I'm just curious about something. How many people living outside of California have heard of Cesar Chavez or what he did?
I figured I'd take it upon myself to enlighten a few individuals if you'd never heard of him because 1) today is Cesar Chavez Day and 2) he was a great man who accomplished great things in the name of people who otherwise might still be largely ignored to this day.
He was born on this day in 1927, in a little town in Arizona. He and his family moved to California in 1938, and it was there that they worked countless farm fields as migrant workers, so that the young ones (including Chavez) could eventually go to college and break the "circle of poverty".
It might not mean much to any of you, but it does to me because the places that he worked back then for next to nothing are places that I know well: Salinas, Delano, Selma, Kingsburg, Mendota. . . all of these are towns surrounding my hometown of Fresno in the Central Valley, all farm towns. Because they worked in so many different places, Chavez went to 37 different schools as a result. It wasn't a cakewalk, either, because speaking Spanish was forbidden and punished if undertaken, and because he put up with as much segregation and racism as someone like Martin Luther King Jr. may have been through.
Chavez never got past the eighth grade, largely because his father had been in an accident and he didn't want his mother to work in the fields. In the 20 years after 1942, he spent time in the Navy, got married, and met several individuals that would later prove influential in his work. When 1962 rolled around, he formed the United Farm Workers union (UFW) and began working to focus attention on the problems farm workers faced and how to improve.
It didn't take long for the UFW to become a force, due to nonviolent protest tactics that were used in the Delano grape strike of 1966 ("huelga" was the rallying cry, which is "strike" in Spanish; they eventually won better working conditions and higher pay), numerous personal fasts, and a 340-mile march across the Valley from Delano to the capitol, Sacramento.
As the years passed, Chavez devoted nearly all of his energy to defending the farm workers against the giants of agribusiness. Even in his last days, when he and fellow UFW leaders were conferencing to battle a lawsuit, he never stopped fighting. They say he died peacefully, on April 23, 1993, near the same farm he was born 66 years prior. When his funeral commenced six days later, the turnout to honor his memory was the largest of any labor leader in United States history. 50,000 people held vigil at Forty Acres, and he was later put to rest near UFW's California headquarters in La Paz.
Bill Clinton commented that Cesar Chavez "left our world better than he found it." He awarded him with the Medal of Freedom a year after his death, citing that Chavez "possessed a deep personal understanding of the plight of migrant workers, and he labored all his years to lift their lives." Robert Kennedy, who had been a close friend to Chavez, said he "was one of the heroic figures of our time."
I'm not saying you have to care about any of this, but I felt I had to at least make a mention of one of the greatest men in my state's history on his day. I may never have been a farm worker myself, but I know that I had family in the past that worked in brutal conditions before Chavez came into the picture. Searing heat, pesticides, little pay, long hours. . . thanks to Chavez, the burdens that farm workers carry in their work has been considerably lessened.
Viva Cesar Chavez, in my thoughts and in my heart. This man will never forget what you did.
