Roberto Bustos was a bilingual high school graduate from Earlimart, CA, and had been working in the fields when the grape strike began. He became a full-time NFWA activist and served as Captain (“El Capitan”) leading the 300-mile, 25-day march from Delano to Sacramento from March 17, 1966, to April 6, 1966. Bustos was part of a small crew of organizers that included Eliseo Medina, Ezekiel Carranza, Ruth Trujillo, and Alice Tapia.  

“As long as I can remember”, writes Bustos in a document archived at the University of California, San Diego’s Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, “I will never forget a talk César [Chávez] told us strikers just before we went out to the farms to picket the ranches and talk to the workers about unionizing and joining the strike. He said guys get ready for a fight! And boy was it a fight! I did not know we took on the most powerful, richest, industry in the nation! They were the Delano grape growers of America! They had the money, the power, the politicians, the police on their side. All we had was our faith, our determination, and our picket signs! It was a long hard and suffering battle, there were times when things were getting desperate and bleak! At times, with the harassment, intimidation, beatings, and being thrown in jail every day, we thought this time around it would be over for us! But then support started coming in donations, food, clothes, other unions pledging their support, and people, in general, supporting us and encouraging us to give them hell! We bounced back and said: ‘Bring it on,’ we are not alone anymore. It took us 5 years to win the strike in Delano, but we made history! First time in history that farmworkers took on their employers and won with the help of one man who said ‘Enough is enough.’”