The California Grape Boycott

To boost participation in the California grape boycott, farm workers traveled to cities where California grapes were widely sold: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Montreal, and Cleveland. They drew on support from local unions, religious groups, and students to form picket lines in front of grocery stores. Initially, picketers encouraged consumers to boycott California grapes. However, United Farm Workers Vice President Dolores Huerta refined the strategy, advocating for a more impactful approach: urging consumers to boycott grapes and the grocery chains that sold them. ¹

Jessica Govea, a 21-year-old farm worker who organized the boycott in Toronto, Canada, recalls asking consumers to do more than boycott grapes: 

Actually that was the smallest thing we were asking people to do … we were asking people to quit their jobs and drop out of school and come work with us full-time. We were asking people to give us money; we were asking people to let us live in their home, and sleep on the floor. We were asking people to feed us. We were asking for paper for leaflets … anything you could think of, we were asking for it because we didn’t have it and we needed it in order to do the boycott. ²

Millions of ordinary people participated in the grape boycott in a variety of ways: picketing in front of grocery stores, writing letters to their local grocers, or simply encouraging family and friends to not buy California grapes or shop at stores that sold them. Eventually, grocery chains across North America began removing California grapes from their stores. By the end of 1969, grape shipments from California dropped significantly, with some cities seeing declines of up to 43%. ³ On July 29, 1970, the Delano grape boycott and strike ended when 26 Delano-area growers, led by Giumarra Vineyards, agreed to negotiate and sign union contracts with the United Farm Workers.

This reading is used in a Jigsaw activity in the lesson Building Support for the Farm Workers Movement: Supporting Question 4. Explore the other readings used in this activity: 

• Farm Workers Gain Support of Influential Leaders
• How Farm Workers Built Alliances to Sustain Collective Action
• The 300-Mile March to Sacramento

• 1Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (University of California Press, 2012), 51.
• 2Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (University of California Press, 2008), 31.
• 3Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory, 83.