Cruz and Cynthia

They met in the walnut plant. It was the summer of 1967. Stevie Wonder was all over the radio, singing how, for once in his life, he had love. They sang along, Cynthia and Cruz. “That was how we felt,” she remembered, “that for once in our life we had something good.” She worked on a production line, sorting walnuts. He was a supervisor of cracking.

Cruz Zavala had bet a co-worker $10 he could win a date with Cynthia Luza. “She reminded me of Angie Dickinson,” he said. The son of migrant farm workers from Mexico, he’d serenade her in Spanish. The daughter of Filipino farm workers, she couldn’t understand a word. She told her friends, no way.

And yet, as they say, love can always find a way, even amid the racket and dust of a walnut plant. First came a breakfast after the graveyard shift, followed by meetings behind the walnut bins. Then came marriage, house, kids, grandkids. In short, a life--financed by and calibrated to the seasons of Diamond Walnut.

“This place was our life,” Cynthia said early Tuesday morning as she stood outside the plant gate. It was Valentine’s Day, and she wore red socks, red earrings, red hairpins and a red sweater. She also carried a picket sign. “This place was our mother and our father. This is where we fell in love. And we gave this place everything. Seven days a week during harvest. We gave it our best. And then. . . .”

*

And then . . . there was a strike. Represented by the Teamsters, about 300 Diamond Walnut workers walked out in 1991. It was harvest time, the peak season. They figured the strike would last a week. Instead, three years later, it ranks today as the longest-running strike in California. Not that many people outside the walnut trade have noticed. “It’s not like we’re baseball players,” conceded one of the Zavalas’ co-strikers.

It was 7 a.m. There were about eight strikers at the gate, waiting to wave picket signs at the graveyard shift workers who sometimes will wave back with their paychecks. This turnout was high; the union local had picked up a note pad on the radar. As with all new strikes, there had been tremendous anger and energy at first. As in all old strikes, that anger and energy has been replaced by a sort of melancholy. Once they demanded their jobs back. Now they speak of “begging.” The strike pay from the international was cut off last May, forcing the strikers to abandon the lines and search for work. For some, the search has led back inside Diamond Walnut.

“Hi, Chris,” Cynthia sang out to a car heading away from the plant.

The worker, still in his hard hat, looked the other way.

*

At this point, details of the dispute hardly seem to matter. Company officials talk of loyalty to replacement workers, who bailed them out during harvest. The strikers tell of broken promises and cutbacks of pay and benefits. They speak of new bosses brought in to bring down the work force numbers. Variations on these themes, of course, now bubble at water coolers across California. The last five years have not been a, well, robust time for jobholders in the Golden Land. And for those who hold picket signs. . . .

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Cruz, who before the walkout had begun to plan a retirement cruise with Cynthia, a final reward for what would have been a combined 60 years of cracking, selling and sorting walnuts. “I mean, we are good people. We were born here in this town. We went to war in Korea. We paid taxes. We helped build this place, put it on the Fortune 500. And now where are we? Out here begging for our jobs back.”

That Cruz and Cynthia and the rest even bothered to stand outside in the morning cold and run through it all again was evidence of their last ally, which is hope. They know the callousness that clouds this bleak era. They suspect their stories of a life at a walnut plant won’t get much traction with a public gone jumpy with its own problems. Still, they hope.

Cynthia said she hears it whenever she leaflets a supermarket: “People at first say, ‘You people are greedy.’ And I say whoa, wait a minute, it’s about a lot more than money.” And then she will try to explain what it was like to work for “this place,” to believe in it, to actually care about setting records for cases of walnuts canned in a day, to build a life around it--and then, for whatever reason, to see it all blow apart. She wants to believe the telling changes something in them. She’s a hopeless romantic, this one.