To Pixley, Remembering the Cotton Strike of 1933

Marchers for California's Future remember and honor the past as they enter Pixley. In the fall of 1933, twenty thousand cotton pickers, mostly Mexicanos and "Okies," went on strike in the southern San Joaquin Valley for a living wage and union recognition. Six days into the strike, on October 10, union organizer Pat Chambers was speaking in front of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union office to a crowd of strikers in Pixley. Ten carloads of growers with guns pulled up. As Chambers and the union members moved into the union hall, the growers began to shoot at the unarmed group. Within minutes two strikers and a representative of the Mexican consulate lay dead, and eight more workers were wounded. In the end, after three weeks, the strikers went back to work with a wage increase. They failed, however, to achieve union recognition. And the murderers went unpunished.