Just caught the end of a documentary on César Chávez and the grape boycott, and remembered something I’ve been wondering since childhood, when Mom would refuse to buy grapes, because ostensibly buying grapes (our favorite food of the time) meant supporting the exploitation of migrant farmworkers…
So why grapes, of all the crops out there to boycott? Presumably farmworkers picking other crops were/are just as exploited.
(And now that I read the Wikipedia article, it occurs to me that apparently we were boycotting grapes for many years after the actual official boycott had ended. What can I say? Mom has never exactly been a slave to trends.)
Lettuce was on the official lefty boycott list too for awhile there. I think they picked grapes–ahem, selected grapes–because they figured they’d have more luck if there was something specific to boycott. But also, I knew some rough types who would go to the store, select grapes, put them in the bottom of the shopping cart, drop things on them (ice cream, for instance, cartons of milk, cans of Dinty Moore beef stew) and then at the checkout say, “Oh, these grapes don’t look good, I don’t want them.” Much easier to see the damage than with lettuce.
As to prolonging the boycott, it sort of just became a habit. I do remember seeing something in this pinko publication I used to read–it was written in spanish and English, but all that meant was that some of the articles were in English and some were in Spanish, they didn’t provide translations–in the mid-80s that it was time to boycott grapes again but I was not quite sure why because that particular article was in Spanish and I was skimming.