Daria Arredondo was born in Rio Grande City on November 18, 1946, one of ten children of Miguel and Daria García Arredondo. At eight she was harvesting onions, bell peppers, lettuce, watermelon and cantaloupe in the Rio Grande Valley, and she left school after the third grade. The 1960 census found nearly a third of Starr County families living on less than $1,000 a year, and field pay ran from forty to eighty-five cents an hour. She married Mario Vera in her teens, and they raised three sons and six daughters. At nineteen she joined the new farm workers union and became its secretary-treasurer.
The melon strike
On June 1, 1966, according to her Handbook of Texas entry, more than 400 workers voted to strike the melon farms. They asked for $1.25 an hour, collective bargaining and toilets and drinking water in the fields. Growers brought in strikebreakers from Mexico and offered raises, yet more than 80 percent of the local workers quit and every packing shed closed on the first day. Ranchers had paid forty cents an hour for cantaloupes, Vera told the Texas Standard in 2016. The union and, later, the courts called the arrests of pickets by Rangers and local police uncalled for, while officers said they were enforcing the law. Arrests, injunctions and the end of the growing season wore down the picketing, and it ended by late June.
On July 4 the union started walking to Austin. Governor John Connally met the marchers in New Braunfels, and on Labor Day, September 5, about 15,000 people rallied in Austin. The march did not bring higher wages.
The bridge
Growers kept bringing in workers from Mexico. On October 24 strikers blocked the vehicles carrying them across the international bridge at Roma. Vera and Irene Chandler lay down on the roadway. "Let's block the bridge, you and I," Vera remembered saying. The Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge, which keeps a farmworker movement archive, counts twelve strikers arrested and a blockade that held for six hours. Texas Rangers arrested her. "They handcuffed me behind my back," she told the Texas Standard. She and Chandler were arrested again in 1967 and charged with unlawful assembly.
What the strike left
The strike did not win the rights its workers sought. Hurricane Beulah struck the Valley on September 20, 1967, and the union afterward moved its office to San Juan and put services ahead of strikes. Vera went on working in the fields. A church in Kenedy, a town she had walked through on the march, built her a new house. Fields eventually got portable toilets and drinking water. In 2015 she helped plan the strike's fiftieth anniversary with Rebecca Flores, the union's longtime Texas director, who remembered Vera saying that joining was the best thing she ever did. Historian Maritza de la Trinidad, who recorded Vera's oral history, said she saw herself as the mother of her community.
Vera died in San Antonio on August 6, 2020, of COVID-19, and was buried in Los Vela's Ranch Cemetery in Rio Grande City. The crossing at Roma where she lay down is in the Roma Historic District, which also keeps the 1928 suspension bridge.