“Dust Bowl” migrants (or “Okies”) from the American Southwest left their drought-stricken farms and attempted to settle in the fertile California agricultural valleys. Tens of thousands discovered that the land was already all owned, the available work was poorly paid, and local authorities were unable or unwilling to offer assistance to desperate families.

As the Depression grew worse in the early 1930s, Americans wondered why their government was failing to act to help them and why factories with perfectly good machinery sat silent and shuttered when workers needed jobs.

Still in high school, Dorothy Ray (later Healey) was smart, energetic, and deeply concerned about poverty and injustice. Within a few years she would be organizing farmworkers in California’s central valleys. In 1930 she joined with other young Communist activists on street corner protests against unemployment in Berkeley and Oakland. She later described what she was attempting to do:

Starting with that first big unemployed protest in 1930, we understood that you had to have a daily plan of building a demonstration, and that holding a demonstration could only be part of a larger strategy. You started with small demonstrations in relief offices, or in various neighborhoods around the city, and then built up to a big central demonstration. That’s the way to turn out a mass following, so that you’re not just bringing out your own militants each time. We didn’t organize a demonstration just to express our own outrage at one or another injustice, or, worse, as an occasion for self-display. We brought new people to demonstrations as a way of increasing their knowledge of the power of collective endeavor. . . . And we could see that organization gave them a power that they hadn’t ever had before, and that perfecting that organization was our greatest, indeed our only, hope for success.

The cotton strike lasted more than three weeks. Its impact was felt not only in higher wages for the workers but also in the formation of the Associated Farmers the following year, a growers’ organization opposed to farm worker unionism. The CAWIU continued to organize until 1935, when much of its leadership was found guilty in a high-profile trial in Sacramento of criminal syndicalism. Several Mexican CAWIU leaders, including John Diaz and Francisco Medina, were deported. Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker served time in prison. Chambers became the unwilling model for one of the main characters in John Steinbeck’s fictional portrayal of farm labor strife, In Dubious Battle. In real life, after prison, he worked quietly as a union carpenter.

Like cotton workers, these women shared the recent heritage of the Mexican Revolution. While their relationship to the politics of the revolution varied, they understood collective resistance to oppression. Many had eagerly followed recent events in the garment industry in the eastern United States, and knew, if incompletely, of the NRA. They readily responded to Pesotta’s attention, like these employees of the Clare Dress Company.

“We want a strike,” said Carmela, a tiny creature with flashing black eyes. “We want to picket our shop.” “Have you ever been on strike before?” I asked. “No, but if others can go out and win, like the Philadelphia and New York dressmakers, why can’t we?” “They say the NRA is back of us—what is the NRA anyway?” another wanted to know.

Without officially issuing a strike call, Pesotta marshaled her forces. The two hundred member “organization committee” met in the hall the evening of October 11. The activists were told to report the next morning at 5 A.M. to receive flyers to distribute. When they arrived, they found the flyers were headlined, “Dressmakers’ general strike declared today!” They took their bundles to their shops and the strike began. Instead of reporting to work, more than three thousand workers walked to the union hall and registered for their strike cards. Another thousand simply refused to work. Nearly the entire Los Angeles garment industry was shut down.