DINUBA, Calif. — The body of Miguel Contreras came home Saturday to the vineyards and orchards of the San Joaquin Valley, where the labor leader, as a young boy, got his first taste of the struggles of farmworkers nearly half a century ago.
His burial in this small farm town in Tulare County, where he grew up picking grapes alongside his father and mother and five brothers, could not have been more different than his funeral Thursday in Los Angeles.
There were no Washington politicians or Hollywood movie makers, no billionaire businessmen or presidents of national labor unions. With the sun beating down through a hazy sky and the orchards a few weeks away from another harvest, 250 family and friends and old campesinos gathered to say goodbye to a native son who never forgot his roots, a valley boy whose death of a heart attack May 6, at 52, had left a large hole in the California labor movement.
That he was being buried across from his father, a man who knew no other life but the fields, a man his fourth son considered his hero, marked the full circle of Contreras' life.
It was here, on a 1,000-acre grape farm, that Julio Contreras built a shack out of scrap wood and his six sons slept in the same room, two to a bed. The harvest was long and brutal, they said, but because he had earned the respect of the farmer, Julio was employed year-round. Unlike so many other farmworker families, the Contreras clan didn't have to migrate town to town, crop to crop.
It was here that Esther Contreras got up at 3:30 a.m. to prepare breakfast and lunch and follow her husband into the fields. Here that the brothers chased jackrabbits and hunted down horned toad lizards and learned to swim in the irrigation ditches. Here that Miguel, the shortest of the brothers, became a fierce competitor and leader -- skills that would serve him well as he left for Southern California and eventually became head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, the boss of 345 local unions.
"Whatever we played, from basketball to street football, from Monopoly to Scrabble, Miguel hated to lose," said younger brother Antonio Contreras.
"Long before he was a union boss, he was our boss," said David Contreras, the youngest child. "After school, Mom and Dad and our older brothers would still be in the fields. It was Miguel's job to make sure we cleaned up the house.
