Standing Up: Decades-ago crusade for farmworkers by Chavez contemporary echoes in Valley

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.themonitor.com/articles/texas_16670___article.html/union_unions.html

August 31, 2008

Sean Gaffney

They had strewn themselves across the international bridge at 5 a.m. stopping traffic, frustrating authorities and preventing Mexican laborers from breaking the melon strike.

It was Oct. 24, 1966, and Antonio Orendain led members of the local United Farm Workers Organizing Committee to the middle of the Roma bridge and straddled the international line, confusing authorities who had no idea if they could arrest them, as Timothy Bowman details in his master's thesis "What About Texas? The Forgotten Cause of Antonio Orendain and the Rio Grande Valley Farm Workers, 1966-1982."


James Colburn | [e-mail]
Farm labor organizer Antonio Orendain sits Saturday at his home in Pharr.


They wanted an eight-hour work day instead of a 14-hour day, they wanted the minimum wage to increase from $0.40 to $1.25, they wanted collected bargaining and they even wanted to the end the green card program that allowed Mexican day laborers to commute to work every morning. So in June they refused to pick the melons.

Ultimately, the strike would fail and workers would return to the fields defeated. On the bridge, Orendain was emerging from the shadow of Cesar Chavez, whom he had worked with since 1951. After the bridge protest, He would be arrested multiple times, face trumped-up charges, be blamed for setting fire to railroad tracks and eventually, long after the strike, break with Chavez and form his own union.

The morning of Oct. 24, however, he simply lay down on the road, and to enrage the authorities who had decided it was time to arrest, he led a group of 16 in a protest anthem:

"We shall overcome, we shall overcome," they sang in Spanish.

THE HOLIDAY

Union activity on the scale of Orendain and the National Farm Workers Association is unheard of today. With few notable exceptions, unions rarely make news locally.

FULL story at link.