It’s a new century, but we’re still carrying 20th century problems. In many ways, labor conditions for minorities in the United States have either remained just as awful or are worsening each day. Therefore, it’s always valuable to learn who were some of the most iconic labor organizers of the past century, and there is one who runs alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and the likes of him.
His name is César Chávez, and he is best known for the movement he helped create, which has become a symbol of Chicano struggle. However, Chávez fought for all farmers’ rights, regardless of their ethnicity. Along with Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the United Farm Workers labor union and achieved many of the rights we still enjoy today. But first things first. Who was he?
Who was César Chávez?
Chávez was a Mexican-American born in 1927 in Yuma, Arizona. His father, Librado, was the son of a Mexican immigrant while his mother had been born in Chihuahua but crossed to Arizona soon afterwards. César lived comfortably enough during his childhood until his family fell into debt and was forced to sell some of their properties. After his mother’s death in 1937, the Yuma local government auctioned off their farmstead. César was profoundly affected by this experience and series of actions that were most unfair.
When the Great Depression hit, his family had to move to California, where they became agricultural workers. He eventually joined the Navy and was honorably discharged some time after that. Soon, though, he too went on to work as an agricultural laborer. Chávez would struggle as a farmer, but this gave him enough experience to know that something had to be done about the terrible conditions workers were set up against. Endless working hours, no benefits and the threat of being pushed away by other immigrants who accepted even worse conditions than they did.
Eventually, he befriended Fred Ross and Father Donald McDonnell in establishing the Community Service Organization in San Jose, California and in registration drives. The CSO was an organization that advocated for civil rights for Latino workers. This organization would later become vital for the movement Chávez was to begin.
But Chávez was also cultivating himself personally. He would begin reading books about Francis of Assisi, and most importantly about Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian leader who protested British rule in India by going on non-violent protests that included hunger strikes.
The Delano Grape Strike
@ufwupdatesOn September 8, 1965, Filipino-American farmers walked off the farms of table-grape growers. Initially, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (mostly made up of Filipinos) demanded wages equal to the federal minimum wage, effectively starting the strike in Delano, California. It took the National Farmworkers Association, founded in 1962 by Chávez and Dolores Huerta, less than a week to join the strike. Eventually, both groups merged in 1966 under one flag, renaming themselves the United Farm Workers of America.
In all demonstrations you would hear “Huelga! Huelga!,” which is Spanish for strike, proof that this was a movement heavily backed by an immigrant workforce. Chavez was then described as a social worker with an eighth-grade eduction. So, how did he manage to become the head of a revolutionary movement?
First of all, the social conditions were staggering. When a reporter visited a demonstration in Delano, he saw it for himself. Footage shows him approaching a farmer and his family, and asking him how much he made a year. The man answered “about 2,500,” to which the follow-up was: “Do you have money in the bank?” The farmer shyly chuckled and answered he had NO money in the bank. Another farmer, a young woman, informed the reporter she was getting paid a shocking $2 wage for a day’s work.
@chavezfoundationThe reporter goes on to explain the housing situation where families of six and more lived in one-room sheds made of corrugated sheet metal. Dolores Huerta, one of the leaders of the movement and co-founder of the UFW, described the situation as serfdom, a step up from slavery. “These employers don’t even provide their workers with restrooms, with a bathroom, with a toilet. So we anticipated that there wold have to be a big strike.” What’s most striking about some of the footage from the time is a white woman yelling at the protestors, scolding them for their presence and rejoicing at the fact that they were being exploited: “We’ll be rich off of you poor people!” she shouts at the crowd.
But something that should be clearly understood about Chávez’s and Huerta’s movement is that nonviolence was at the surface and the core of the movement. In turn, the movement suffered what many grassroots movements go through: fear and intimidation tactics, death threats, chasing down with rifles, breaking up of workers’ elections, attempts to run them over with cars.
Meanwhile, the movement resorted to powerful and peaceful tactics like a widespread official boycott and even convincing the longshoremen from refraining to load the shipments of grapes. They succeeded, leaving the grapes to rot in the docks.
But the fight for the workers was a fight for the recognition of their rights. Even Robert F. Kennedy eventually flew to California for a hearing. There he questioned the Kern County Sheriff, who claimed to have arrested people before they rioted. Kennedy was baffled by his logic, eventually asking “How can you arrest someone if they haven’t violated the law?”
@latinaspoderosasIn fact, Kennedy’s support would only help the strike, which he described as being not just a question of wages, but a question of housing; a question of education and a question of living conditions; “It is a question of hope for the future.” In 1968, with the strike still going on, after some members of the movement had gone violent, Chávez reacted by going on a 25 day hunger strike. On March 10, 1968, when the day came to break the fact, Kennedy flew over to California to break bread with Chávez. There he said in a speech that “we here in the United States are lucky and fortunate to have produced a man so committed to justice, to compassion, to honesty, to truth and to service for all humanity.”
The UFW was successful in spreading the word through union representatives, with which the managed to extended their boycott from Delano, California to cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and even cities in Canada.
The movement was finally granted labor contracts with the union and they also achieved timed pay increase, health, and other benefit. By continuing the strike in order to get labor contracts with grape companies, Chávez unleashed a movement of which the legacy is the pursuit of justice.
Why he’s important to ALL Americans
César Chávez was mostly influenced by Gandhi’s success of using nonviolence to protest unjust conditions. But he also lived by and defended Martin Luther King as a protestor who championed for the poor in general, not just African Americans. Chávez should be remembered as an activist who fought for the little guy, who in the United States is too often synonymous with a little guy of color. However, this doesn’t mean that white working class Americans can’t learn some of the tactics Chávez used against powerful corporations. If anything, more and more people should learn about the activist whose victories were not just for himself but for the entire working class farmers.
@felipe.garcia.j
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