Fighting for Our Lives

1/10/2026

When the grape pickers of California reject the intervention of the Teamsters and overwhelmingly vote to remain in their own United Farmers Union, their subsequent strike action pits them not only against their employers but also against “enforcers” from the union they declined to join. With the courts weighing in with injunctions limiting their picketing opportunities and then the workers being intimidated and even brutalised, the struggle for their rights becomes a dangerous and violent one. The police appear, at the start anyway, to be trying to remain impartial but as this dispute protracts, even they begin to operate on the wrong side of increasingly frayed legal boundaries. It’s hard to imagine fifty years later just how hard it was to produce a feature like this. The photography has