Currently cutting material in my new book, “Swimming with the Sharks.” Here is one of the cut passages:

Lessons from the Working Class. “When the Moment Comes”

Throughout my learning experiences in Arizona and Chicana/o Studies I frequently remembered E.P. Thompson who wrote:

“The consciousness of a worker is not a curve that rises and falls with wages and prices; it is the accumulation of a lifetime of experience and socialization, inherited traditions, struggles successful and defeated . . . It is this weighty baggage that goes into the making of a worker’s consciousness and provides the basis for his behavior when conditions ripen . . . and the moment comes”

History is about feelings, and in order to understand it, to write it a historian had to understand people. British historian E.P. Thompson had a love affair with the working class (not classes); he believed they were the motivating force behind most economic and social progress. I tried not to romanticize the working class; at the same time, I considered many workers my teachers. I was very fortunate in the 1980s to have been part of the Keep GM Van Nuys Open campaign. I will never forget an auto worker who told me that the thing that he would miss most if the plant shutdown was the feeling that he got after his shift was done and thousands of workers would pour into the parking lot. He felt overwhelmed, he was powerful, and he had a union.

During the GM struggle, I attended many meetings where I mostly listened. At one meeting at the International Association of Machinists Union Hall in Burbank, I sat next to my friend, Eloy Salazar, who was a member of the Machinists. He was proud of his hall and how Mexican Americans played a leading role in the union. After the meeting he asked me, “Rudy, you got a minute? I want to show you something.”

We went out into the parking lot where his new car was parked. It was a Cadillac, which he pointed out was an American made car, white with white leather seats. It kind of took me aback because in my world of so-called “cultural” workers there would have been instant criticisms such “bourgie”.

I reflected how Eloy who had worked hard as a machinist was proud of the product of his labor, and how in contrast I was apologetic for my Ray-Ban sunglasses. My world was one of theory; Eloy’s was one of the praxis.

My research put me into contact with labor leaders. They always had lessons not found in the the Bancroft Library, but if he was alive I wanted to see them. It was forty years after the strike so I sent out numerous emails. Pat Chambers who led the San Joaquin Cotton Strike one day showed up at the Cal State Northridge campus and asked for me. Pat was a short man, 5” 6”, rotund and balding. He apologized for taking so long but he had to check me out, and it was important to him that I was an activist. In the next several years, he would just show up, and was clearly emotional to see so many Chicanas/os in college.

Chambers was a pseudonym; he was a communist who at the time were hounded. Pat did not like the party leadership, saying that they caused too many problems and cost resources to hide them. It was clear that he was not an ideologue; he got into the party because he admired the Wobblies.

The strike involved 18,000 cotton pickers and their families; 80 percent were Mexicans. It was a violent strike that saw three Mexican workers assassinated on picket lines at Pixley and Arvin. He described the Mexican women picketed and kept worker camps such as the one at Corcoran operating. The growers to break the strike colluded with county and state officials who denied workers relief and pressured the women to go back to work. Growers purposely starved at least nine infants to death.

I met 4’ 8” Caroline Decker who was in her late teens or early 20s when she organized alongside Chambers, Caroline was from a middle-class Jewish family; she dropped out of school to help organize oppressed workers. She was a communist because she was anti-fascist, and the Party was the only organization doing something about it, according to her. Years later when interviewing strikers, they would ask about Caroline Decker.

In 1934-5, the growers and their minions finally broke the union. Chambers and Decker among others were charged and tried for Criminal Syndicalism: “Any doctrine or precept advocating, teaching, or aiding and abetting the commission of crime, sabotage or unlawful acts of force and violence or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership or control, or effecting any political change.” Chambers and Decker along with other union organizers were convicted. Chambers spent two years in San Quentin, and Decker two at Tehachapi Women’s Prison before the convictions were reversed on appeal.

The Moment had arrived for workers in the 1930s. This was especially true of Mexican women who produced outstanding leaders such as Emma Tenayuca who I met at an activist reunion in San Antonio in 1989. At the age of 16, she began organizing workers. Emma was the lead organizer in the San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike. Jailed and hounded, “when conditions ripen . . . and the moment” came she rose to the occasion, and we learned from her “struggles successful and defeated . . .” form our consciousness.