How labor leader inspired, empowered
Legacy of Cesar Chavez: Six stories of changed lives
By Bobby Caina Calvan - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, March 31, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
Reynaldo Acosta, a field worker who lives in Stockton, feels the muscle on the biceps of Cesar Luis Suchil-Magaña, 6. Cesar, named after labor leader Cesar Chavez, admires farmworkers like Acosta and says he wants to grow up strong, like them. Sacramento Bee/Autumn Cruz
By most accounts, Cesar Chavez was a humble man, whose physical stature belies the vastness of the labor movement and civil rights struggles he helped launch in California and elsewhere. As he did in life, on what would have been his 80th birthday, Chavez, the embodiment of the United Farm Workers, is again bringing together throngs for marches, observances and tributes to his work advocating for the men, women and children who toil in the fields and to the diverse groups touched by his legacy.
"In truth, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers in California ... are better off today because of our work." -- Cesar Chavez, address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984
Reynaldo Acosta sowed a life for his family in the fields around Stockton. In 1975, he slipped into the United States from Mexico, joining the migration north to toil in California farms. In Michoacán, Mexico, he grew corn but could not make a living for his family.
In Mexico, there was little other work, he said. When Acosta arrived in the United States, there were plenty of jobs in orchards and fields. He picked peaches one season, apples the next. Sometimes it was cherries. Other times, it was sunrise to sundown in asparagus fields.
"There were more jobs in the fields back then," he said, his daughter Cecilia, 18, interpreting as he pruned a tree at the Mexican Community Center on Stockton's Lincoln Street.
These days, jobs come more sporadically. It remains a difficult life, Acosta said. There are good places to work, and there are places to avoid -- if one has the luxury of turning down a job.
But imagine how much more difficult it would be, he said, without the work of Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers -- the union that grew from the grape strikes of the turbulent '60s -- and the movement that has become his legacy and is being celebrated today.
"He did a lot for a lot of people, a lot for our people," Acosta said. Because of Chavez and the UFW, many farmworkers are eligible for unemployment benefits. Working conditions have improved. Such workplace necessities as water and portable restrooms are now required by law. Workers' safety -- from potentially dangerous equipment, chemicals and other perils of the fields -- is no longer taken for granted.
"His name is a symbol for us, for us farmworkers," said Acosta, who became a legalized resident after the federal government in 1986 launched an amnesty program for thousands of illegal immigrants. Over the years, his family joined him in the United States.
His clan is expected to join hundreds, many of them fellow farmworkers, for today's march in Sacramento honoring Chavez -- "to remember a very important person for us," Acosta said.
"For those who already know his story, it is a very important day," Acosta said. "For those who don't know his story, it is important to teach them."
"All Hispanics ... are connected to the farmworkers' experience. We had all lived through the fields, or our parents had."
Her family name wasn't yet so famous when the man Becky Chavez knew as "Uncle Cesar" arrived with stacks of leaflets and an armful of picket signs in search of a few spare hands.
"Whenever he needed an instant picket line, we were his picket line," said Chavez, 52, whose father, Richard, was Cesar's older brother.
"I remember how he would gather all of us children -- his children, his brothers' and sisters' children, and he would take us somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley for leafletting," she said of her uncle.
At the time, "we didn't think it was hard work. My uncle would come by and said we had a mission to do. So we'd go."
It was one adventure after another. Rallies were a way of life for every member of the Chavez family.
"I really didn't think we were making history. But that was our family work. I don't think we as children knew the significance of what we were doing -- at least I didn't."
For Becky Chavez, the legacy of Cesar Chavez brings a burden of responsibility. The family name is revered, associated with a movement, a cause, a sense of history. Each year, the holiday yields numerous invitations to appear before groups or lend the family name to an event. Members of the Chavez family fan out to accommodate, lend their support and continue the work of the man that made theirs a household name.
About the writer:
The Bee's Bobby Caina Calvan can be reached at (916) 321-1067 or bcalvan@sacbee.com. Bee researcher Sheila A. Kern contributed to this report.
Guambry Santillan, 19, a student at Sacramento City College, shouts in support of fellow students while marching to the state Capitol from Hiram Johnson High School on Friday as part of a student protest demanding that school districts recognize Cesar Chavez Day as a holiday. Students from across California participated in the march, including about 100 from Hiram Johnson High School who boycotted classes for the protest. Sacramento Bee/Kevin German
Becky Chavez
Lorraine Agtang-Greer
José Montoya
"Part of his legacy is of community service. That's how he lived his life. He always worked for the community. So, our upbringing was about community service," said Chavez, who oversees a three-campus preschool program for the city of Sacramento.
"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed."
Lorraine Agtang-Greer envisioned her future and saw nothing but fields and vineyards. Many roads led to the growers camps near Delano, she said, but few ways out.
"I looked forward to a life working in the fields like my parents. At that point, I didn't have much hope. I knew my future," she said. "If it wasn't for Cesar, I'd still be there."
Her family was poor. Seven children in a two-bedroom house. As a teen, she went to work harvesting grapes. The extra income helped her family survive.
Her father had come from overseas, from a fishing and farming village in the northern Philippines, finding his way to one of the camps outside of town. Her mother made her way from a tiny ranch outside Guadalajara, Mexico. It was an unlikely union.
In Delano and many other farming towns, divisions were everywhere, she recalled. Railroad tracks cut a line between rich and poor. "Theirs" and "ours" extended not only to neighborhoods, but to churches. Even among laborers, it was "us" vs. "them," Latino vs. Filipino.
The Agtang family was both -- and found itself caught in the strife between two ethnic populations equally struggling against poverty and mistreatment, but seemingly worlds apart.
"Not many people realize that Filipinos played a big role" in the early days of the farm labor movement, said Agtang-Greer, who after six years of working for the UFW moved to the Sacramento area in 1978 and supervises a staff of clerks for a Yolo County agency. It was Chavez, she said, who persuaded Latinos and Filipinos to work together, to exploit the power of their numbers, to unite under a common flag.
"If Cesar left a legacy, it was how he united people in their common struggle. He brought people together," said the 55-year-old former farmworker.
"He was so charismatic," she recalled. When he spoke -- often from a flatbed truck that roved from camp to camp -- his words rang true, she said. "He told us we deserved more than what we had."
We created confidence ... in an entire people's ability to create a future.
It was 1969 when the Rebel Chicano Art Front -- later known as the Royal Chicano Air Force -- harnessed art to help bring voice to California's Chicano movement and embrace the cause of Cesar Chavez and the UFW.
José Montoya, a founder of the group who would later become Sacramento's poet laureate, found inspiration from the man who would become the embodiment of the farmworkers movement.
In turn, Chavez would become fascinated by the work of Sacramento's vanguard of Latino artists. Montoya and Chavez became quick friends.
"Whenever he came to Sacramento, he wanted to meet with our group, his friends," Montoya recalled. "He was so amazed by the silk-screening process, so amazed that we could fit this equipment into a Volkswagen and take it anywhere with us. To him, it was like a printing press you could take anywhere."
Chavez had grown larger than life. "He was such a giant, this huge leader of this movement," Montoya said. "But his physical stature and his humble demeanor were totally opposite to his achievements."
His legacy was his ability to bring "dignity to the people who toiled in the fields, to give people that dignity was an awesome achievement."
"You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride."
Carole Migden had boycotted table grapes. She picketed grocery stores, took part in rallies and marched under the banner of the UFW. She stood with Cesar Chavez, even if she stood afar as just one in a crowd of sometimes thousands.
His cause became hers. Over the years, her own cause -- advocating for gay and lesbian rights -- would become his, the UFW banner waving boldly among a myriad of rainbow flags.
"Anyone who was subjugated or oppressed -- he was going to defend those people," Migden said.
In 1983, during a gathering at a Los Angeles nightclub, Chavez spoke of his support for gay and lesbian rights.
"Many years ago, we were struggling in Delano to try to build an organization to defend the rights of workers, men and women who worked in the fields," Chavez was quoted in the Los Angeles Times. "It was along those years that we began to know from friends that supported us about the problems that the gay and lesbian communities were facing throughout the country."
His appearance at the event, his first before a gay and lesbian group, was a risky move, a courageous move, said Migden, now a state senator from San Francisco and one of several openly gay and lesbian members of the Legislature.
"He opened doors," she said.
In San Francisco, separate marches organized by union and gay activists would meld into one, sometimes to the consternation of his own followers.
"His legacy," Migden said, "was his extreme selflessness."
"You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read."
The legacy of Cesar Chavez was already well-established before Jesse Thomson-Burns was born in 1990. The labor leader's name was already familiar in the Latino community, on college campuses and in progressive circles. When California passed its state holiday honoring Chavez, it also put him on the curriculum of public schools.
"I've always been kind of interested in the '60s. They were doing things right," said Thomson-Burns, a student at River Valley School in Sacramento who earlier this week left for a 10-day tour of the South as part of a survey of the civil rights movement. "Back then, people just went out and did what they could do. They worked together. That's what I saw in the United Farm Workers."
On Friday, students across California, including about 100 from Sacramento's Hiram Johnson High School, boycotted classes to demand that their school districts recognize the state holiday that gives the day off to state employees. Other student groups used the day to bring attention to Latino causes, including a demonstration at Woodland Community College to bring attention to the dearth of faculty of Latino descent.
"People need to stand up for justice. Even if it's a hard thing, it's the right thing to do, and you have to do it," Thomson-Burns said. "He showed people that there was a problem, that it needed to be dealt with. ... He took step one -- making the problem visible to people."
CESAR ESTRADA CHAVEZ
Born: March 31, 1927
Died: April 21, 1993
Known for: United Farm Workers union leader, led the landmark 1960s nationwide grape boycott, became a symbol for Latino civil rights, spokesman for the poor -- especially his fellow Mexican American farmworkers.
Background: When he was 10, his parents lost their farm and the family became migrant workers in California. Chavez began to organize grape pickers in 1962, when he established the National Farm Workers Association with Dolores Huerta. In 1966, the union merged with another into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. The two unions had been on strike since 1965 against California grape growers. After the merger, California's wine grape growers agreed to accept the UFWOC as the collective bargaining agent for grape pickers. But table grape growers refused to do so. Chavez then organized a nationwide boycott of California table grapes. In 1970, most table grape growers agreed to accept the union, and the boycott ended. Later that year, Chavez called for a boycott of lettuce produced by growers without union contracts. Chavez remained committed to nonviolence despite occasional outbreaks of violence during UFW strikes. He declared that the "truest act of courage ... is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice."
Source: World Book Encyclopedia 2007
CELEBRATIONS: Sacramento
What: "United We Win: Justice for All Workers," the annual march and celebration of the life and legacy of Cesar E. Chavez.
When: 10 a.m. march, noon rally
Where: March begins at Southside Park, Eighth and T streets, and proceeds to Cesar Chavez Plaza, 10th and J streets.
Details: The rally includes a cultural program, a folkloric dance troupe, speakers, poetry and information booths.
More information: (916) 446-3021.
Rocklin
What: Cesar Chavez celebration
When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Sierra College
Celebration of arts, health, education and job fair featuring groups Luvtaxi, Sueños Ballet, Aztec and salsa dancers, rappers and workshops.
Information: (916) 532-5998
POEM EXCERPT
Just the other day
In Fresno
In a giant arena
Architectured
To reject the very poor
Cesar Chavez brought
The very poor
Together
In large numbers
...
That humble man's
Awesome task
Of organizing
The unorganizables!
In Fresno
In a giant arena
Architectured
To reject the very poor
Cesar Chavez brought
The very poor
Together
In large numbers
...
That humble man's
Awesome task
Of organizing
The unorganizables!
-- José Montoya, Sacramento's past poet laureate (from "Faces at the First Farmworkers' Constitutional Convention")
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