaded with kids went to buy a lettuce for the enchiladas my mother made for dinner. We crept up on a scene with “the store man” wringing his hands in his apron in front of the store on Whittier Blvd. as car after car was turned away. A well-dressed UFW organizer spoke to my stepfather in formal Spanish as a sign of respect and deference and asked him not go in the store in support of the Farmworker Boycott. After a long day on a repair gang for the Southern Pacific Railroad my step dad drove away without the lettuce, but with muffled pride and I witnessed the power of organizing.
I became a labor negotiator and labor organizer. Often, the only Latina in a profession dominated by White men.
The reasons Dolores, Ana Murgia and Debra Rojas gave for their silence were heartbreaking and familiar. Suffer humiliating betrayal in silence to protect the Union. The thinking goes like this: they’re out to get us and if you tell what’s happening to you; first, nobody will believe you, and if they do, and it all fails, it’ll be your fault. So, suffer the abuse, be quiet, protect the movement and your people.
It’s hard to look at pictures of Cesar piously taking Communion with celebrities to end a long fast, when he was violating children.
In Salinas, in the early 2000’s I was the SEIU Deputy Director of the Union that represented workers at Natividad Medical center, a hospital that the growers set up for farmworkers so they wouldn’t go to the elite Carmel Valley Hospital. But Natividad was never fully funded and was always under threat of closure. I engineered a county wide direct-action campaign and strike to fight for the hospital. The whole time I was being subjected to sexual harassment by my boss at the Union. His abuses included calling me on the phone while he jerked off, leering at me with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, threatening to cut my pay, daily use of words like cunt and dick wad, humiliating me in front of “important” people, denying me credentials at an international convention so I had to ask his permission to go to the bathroom, shutting me out of important meetings, taking credit for my work, harassing female staff and on and on.
In addition to the sexual abuse; Dolores described being called names, attacked by Cesar and sent on wild goose chases so she wouldn’t share the limelight with him; it was all too familiar.
Yet, I was determined to do what I could to save the hospital so campesinas wouldn’t have to have their babies in the fields or turned away from the elite hospital. Just leaving didn’t make sense and complaining would have been the kiss of death; no Union would hire me if I did. When the hospital was saved, at least temporarily, I started to look for work. My boss had a male colleague break into my computer and found out where I was getting interviews. I caught him. I was on my way from Salinas to Oakland where I had a job offer. The only stipulation was that I had to meet Sal Roselli, the then leader of the union, in person. I got there and was told that there was no job offer and that Mr. Roselli was not available. As I was leaving, I could see him and his entourage at the top of stairs all looking down. When I got back to Salinas my boss met me at the door and with a sneer, said. “Get the job?” That boss, John Vellardita is now the director of the Clark County Education Association, a large teacher’s union in Nevada. I got blackballed from jobs in Nevada, San Jose and no doubt others until I got a job in San Francisco where I learned that he said that I was “political,” meaning that I would organize against union leadership, a death knell. Josie Mooney hired me anyway. My experience in Salinas was just one of many Union male boss abuse situations; Portland, Oakland, San Francisco.
Then there was the Harvard Trade Union Program where I was a National Fellow: As soon as courses at Harvard began, Ana not here real name, a White female classmate, found herself stalked by Aaron, not his real name, a Black male classmate who was set up on a bet by a White Trumpian bully classmate. Word quickly got out to the rest of the cohort – but not wanting to get anyone kicked out, Ana refused to name names. She wasn’t a snitch and didn’t want to hurt the program. The program director insisted there is nothing she could do to intervene if no one named the perpetrator, the class become engulfed in a campaign to protect Ana that split the class into two camps. Some of the men joined the women to fight the harassers, some of women joined the harassers. In short order the conflict became a fight for power that divided along race, sex, LGBTQ, and class lines – and mirrored the heartbreaking history of the labor movement and served as a precursor to our current political landscape.
From some rural outpost in California to the hallowed halls of Harvard, it’s the same. Lest anyone be confused about the horrors of duplicity in the UFW, you don’t have to go far to find it other Labor Unions. So no, it’s not a Latino thing, it’s a male power thing. I support Labor Unions and made “fighting the boss” my life’s work. I’ve seen the Union’s power to change people’s lives, including my own. I remember what it was like when I believed I had no power. Inspired by Dolores, Ana Murgia and Debra Rojas I’ve decided to come forward. None of us are immune and it’s time to break the silence. As the country decides what to do about renaming the Chavez sites, it could start by finding unsung, unrecognized and uncelebrated women of color labor leaders to honor. There are many. In Berkeley, it could start with now deceased Sister Lorraine Box, a Social Worker, member of SEIU local 535. Si se puede! Yes, we can!
YVONNE MARTINEZ Her memoir in essays, “Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman” was endorsed by Shondaland “A must-read to learn more about this titan.”and covers her childhood in Salt Lake City/South Central LA/Boyle Heights and her work as a labor organizer/labor negotiator in California and the Pacific Northwest. Her new book, now a play “Scabmuggers” is based on her experience as a National Fellow of the Harvard Trade Union Program in 1994. Publishers Weekly said of Scabmuggers: “Charged and incisive… Martinez’s story touches on ever-pressing topics: union history, politics, the lines between justice and morality, how solidarity breaks down and how it also shows up in unexpected forms.”—BookLife Reviews. She was the Jerry Wurf Fellow at the Harvard Trade Union Program and has a Master of Science degree in Labor Studies – Union Leadership and Activism from Umass, Amherst. Yvonne lives in Berkeley, CA. Her play Scabmuggers, based on her experience at Harvard will premiere at THE FREIGHT in Berkeley, CA for a limited three day run, on Tuesdays, July 7th, July 14th and July 21st, 2026.
