Driving through the Pajaro Valley around Watsonville, where the United Farm Workers is mounting an effort to organize California's $650 million strawberry industry, Josefina Flores stops from time to time to speak with workers. Now in her sixties, she is strong but a little weather-beaten, the result of her life spent in the sun. In a spiral notebook she carefully writes down the name of every worker, what each one says about their wages and their lives. In part this is for organizing purposes, for the union. But it is also a way of recording who passes through these fields. Once an illiterate farmworker, Josefina has become an archivist of the voiceless, even as she explains the history of a movement she believes can change their lives. Compared to her own generation, Josefina says, the young people she meets today -- mainly teenage migrants from Mexico -- have higher expectations. Those expectations are the focal point now for her hopes that the movement will survive. Josefina Flores talks about a life spent working for the union. Her narrative was recorded and edited by PNS associate editor David Bacon. (Second of two parts).

WATSONVILLE, CA. -- I never learned to read and write when I was a child -- not until much later. I learned to read and write in the union. Other organizers would teach me a little here, and a little there. Finally I learned, but long after I was already grown.

I was born in Calexico, in the Imperial Valley. I worked in the fields from the time I was seven years old. I worked in the lettuce, in the beets, the carrots, and finally, the grapes. My family worked the corrido - we traveled with the crops, making the same circuit every year.

In those years, no one ever demanded that the children of farm workers go to school. I just went a few days in one place, a few days in another. I wanted to go to school -- I could see the other children playing, and learning things. But I didn't, because of the economic situation of my family.

I was the oldest child, I had to help, so I went to work. This was in 1937 and '38, when the wages were 30 cents an hour. At first I just worked helping my parents. Adding what I did to their work, we all just made a little more.

I was a citizen, born here in the United States, but we were seen as poor people, as Mexicans. Being poor and being Mexican was just about the same thing.

I got married at 21 and I had nine children. The triplets are 42 now and my twins are 31. The other children died, some before they were born and some after. My husband died when my oldest was ten years old. Afterwards, I just went on working. I brought my kids to the fields, the way my parents brought me. We had a little corrido -- just from Arvin to Selma and back.

In 1965 we began to hear about Cesar Chavez, that he was organizing farm workers. I didn't know what a union was at the time, much less a strike or a boycott. In 1966 I was working near a ranch in Selma where there was a strike. I went to find out what was going on and I saw that the union was trying to do something good. In those times it was just trying to get the wages up a little, and get bathrooms in the fields. So I joined.

In 1968 we struck the grapes in Arvin. I went to a restaurant with my daughter to pick up some burritos which the owner was donating to workers on the picket line. While I was inside, a foreman came in and shot me. He shot seven bullets into my body. It took a long time to recover. I couldn't work for a couple of years.

After 1970, I went to work for the union, first in Santa Maria and then back to the San Joaquin Valley during the 1973 grape strike. The strike was called off after two people were killed and I went to Chicago on the boycott. I've worked as an organizer in the union office in Delano ever since.

All of the struggles we've had in our union have been very difficult. But at least we know now a little bit about how to fight. There are many people in the union like me -- we're older workers. We're explaining the history of our own movement to people here in the strawberries who don't know anything about it. They weren't here when it happened. Many of them hadn't been born yet.

People come here from far away in Mexico, to this valley to pick strawberries. They know every little about their rights as workers. To them, Cesar Chavez is a boxer. They had no way of learning the history of our movement in Mexico. But our history can help them to understand how they can get something better, if they know it.

People in Mexico are living with a big economic crisis. For most of them, if they don't come here, they don't eat. But that's also why there was the uprising in Chiapas. People are tired of being poor and ground down. They tell us we're not here because we want to be, but because we have to. In their milpas (the small corn patches of Mexican subsistence farmers), they have no rain, and the corn has died. In the little towns, they have no clinic, and even sometimes no school. They can't read and write.

That's the biggest problem -- for us and for them. They know so little.

While I see a lot of fear among people here in the strawberries in Watsonville, I think it's getting better. There are a lot of workers here without papers and the growers use this to threaten them a lot. They tell workers a lot of lies about the union to scare them.

But these young people are not as accepting of things as farm workers were when I was their age. Their expectations are much higher than ours were. That's why I think our movement can help them. They want something better, and they're willing to fight to get it.