This was the context in which farmworker housing was an ambiguous space of community power, social control, and retribution. In its crudest form, the grower class destroyed the collective power of workers by evictions. This in turn served as an admonition to workers who sat on the fence of resistance about the punishment they could expect if they sympathized or joined brethren in struggle.
Fast forward thirty-years, and an insurgency of agricultural strikes arose in Ventura County in relation to citrus, lettuce, eggs, and strawberries. Most, if not all, were inspired by the geist of job actions by the National Farm Workers Association, subsequently rebranded the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, initially in the San Joaquin Valley in 1965. The first took place in the citrus orchards of Fillmore, adjacent to Rancho Sespe, in 1968, followed by strikes in Santa Paula and other parts of the Santa Clara River Valley, as well as the Oxnard Plain.
Chávez was central to the inspiration of these job actions as he had founded a CSO in the City of Oxnard in 1958 to undergird the efforts of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). As leader of the UPWA, Ralph Helstein underwrote this campaign on the condition that Saul Alinksy of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago appoint Chávez to this project. They believed that an organized community would strengthen the unionization of citrus packinghouse workers. The CSO in Oxnard transformed into a countywide institution with a strong contingent of true believers in the Santa Clara Valley, Santa Paula specifically led by Pablo Yzquierdo.
In fact, with the loss of land and home in Arizona during the midst of the Great Depression, Chávez experienced firsthand the merciless toil the old and young endured as migrant workers. As detailed in Jacques Levy’s oral history César Chávez: Autobiography of La Causa (1975), Chávez also understood the misery of migrant families living in leaky tents, foul-smelling barns, congested homes, and densely segregated barrios. He experienced this wretchedness working in the fields and orchards of Ventura County and other places. When he returned to Ventura County in 1958, he quickly learned that another cycle of farmworkers, all male, were being pitted against long-term resident and US citizen ethnic Mexicans. They were labeled braceros and lived in spartan barrack facilities, often former stables, owned and controlled by ag associations. The largest-bracero facility of its kind in the nation was that of Buena Vista in Oxnard, created as part of a total 165 such sites, by the Ventura County Farm Labor Association.