In 1938 and 1939, with the assistance of a half-dozen UCAPAWA organizers (including former CAWIU organizer Dorothy Ray Healey), workers struck repeatedly for union recognition and higher wages. In October 1939—the same month John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published—more than a thousand workers struck cotton growers in Madera County. In the face of extreme grower violence fomented by the Associated Farmers, Okie families hung together with Mexican, black, and Filipino workers on the picket lines. Healey recalled,

All their lives they’d been on a little farm in Oklahoma; probably they had never seen a black or a Mexicano. And you’d watch in the process of a strike how those white workers soon saw that those white cops were their enemies and that the black and Chicano workers were their brothers.