ANY issue that arouses as much ->> passion as the California grape strike, the subject of TIME'S cover story this week, inevitably poses a doubly difficult task for journalists. The simplest facts become fogged by rhetoric; rumor and innuendo abound and every source, it seems, has chosen sides. To meet this challenge, TIME'S Los Angeles bureau deployed nine correspondents and stringers across the Southwest. For several weeks, they toured the towns and vineyards, traveling thousands of miles and talking to hundreds of people for their report to Writer Keith Johnson and Editor Laurence Barrett.

Los Angeles Bureau Chief Marshall Berges took on the job of providing an overview from the state government and community leaders. Martin Sullivan, recently arrived from Montreal, went into the East Los Angeles barrios to distill the Mexican-American way of life--and found the Chicanos strikingly similar in mood and plaint to their French-Canadian cousins in Quebec. Sandra Burton observed the importation of "green-card" nonunion workers from Mexico and covered the climax of a 100-mile march between El Centro and Calexico, in which, she reports, the heat hit 120DEG and blisters "were like merit badges." At the end, when Union Leader Cesar Chavez began to speak, she thought that she had obtained a perfect worm's-eye view amid the swarming crowd by squirming under the flatbed truck that served as a podium--until Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, standing barefoot a few yards away, started scratching and announced that the grass was infested with chiggers.

In the Coachella Valley and the Delano market center, Susan J. Diamond set out to get the growers' side of the dispute. Most of the' time, she could only interview the growers at night, after their 15-or 16-hour day, and she went away suspecting that tempers were short largely be cause the owners worked such killing ,hours. Curiously, no one ever offered her a grape.

The assignment of interviewing Chavez himself fell to Robert Anson. Almost immediately, the workers' mistrust of the Anglos was sharply brought home to him. He had arrived in jacket and tie, and an organizer quickly informed him that it would be better to leave the jacket and tie home. "You have to realize," said the man, "that a lot of these people have been exploited by men wearing jackets and ties." "From then on, I wore Levi's," says Anson.

The talks with Chavez were held in the back room of a small house near union headquarters in Delano. All interviews were strictly limited to 45 minutes (Chavez spends the rest of every hour exercising his disabled back), and the union leader insisted on talking only about la causa, never about himself. Those around Chavez were equally reluctant to discuss him as a man. Says Anson: "For most of them, Chavez is a symbol rather than a person."

The Cover: Oil on canvas by Manuel Gregorio Acosta, 48, a Mexican-born Texan and onetime protege of Peter Hurd and Andrew Wyeth, who makes his first appearance in TIME.

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