Unionization efforts were initiated by the Confederación de Uniones Obreras (Federation of Labor Unions) in Los Angeles, with twenty-one chapters quickly extending throughout southern California, and La Unión de Trabajadores del Valle Imperial (Imperial Valley Workers' Union). The latter organized the Cantaloupe strike of 1928, in which workers demanded better working conditions and higher wages, but "the growers refused to budge and, as became a pattern, local authorities sided with the farmers and through harassment broke the strike." Communist-led organizations such as the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (CAWIU) supported Mexican workers, renting spaces for cotton pickers during the cotton strikes of 1933 after they were thrown out of company housing by growers. Capitalist owners used "red-baiting" techniques to discredit the strikes through associating them with communists. Chicana and Mexican working women showed the greatest tendency to organize, particularly in the Los Angeles garment industry with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, led by anarchist Rose Pesotta.