He did not like school as a child, probably because he spoke only Spanish at home. The teachers were mostly Anglo and only spoke English. Spanish was forbidden in school. He remembers being punished with a ruler to his knuckles for violating the rule. He also remembers that some schools were segregated and he felt that in the integrated schools he was like a monkey in a cage.
He remembers having to listen to a lot of racist remarks. He remembers seeing signs that read whites only. He and his brother, Richard, attended thirty-seven schools. In he graduated from the eighth grade. Because his father, Librado, had been in an accident and because he did not want his mother, Juana, to work in the fields, he could not to go to high school, and instead became a migrant farm worker. While his childhood school education was not the best, later in life, education was his passion.
He joined the U. Navy, which was then segregated, in , at the age of 19, and served for two years. In Cesar married Helen Fabela. They honeymooned in California by visiting all the California Missions from Sonoma to San Diego again the influence of education. They settled in Delano and started their family. First Fernando, then Sylvia, then Linda, and five more children were to follow. They talked about farm workers and strikes. Cesar began reading about St.
Francis and Gandhi and nonviolence. His first task was voter registration. He was joined by Dolores Huerta and the union was born. Cesar told the story of the birth of the eagle.
He asked Richard to design the flag, but Richard could not make an eagle that he liked. Finally he sketched one on a piece of brown wrapping paper. He then squared off the wing edges so that the eagle would be easier for union members to draw on the handmade red flags that would give courage to the farm workers with their own powerful symbol. That is why we chose an Aztec eagle. It gives.
For a long time in , there were very few union dues paying members. By the UFW got grape growers to accept union contracts and had effectively organized most of that industry, at one point in time claiming 50, dues paying members. The marchers wanted the state government to pass laws which would permit farm workers to organize into a union and allow collective bargaining agreements.
Cesar made people aware of the struggles of farm workers for better pay and safer working conditions. He succeeded through nonviolent tactics boycotts, pickets, and strikes.
Cesar Chavez and the union sought recognition of the importance and dignity of all farm workers. Chavez has been dead since He had led a life of outrageousbehavior, if you happened to be a farmer in California or Arizona,because his aims were these: To organize farm workers into unionsthat cried out for decent pay and working conditions, and to takethe steps that would lead to contracts with farmers.
Such asboycotts and huelgas. He did these things in the s and s,principally, and if you were not alive then it must be very hard toimagine the power of this one small man -- Vicente Fox he was not-- to enrage. But the Chavez life, from the viewpoint of the migrants earningthemselves permanently bent spines in the groves and vineyards andfields of the Southwest, was inspirational, almost saintly, and hewill never be forgotten by the workers into whose own lives heshined a little hope, a touch of security, a bit of knowledge thatthey were more than slaves in the unforgiving sunshine.
Across the nation he was honored at safe remove by liberals ofevery stripe. They sent money and good wishes, and very often theirchildren and brothers and sisters to march with Chavez in thisstrike and that, to bolster a boycott, to get a contract in theworks. The great grape boycott was a thing of American history. Cesar Chavez, of Mexican descent, was in some ways from centralcasting.
He was one of six children whose very early life, on afarm near Yuma, Ariz. Then in the Depression years it got very rough, and how he andothers survived is difficult to take in. And got some contracts signed with farmers who saw no end to hisobsession, and who decided to obey laws, or to get the grapespicked.
A fair question is this: If Chavez and his followers -- and theunion -- somehow transformed the lives of workers through theyears, why are migrants today still the lower class of society insuch counties as San Diego? Still widely denied housing or evenshantytowns in the arroyos?
Still working for minute sums whileperforming signal service for the eating world? And because ofthe nearness of the chaotic U.
The undeniable truth is that after the glory years, much of thegrand Chavez movement, the struggle, died out, or languished. California farming increasingly was characterized as "agribusiness," since the industry was not made up of family farms --as was the norm in many other areas of the country--but of vast land holdings operated by major corporations. In California, growers had political muscle that they could bring to bear in both Sacramento and in the nation's capital.
California agribusiness had become "a coerced cornucopia," as geographer Grey Brechin wrote. Mexican workers had been imported into the state since the s, first to work on the railroads and in factories, and later to work the fields.
During World War I, for example, labor contractors supplied California growers with seasonal workers from Mexico. Growers prevailed in Congress to not include Mexico in the postwar immigration restrictions that were placed on most other nations, so as to maintain the labor supply.
World War II created a labor shortage on the homefront and Congress responded by enacting the Emergency Labor, or Bracero, progam bracero meaning "the strong-armed ones". Thousands of workers were imported, and an even larger number of illegal "undocumented workers" crisscrossed the border to work the fields of California and the Southwest.
Congress granted a variety of extensions to the program, which existed until
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