Boycott Grapes! Chile Solidarity Movements and the United Farm Workers in the Cold War

This paper compares the consumer boycotts against grapes led by the United Farm Workers in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States to the efforts of the Chile solidarity movement to organized boycotts inside the U.S. against grapes imported from Pinochet’s Chile.  The paper draws on older methodologies of comparative history to pursue the more recent goal of understanding Latin American and U.S. histories as mutually interacting within an Americas dynamic.   I argue that both the UFW boycotts and the Chile solidarity boycotts radically challenged the idea that grapes were “fresh food” or “good for you.” Collectively, they insisted that U.S.-American consumers assume political responsibility for the conditions under which their food was produced.  While the UFW condemned the labor exploitation and pesticide use by California grape-growers, the Chile solidarity movement criticized Chile’s lack of democracy and human rights abuses.  Boycott organizers in both campaigns formally endorsed one another’s efforts.  However, in practice, the UFW and Chile solidarity movement had almost no real collaboration, despite both groups’ concern with grapes at a moment when collaborations between Californian and Chilean agribusiness were at their peak.  This lack of connection, I argue, was shaped by how the cold war differently constructed U.S. and Latin American political struggles. Whereas the UFW understood its mission primarily in terms of national labor and civil rights inside the U.S., Chile solidarity activists were focused on the U.S. as an imperialist force abroad.  I conclude that histories of “disconnection” are sometimes as crucial as histories of “connection” to transnational and world history objectives.