Labor Chief Makes Final Trip Home

The body of Miguel Contreras came home Saturday to the vineyards and orchards of the San Joaquin Valley, where the labor leader, as a young boy, got his first taste of the struggles of farmworkers nearly half a century ago.

His burial in this small farm town in Tulare County, where he grew up picking grapes alongside his father and mother and five brothers, could not have been more different than his funeral Thursday in Los Angeles.

There were no Washington politicians or Hollywood movie makers, no billionaire businessmen or presidents of national labor unions. With the sun beating down through a hazy sky and the orchards a few weeks away from another harvest, 250 family and friends and old campesinos gathered to say goodbye to a native son who never forgot his roots, a valley boy whose death of a heart attack May 6, at 52, had left a large hole in the California labor movement.

That he was being buried across from his father, a man who knew no other life but the fields, a man his fourth son considered his hero, marked the full circle of Contreras’ life.

It was here, on a 1,000-acre grape farm, that Julio Contreras built a shack out of scrap wood and his six sons slept in the same room, two to a bed. The harvest was long and brutal, they said, but because he had earned the respect of the farmer, Julio was employed year-round. Unlike so many other farmworker families, the Contreras clan didn’t have to migrate town to town, crop to crop.

It was here that Esther Contreras got up at 3:30 a.m. to prepare breakfast and lunch and follow her husband into the fields. Here that the brothers chased jackrabbits and hunted down horned toad lizards and learned to swim in the irrigation ditches. Here that Miguel, the shortest of the brothers, became a fierce competitor and leader -- skills that would serve him well as he left for Southern California and eventually became head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, the boss of 345 local unions.

“Whatever we played, from basketball to street football, from Monopoly to Scrabble, Miguel hated to lose,” said younger brother Antonio Contreras.

“Long before he was a union boss, he was our boss,” said David Contreras, the youngest child. “After school, Mom and Dad and our older brothers would still be in the fields. It was Miguel’s job to make sure we cleaned up the house.

“He’d play sergeant and we’d be his privates. He’d get right in our faces, call us to attention and tell us what room to clean up first. ‘Mom will be home in 10 minutes,’ he’d bark. ‘Mom will be home in five minutes. Clean this up. Now. Now.’ ” Even as Contreras emulated the deep work ethic and keen logic of his father in becoming one of the nation’s strongest labor leaders and a dominant force in Los Angeles politics, he never forgot the way home, family and friends said.

On Friday, a day after a funeral that drew 4,500 mourners to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels -- a crowd that included top city and state and national politicians and business and labor leaders -- his body made the familiar journey one last time: up and over the Tehachapi and down into the wide open spaces of the San Joaquin Valley, along the flat two lanes of Highway 99, the road of Saroyan and Steinbeck and Chavez.

He had come home to a different Dinuba from the one in which he was born, a place where Latinos now dominated city life and it was no longer unusual for the children and grandchildren of farmworkers to graduate from college and go on to great things. Indeed, it was a path he helped carve out.

But big-city problems had managed to find this place, too. His friends said Contreras had trouble understanding why a growing proportion of Latino youth, after all the hard work of the Chicano movement, were dropping out of high school and embracing a pathology of drugs, gangs, out-of-wedlock births and welfare dependency.

Mostly, though, he loved sitting back at family barbecues and recalling the old times with his mother and brothers, all of whom still live here.

“Any time there was a disagreement among us, he’d call us out to the patio and make sure we didn’t leave until everything was resolved,” said Alex Contreras, the older brother who was best man at Miguel’s wedding.

“His role of peacekeeper will be lost. I may never get along with my brothers again,” he said with a chuckle.

Yes, there were hard times growing up, he said. The brothers swallowed more than their share of dust walking behind their parents in the fields of Thompson grapes. They’d race up and down the powdery rows putting down the trays onto which their father and mother dumped the amber bunches to dry in the 105-degree sun and become raisins.

But the quiet rural life also gave them plenty of room to roam. “We lived on the Hamilton Ranch and my father did everything. When he irrigated, we would follow him and that’s how we learned to swim, in one of the ditches,” Antonio Contreras recalled. “We hunted jackrabbits with BB guns and when we caught those horny toads, we’d stick them in our pockets.” And then in the mid- to late 1960s, he said, the unrest of labor began to agitate the land. Their father was an early convert to Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union, and the brothers marched in rallies and protests.

Miguel Contreras, in a remembrance of his father published in The Times on Father’s Day 1997, recalled the anger in old man Hamilton’s voice on a hot day in July 1970 when he was forced to sign a contract with Chavez to unionize his farm.

“He explained how he and all the growers were being ‘blackmailed’ by the grape boycott into signing UFW contracts,” Contreras wrote. “Some of the workers yelled ‘Viva Chavez!’ and threw their hats into the air. My father was among them. Hamilton angrily got back in his Cadillac and sped away.”

Saturday’s rosary at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church in Dinuba was attended by Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), two state senators and Los Angeles City Councilman Martin Ludlow.

But this day belonged to those old UFW strikers. On the three-mile-long procession from the church to the Smith-Mountain Cemetery, they waved their red-and-black Aztec Eagle flags out car windows.

The procession headed past Rose Ann Vuich Park and Sadoian Bros. packinghouse and made a turn down a small country road with a pomegranate orchard on one side and groves of oranges on the other. Here, standing in the hot sun, they huddled around the family as a simple prayer was offered in Spanish. Then, in the tradition of the UFW, they broke out in a loud rhythmic clap. Then, as the casket was lowered into the grave, they watched the shovel pass from brother to brother to Contreras’ widow, Maria Elena Durazo, who grew up in the same valley.

“He was a local boy who did a lot of things in Los Angeles that reflected on us back here in the rural valley,” said Gloria Hernandez, a longtime UFW organizer. “Like Chavez, he is now one of our heroes.”