Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
Adair (Douglass) United Farm Workers Collection
0011
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: Douglass Adair United Farm Workers Collection
Creator:
Adair, Douglas, III
Identifier/Call Number: 0011
Contributing Institution:
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Special Collections and Archives
Language of Material: English, Spanish, and Arabic.
Physical Description:
13.34 Linear Feet
(17 boxes)
Date (inclusive): 1936, 1956-2015
Date (bulk): 1965-1995
Abstract: Douglass Adair joined the United Farm Workers union in 1965 at the age of 22. He helped organize the nationwide grape boycott
and served as editor then publisher of the union's newspaper
El Malcriado from 1965 to 1970. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Adair worked in the fields at various California ranches and as a member
of the union's legal department. The collection includes correspondence, notes, notebooks, and records documenting Adair's
involvement with the union and his employment as a farm worker; clippings and short publications on the union and related
topics; and realia, ephemera, and photographs related to the farm workers' rights movement.
Advance notice required for access.
Permission to publish, quote, or reproduce must be secured from the repository and the copyright holder.
[Box/folder# or item name], Douglass Adair United Farm Workers Collection, Collection no. 0011, Special Collections and Archives,
University Library, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Douglass Adair donated the materials to Cal Poly Pomona in installments between 2010 and 2011. He donated additional materials
for the collection in 2017.
Douglass Graybill Adair III was born December 10, 1942 in Princeton, New Jersey. His father, Douglass Greybill Adair Jr. was
a professor of American history specializing in the revolution and early Jeffersonian period. His mother, Virginia Hamilton
Adair, was a noted poet and Professor of English at Cal Poly Pomona. The Adairs moved to California in the 1950s and Douglass
graduated from Claremont High School in 1960. He went on to study history at Pomona College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in
1964.
Adair was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to continue his studies in history at UC Berkeley. He studied Latin American
history for a year and maintained his landlady's garden in exchange for free rent. He enjoyed gardening so much that he considered
dropping out of school to start a landscaping business. During this period, Adair was also developing an interest in farm
labor issues, specifically the recently ended Bracero Program. He joined the Student Committee for Agricultural Labor and
participated in a pilot project to send students to work in the fields of central California farms. Adair spent the summer
of 1965 picking peaches, plums, and nectarines for the Red Banks Fruit Company in Visalia and lived at the Linell Farm Labor
camp in nearby Farmersville.
It was at the camp that Adair first met Gil Padilla of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Padilla had come to the
camp to organize a rent strike and Adair credits Padilla with "organizing him" and introducing him to the farm workers movement.
Soon after meeting Padilla, Adair assisted workers at the labor camp by translating for them and the police during a "wildcat"
(unauthorized by the union) strike protesting lowered wages at Exiter Dehydrator. Over the course of the strike, Adair met
Cesar Chavez, then leader of the NFWA, and Larry Itliong, leader of the AFL-CIO union Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee
(AWOC). The NFWA and AWOC would merge in August 1966 to form the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Adair was still considering returning to Berkeley at the end of the summer of 1965, when Bill Esher asked him to come to Delano
to assist with the English language version of the UFW's newspaper
El Malcriado. Cesar Chavez had launched the publication in 1964 and hired Esher in the spring of 1965 to help with production and distribution.
Chavez and Esher decided to publish an English version for young Chicanos who did not read Spanish, as well as African Americans
and Filipinos interested in the union. Adair arrived in Delano just after the Grape Strike began in September of 1965. The
strike would continue for over five years and brought national attention to the farm workers movement.
The UFW immediately enlisted Adair to produce leaflets and copies of
El Malcriado advertising the strike. He went on to help organize the strike and by 1966 had become the editor of
El Malcriado. The following year, Adair traveled to Texas to assist the union with a melon strike. When he returned to California, he
transferred editorial duties for
El Malcriado to David Fishlow and served as publisher instead. The union sent Adair out of state again in 1970, this time to Philadelphia
to assist with the ongoing grape boycott. He worked in Philadelphia for a year organizing people to pressure grocery chains
to carry union grapes. Next, he was sent to St. Louis for eight months to assist with a lettuce boycott.
At this point, Adair wanted to get back to working in the fields. He returned to Delano in December of 1971 and began working
at Tenneco-Ducor ranch pruning grapes with his friend Rudy Reyes. Adair worked at Tenneco-Ducor until 1973, when the ranch's
contract with the UFW expired and it signed with the Teamsters union instead. That same year, Adair was falsely convicted
of damaging a car while picketing at a neighboring ranch. He was jailed for 37 days and placed on probation for two years,
the terms of which prohibited him from having any contact with the union.
Adair decided to move back to Claremont for the duration of his probation; both to avoid violating the terms and to help his
mother take care of his elderly grandfather. While back home, Adair earned a Master's degree in Public Administration from
the Claremont Graduate School. He felt that one of the UFW's weaknesses was its administrative practices and planned to use
his degree to help improve them.
After his probation ended in 1975, Adair returned to the union staff as a volunteer. He was quickly assigned to the legal
department and worked there for the last half of 1975 through 1977. As a member of the legal department, Adair was in charge
of the Coachella office for the election campaigns of 1977 and helped prepare manuals on legal issues for the various field
offices. He met his future wife, Debra, in 1976 when she came to the Coachella union clinic as a nurse.
By the end of 1977, Adair was once again ready to return to work in the fields. He was soon hired at David Freedman Company
in the Coachella Valley tying grape vines. He joined the Ranch Committee in 1980, which represented the workers to the union
leadership and informed the workers of their benefits. As secretary of the Ranch Committee, Adair was involved in contract
negotiations between the union and the David Freedman Company.
The United Farm Workers lost the contract with Freedman in 1988. Adair continued working at Freedman for another year until
the company sold off most of the ranch and many workers were fired. He decided at that point to work exclusively on the five-acre
date farm in Thermal, California that he had purchased in 1977. He continues to grow dates at Pato's Dream Date Garden and
is a dues-paying member of the UFW.
The collection includes correspondence sent to and from Douglass Adair; records documenting Adair's involvement with the United
Farm Workers union and his employment as a farm worker at California ranches including Tenneco-Ducor and the David Freedman
Company; clippings and short publications on the union and related topics; and realia, ephemera, and photographs related to
the farm workers rights movement.
The collection is organized into the following series: Series 1. Correspondence; Series 2. Tenneco-Ducor and David Freedman
Company; Series 3. United Farm Workers; Series 4. Douglass Adair; Series 5. Clippings and Publications; and Series 6. Realia,
Ephemera, and Photographs.
United Farm Workers Ephemera Collection, Collection no. 0006, Special Collections and Archives, University Library, California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
United Farm Workers News Clippings Collection, Collection no. 0008, Special Collections and Archives, University Library,
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
The collection was initially processed and cataloged by Special Collections staff 2012. The collection underwent further processing
in 2017 by Rodney Cox and James Song to incorporate new accruals. The finding aid was revised the same year by Alexis Adkins
to reflect the changes and enhance findability and access. The collection number was changed from SC2012.03 to 0011 and the
collection title changed from
Douglass Adair's United Farm Workers Collection to
Douglass Adair United Farm Workers Collection.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
United Farm Workers
Agricultural laborers--California.
Agricultural laborers--Labor unions
Grape Strike, Calif., 1965-1970
Barnes, Peter.
The Sharing of Land and Resources in America. Washington, DC: New Republic, 1973.
El Malcriado. Delano, CA: Farm Workers Press.
Fishlow, David M.
Sons of Zapata: A Brief Photographic History of the Farm Workers Strike in Texas. Rio Grande City, TX: United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO.
Galarza, Ernesto.
Strangers in Our Fields. Washington, DC: 1956.
Montoya, Daneen, ed.
1962-1982. Keene, CA: National Farm Workers Service Center, 1982.
Zermeno, Andrew.
Don Sotaco: Cartoons from the Delano Strike/Caricaturas de la Huelga de Delano. Delano, CA: Farm Worker Press.