Picket Line by Elmore Leonard

JetBlackDragonfly
3 days ago
2 min read

Among crime writer Elmore Leonard's many works is this 'lost' novella from 1970, the genesis of his novel Mr. Majestyk. This story of an agricultural strike by Texas melon pickers is rife with racial tension, inspired by the Mexican braceros, the migrant workers picking beets and cucumbers near his home.

Chino and Paco drive through the barren landscape of Texas near Laredo. The Texaco attendant allows them to use the bathroom, but when another car pulls up with six Hispanic migrants, the toilet is suddenly out of service to their kind. Chino is looking for a man named Vincent Mora who heads the Valley Agricultural Workers Association, and they take on jobs picking melons along the irrigation canals for a dollar and ten cents an hour; migrants don't sit around on their asses. Mora is working with Connie Chavez, a twenty-two-year-old organizer building a strike for a just wage of $1.50 an hour—and proper toilets, not the open fields. Foreman Larry Mendoza worked his way up from picking and is now caught in the middle between Bravo County State troopers goading them on the other side. Mora is an experienced labor organizer from California—a man Chino knew before he was in Folsom Prison and began his own pachuco gang named the Brown Hand. How long can they hold out with troopers' intimidation on behalf of the owners, along with their own prejudice?

Taking place over a single day, you certainly enter their world; you can easily see how this was developed into a novel. There were many attempts to film this when it was adapted into a screenplay, with Clint Eastwood moving the story to California and the troopers into local mob enforcers. A disagreement over picking artichokes or melons folded that deal, and it was reworked for Charles Bronson, becoming the film Mr. Majestyk in 1974.

Fans of concise writing and characterization will appreciate Leonard's masterful prose, no matter what subject he tackles. This is now republished and widely available in all formats.

1970 / Hardcover / 128 pages