Moraga draws on historical events for the play’s narrative. Farm workers have been living in California and working in the agricultural industry for over a century. During World War II, the United States started the Bracero program to bring over Mexicans to work in the fields. The conditions were exploitative: low pay, poor housing, and arduous working conditions. On average, farm workers only lived to be 49 years old. Farm workers tried to organize many times, but were often stopped by the powerful agricultural companies.
In the early 1960s, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong, and other organizers started the United Farm Workers of America (referred to as the UFW). UFW was the first farm workers’ union in the country, and today it still remains the largest. Together they organized workers all over the state of California. In 1965, they focused their fight on grapes. Thousands of Mexican and Filipino workers went on strike demanding not just better pay, but a union that would protect them. To pressure the growers, organizers launched a public campaign to boycott grapes. The boycott went national and millions of consumers stopped buying grapes. The strike dragged on, but workers eventually won the right to unionize in 1970. This fight effectively unionized most of the agricultural industry in California—some 50,000 workers at the time.
At the time Heroes and Saints was written, in 1988, the UFW was organizing again—this time to end the use of pesticides on grapes. They argued that the pesticides endangered farm workers, consumers, and the environment. At the time, a town called McFarland in the San Joaquin Valley saw unusually high rates of birth defects and cancer among children in the community. Government health investigators denied that there was enough proof that pesticides caused the health problems. However, activists pointed to the fact that the county where McFarland was located had the second-highest use of pesticides in the whole state of California. To raise awareness for the cause, Cesar Chavez went on a hunger strike for 36 days. This was even longer than his strike in 1968 which lasted 25 days.
Chavez and Huerta were two key figures in the fight for farm workers and immigrants' rights. Although lesser known than the broader civil rights movement, the farm-workers movement was part of the same fight to end systematic racism and demand a dignified life for people of color in the United States.
