New national monument honors labor leader, farm worker movement


By SHERRY HALBROOK


In October 1989, when delegates to the 11th Annual PEF Convention gathered at the Concord Hotel and Conference Center in Kiamesha Lake, they heard from United Farm Workers (UFW) President and co-founder Cesar Chavez.


He spoke softly of the farm workers’ struggle against fruit growers in California for protection from toxic pesticides and herbicides, and he asked PEF to join a national table grapes boycott.


Last month, just as delegates to PEF’s 34th Annual Convention were preparing to travel to that event in Syracuse, President Barack Obama established the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument at the National Chavez Center at La Paz, in Keene, CA.


Chavez is both the first national labor leader and the first Latino to be honored with a national monument.


“Cesar Chavez gave a voice to poor and disenfranchised workers everywhere,” Obama said. “La Paz was at the center of some of the most significant civil rights moments in our nation’s history, and by designating it a national monument, Chavez’ legacy will be preserved and shared to inspire generations to come.” From this rural headquarters in the Tehachapi Mountains of Kern County, California, Chavez played a central role in achieving basic worker protections for hundreds of thousands of farmworkers across the country.


Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the UFW in 1962, the first agricultural union in the United States. As UFW president, Chavez led the union through a series of unprecedented victories that benefited more than 100,000 farm


workers. Coining the Spanish phrase, “Si, se puede!” which means “Yes, it can be done!” they were able to raise wages, obtain some health care and pensions, and achieve healthier, safer working conditions. They have fought for drinking water and restroom facilities for workers who labor from dawn to dusk in scorching hot fields, groves and vineyards.


Chavez succeeded by adopting a non- violent but heroic advocacy style inspired by Mahatma Gandhi in India and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in America. Chavez began to fast for long periods. By refusing to eat food, Chavez drew national and international attention to


Page 2 — The Communicator November 2012


NON-VIOLENCE CHAMPION – PEF Sec.-Treas. Jim Sheedy welcomes Cesar Chavez to the 1989 PEF convention, at left, and President Obama dedicates national monument to him, above.


the suffering of the people who grow and pick the food. His sacrifice helped the public see the workers’ cause as a moral issue.


He fasted for 25 days in 1968,


promoting the principle of nonviolent resistance. Two years later, he fasted in ‘thanksgiving and hope’ to prepare for civil disobedience by farm workers, and in 1972, he fasted to protest an Arizona law that prohibited boycotts and strikes by farm workers during the harvest seasons. Born in Arizona in 1927, Chavez’ birthday, March 31, has become Cesar Chavez Day. A holiday in three U.S. states, the UFW is working to make it a national holiday.


A Mexican American, Chavez left school after eighth grade to work in the fields, so his mother could be spared that back-breaking effort. After serving two years in the U.S. Navy, Chavez went to work in 1952 as an organizer for a Latino civil rights group called the Community Service Organization, or CSO. Within six years he became its national director. Four years later, he left to co-found the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with Huerta, which later became the UFW.


In 1966, Chavez led a strike of


California grape pickers and their historic march from Delano to the state capitol in Sacramento. The strike lasted five years and attracted national attention and support from U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.


The UFW sparked similar efforts and new unions in Texas, Wisconsin and


Ohio. The UFW organized the largest farm worker strike in U.S. history, the Salad Bowl Strike, which won higher wages for workers from grape and lettuce growers. The union also won passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which gave collective bargaining rights to farm workers. Chavez was committed to restricting immigration and, with Huerta, opposed the Bracero Program that began in 1942 to help sustain food production during World War II. They felt the program undermined U.S. workers and exploited the migrant workers by providing a constant supply of cheap immigrant labor for growers. Chavez and Huerta got Congress to end the Bracero Program in 1964.


The UFW was among the first unions to oppose employer sanctions against hiring undocumented immigrants, and Chavez played a critical role in getting amnesty provisions into the federal immigration act of 1986.


In 1969, Chavez led the UFW on a


march through the Imperial and Coachella Valleys to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of undocumented immigrants to break UFW strikes. Both black civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Sen. Walter Mondale joined Chavez on that march. Today, the UFW is fighting a tough battle to end the needless deaths of its members who are often denied shade, rest and medical care when they suffer heat stroke in the fields.


PEF Information Line: 1-800-553-2445


Roots of Struggle


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