Picket Line, by Elmore Leonard (Mariner Books: New York, 2025).
Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) was probably the greatest American crime writer of our time. His prose crackled with the found sounds of street dialogue — cops and criminals, wayward souls, grifters on the take. His criminals were sometimes stupid, other times charming. They were believable, even when they did the most outlandish things. If you haven’t read any of his more than 40 novels, you may have seen one of the film or TV adaptations—Get Shorty (John Travolta), Jackie Brown (Pam Grier and Samuel L. Jackson), or Justified (Timothy Olyphant).
So, how lucky we are to have a newly found novella by the master, which takes an intimate look at an iconic labor institution — the picket line.
Picket Line captures what many of us have experienced as organizers or workers who have taken the extraordinary step of withholding our labor to make the boss come to terms with our demands.
It’s set in the late ’60s or early ’70s. Chino and Paco are Chicanos from LA driving through Texas farm country. They are wise asses (most of Leonard’s best characters are), but are they criminals? They stop to earn a little money, picking melons for a grower who has been struck by a farmworkers union.
Enter our organizers. Vincent Mora is a cerebral staff organizer of mysterious background, and Connie Chavez is a passionate college-educated activist just learning the ropes of organizing.
Skilled organizers can inspire workers to take risks they’ve never taken before, and Vincent and Connie work at this continually. If you’ve been on a picket line you’ll recognize the way Connie uses her megaphone to create hope, to shame inaction, to encourage defiance, and to ridicule the boss. And you’ve got to do it with a bit of humor and irreverence or the people aren’t going to listen to you.
Besides the crew of immigrant Mexican men, women, and children in the field, there are a couple of wild cards — Clinton Taylor, a cynical black Detroiter who ran out of money on the way back from Mexico, and Bud Davis, a white college kid who thinks picking melons might be a good way to pick up extra spending money before he goes back to school. They are characters who showed up on the scene but don’t belong to the community of migrant Mexican laborers who make up America’s farm labor movement. What will they do?
Connie taunts college kid Bud from the picket line: “How does it feel Anglo, to take a poor man’s job? Take food out of the mouths of his children?”
Also in the mix are racist cops who harass the workers and a Mexican-born foreman who enforces the employer’s work discipline and tries to keep workers from joining the picket line. As in all of Leonard’s books, the characters use the rawest popular vernacular, which in this case is loaded with racism and ethnic prejudice.
Leonard winds up the tension, and when Connie gets a couple of men to leave the field and join the picket line, the foreman and the cops up the ante; an explosion is imminent.
And Chino and Paco, our accidental temporary workers? They have a past, and so does the head organizer, Vincent. Are they connected, and how will it be resolved?
Picket Line includes some timely historical commentary on the strategic choices that faced farm worker organizing. Chino and Vincent argue over whether the path to victory is a negotiated labor agreement through non-violence (Cesar Chavez’s) or a more militant one — proposed by radical Chicano groups like the Brown Berets — for armed self-defense?
Leonard airs all of this without sounding academic. The characters make the case, and always in voices that sound authentic.
A picket line is many things. It can be exciting. It’s often dreadfully boring. There are moments of heightened empowerment and others of despondency. But as Vincent Mora points out: “If a man comes out of the field and joins a picket line, he’ll never be the same again.”
Elmore Leonard captures that brilliantly, in a mere 100 pages.
Marcus Widenor is a former labor organizer and associate professor emeritus at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center.
