How the strike came to be

Briseño’s children were not old enough to go to school when the family first moved to Colorado from Texas, so she stayed home with them. When the kids eventually started school, Briseño found work at the Kitayama Flower plant where she worked on the nursery floor cutting flowers and making carnations.

From the beginning, Briseño realized how poorly the management treated the majority-female staff. Sandoval and Briseño recalled the plant’s owner, Ray Kitayama, calling the women “pigs.”

“The way that they treated [the women], spoke to them, I couldn't tolerate,” Briseño said of management.

The physical conditions were just as bad. The women worked unprotected from the insecticide that soaked the flowers. Water leaked from the roof and, combined with the water used for irrigating the carnations, the greenhouse’s dirt floor turned to mud, leading to frequent accidents and creating a “muggy” environment.

“You'd get bronchitis because of the humidity,” Briseño explained. “And you’d have to go see the doctor and they [the managers] would tell you, ‘You cannot see the doctor. You go, you lose your job.’”

Briseño decided that these conditions had to change. With her colleagues, she formed the National Floral Workers Organization (NFWO) and held meetings about the plant’s working environment. At the very first meeting at the community center in Brighton, Ray Kitayama was one of the first people through the door.

“And he said, ‘Everybody go home’ like we were small children,” Briseño recalled. “He said, 'Go home, watch television. If you don't like what's going on on television, go to sleep. See you tomorrow morning.’”

The next day at work, police officers were stationed throughout the plant. It was then that Briseño began talking to her colleagues about unionization. Kitayama caught wind of these conversations and, on a Saturday, drove to Briseño’s house and fired her.

“I said, ‘this is nothing,’” Briseño recounted. “‘I will fight you, win or lose, but I will fight you to the end.’”

Briseño went to the Capitol in Denver to find out what kind of rights she had to form a union. She was disappointed to learn that the employees at the Kitayama plant were technically considered farmworkers, and as such, Kitayama did not have to recognize their union if they formed one. Asked by the Times in October of 1968 if he would recognize the NFWO union if it won a vote from the workers, Kitayama reportedly grinned and replied “heck, no… we’re 100% within the law. Anyway, I think they [the workers] have about shot their wad.”

Life on the picket line

The NFWO strike began July 1, 1968. Made up of about 60 people, the NWFO was more than half of the Kitayama workforce. The picketers marched outside of the plant for 221 days. People took notice.

Priscilla Falcon, a Chicana/o and Latinx Studies professor at the University of Northern Colorado, described the support Briseño and the NFWO received was “amazing.”

“And it was across-the-board support,” Falcon said. “You had SDS from Boulder, you had the United Mexican American Students, you had the Colorado Council of Churches, you had the Teamsters, you had the National Teachers Federation.” Cesar Chavez, the labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with Dolores Huerta, supported Briseño and the rest of the workers.

However broad the support for the striking women was, it wasn’t universal and it didn’t always last, Falcon explained.

“The community became divided,” Falcon explained. “[Briseño’s] husband suffered a series of beatings. Her children were bullied at school because of the strike … And it became very dangerous for Lupe. She talked about how Kitayama employees harassed her.’”

Falcon said that Briseño is one of her heroes.

“To have her and these women decide that they are going to have a union, that they're going to stand up, that they're going to change things was something that was unheard of,” Falcon said.

As the strike went on, the number of picketers declined. Falcon said that by January of 1969, only about three or four people would be on the picket line at one time. Some picketers returned to work at the Kitayama plant because they needed the wages (about $1/hour). Others found work in nearby sugar beet fields and would join the Kitayama strike before and after their shifts. But Briseño and Sandoval — who was pregnant — stayed strong.

“You'll be surprised what we women can do when we make up our mind,” Briseño said.

In February of 1969, after learning that the National Labor Relations Board officially denied the NFWO’s petition to form a union, Briseño, Sandoval and the other leaders of the strike decided on one last act of civil disobedience: chaining themselves to the gate of the Kitayama plant.

“They met secretly the week before February 15, and they decided that they were going to chain themselves to the fence so that the employees could see them when they walked into the plant,” Falcon said. “So that week, Lupe and her colleagues went to a lumber yard and they bought a logging chain and then they bought a lock.”

Early in the morning of February 15, 1969, Briseño, Sandoval and the other strike leaders locked themselves to the Kitayama gate. They didn’t even tell their families about the plan.

Weld County police officers were called to the scene, where they cut the chain and sprayed tear gas on the women at the direction of Ray Kitayama.

“We couldn't see nothing. We couldn't do nothing because we were so foggy and all gassed up,” said Sandoval, who was pregnant with her daughter as the officers gassed her. “We were coughing and choking and covering our mouths.”

That was the day the strike ended.