Manuel Rivera was run over by a truck, injuring his pelvis and breaking his legs, an incident which took place on October 15, 1966, around 10:00 a.m., near Garces Highway and Glenwood Street, close to the packing shed. Strikers that day were obstructed the way to trucks, preventing them from either going to or coming out of the packing sheds where grapes, collected by strikebreakers, were about to be distributed to grocery chains across the nation.

The immediate goal of the strikers was to pressure the company to organize elections, giving workers the option to be represented by the UFWOC. Rivera, 52-year-old at the time, was a farmworker that arrived in Delano in 1961 with his wife and children to work as a farmworker. He was one of the first rose workers in MacFarland to support “la causa.”

Photographer Emmon Clarke, who captured these images, recalls running backward and shooting these events as they happened. César Chávez heard of the incident and “he stepped in to save the driver”, said Clarke in an oral history interview by Richard Street. “The pickets were ready to kill him. César probably saved his life. He let the grower have it. He called him a greedy bastard who had no business having a salesman driving one of those big trucks.” No arrest was made after the incident.