Gilroy
– For those who knew Cesar Chavez, it’s surreal to see his name
splashed over highways, on street signs, parks, even a Texas
bowling alley; still stranger to see government workers kicking
back in honor of a man who worked ceaselessly for the men and women
who till California’s soil.
Gilroy – For those who knew Cesar Chavez, it’s surreal to see his name splashed over highways, on street signs, parks, even a Texas bowling alley; still stranger to see government workers kicking back in honor of a man who worked ceaselessly for the men and women who till California’s soil.
“Cesar would not want a holiday on his behalf,” said Timoteo Vasquez, who met him as a teenager in San Jose and spent six years organizing alongside Chavez, spearheading the grape boycott as a student in Santa Barbara. “He’d want an organizing day.”
Monica Gomez agreed. Five years ago, the Morgan Hill woman decided to take Chavez’ message to the fields, not the streets – not even the streets that bear his name. Armed with brown paper bags, juice boxes, and packs of chips, she enlisted her mother and a friend to help her pack 100 lunches for South County farmworkers, and deliver them to a Morgan Hill mushroom plant. Today, her grassroots gesture has exploded into an annual event that delivers hundreds of lunches to South County workers on three different farms, with a prayer, a song and a message from Cesar Chavez to boot.
“There are still people who don’t know who Cesar Chavez was,” Gomez said – county workers and field hands alike. “It’s not much, but this is our small effort to celebrate the holiday, and to recognize the people who Cesar Chavez fought for.”
Chavez symbolized big change
To many, Chavez is a symbol: the father of the farmworkers’ movement, who won higher wages and workplace protections for California grape-pickers. But to those who knew him in South County, Chavez was flesh-and-blood, ordinary and extraordinary at once.
They remember the little things. His granddaughter, Teresa Chavez Delgado, recalls the small box of audio tapes, jazz music, big band and swing, that he traveled with; Vasquez remembers the Indian vegetarian meals he cooked, the book he first gave him – “All Men Are Brothers,” by Mohandas Gandhi – and his two German Shepherd dogs, Boycott and Huelga (Strike.) They remember the “tortilla masses” he helped lead in the fields, when Catholic priests had to substitute specially-blessed tortillas for the Dioceses-sanctioned host; they remember his daily meditations, Tai Chi and prayers.
Chavez’ niece, Barbara Medina Aranda, fought back tears as she addressed the crowd gathered for Gilroy’s annual Cesar Chavez Breakfast, presented by the Mexican American Community Services Agency. As she drives down Monterey Highway, past the garlic fields where workers hunch over the crops, she still pictures her uncle there alongside them, though he died 14 years ago. For her, he is no symbol.
“I like to explain to children that they could be the next Cesar Chavez,” said Chavez Delgado. “People look at him almost like a saint or a mythical figure” – especially after his lengthy public fasts of 24, 28 and 36 days each. “But I tell them, he was my grandfather, and he started out with less than what you have. Follow his core values, and you could be him.”
As a college student, Morgan Hill attorney Anne Rosenzweig recalled, she was doing community work in Salinas when Chavez came to visit. The Salinas family she stayed with always opened their home to visitors, so Rosenzweig didn’t bat an eye when people began to fill the living room, their Spanish peppered with the words “union” and “huelga.” Then Chavez walked in: a gentle face she knew from newspapers, but with a smaller stature than she’d imagined him. He asked for an aspirin.
“He showed me that you can have real strength without being strident,” Rosenzweig said. Later, she became a labor lawyer, inspired by Chavez’ work. “The two things I took from knowing him: One, how much difference one human being can make. Two, the power of nonviolent action, and people working together to make change.”
Struggling for farmworker rights, then and now
In life, Chavez was not always so revered – at least, not by those on the opposite side of the picket lines. Death threats arrived every day by phone and by mail; when he marched, Vasquez said, opponents sometimes hissed, ‘We’ll kill you.’ Pipe bombs exploded at sites where he was scheduled to speak; fortunately, said Vasquez, he always planned three possible routes to march, three possible locations to speak, and picked one at random, to outwit his enemies.
“My mom would tell us, ‘You have to be careful. Some people don’t like your grandfather,’ ” said Chavez Delgado. ” ‘Don’t say, ‘Cesar’s my grandfather.’ ”
Today, Pete Aiello welcomes Gomez and her volunteers, dubbed Amigos de Cesar Chavez, onto Uesugi Farms to deliver lunches and Chavez’ message. Born long after Chavez mobilized Delano grape pickers to strike, he doesn’t share older farmers’ antipathy toward Chavez – but he knows little love was lost.
“None of those guys thought too highly of Cesar Chavez,” Aiello said. “He was a labor union leader. We’re employers of those laborers. I can’t think of a single industry where those two factions think highly of each other.”
Time has softened the divide, and so has United Farm Workers’ diminished influence, said Aiello. No modern boycott has mobilized consumers like the 1960s grape boycott, which slapped thousands of ‘NO GRAPES’ and ‘NO UVAS’ bumper stickers on California cars. But though it’s quiet in the fields, activists say that doesn’t mean that all is well. Rosenzweig is frustrated that farmworkers remain low-paid, often unorganized, exposed to pesticides and poorly housed; Vasquez adds that Chavez died still trying to outlaw noxious pesticides in the fields.
“Farmworkers are still living under poor conditions, even here in South County,” said Aranda. “My uncle would have been 80 on Saturday, and if he were here, he’d be fighting to educate farmworkers, and to fight the immigration raids.”
What Chavez achieved
Still, Chavez undoubtedly bettered the lives of farmworkers, said Yaocoatl Noe Montoya, a musician who once worked Hollister fields alongside his migrant parents. He remembers waking up in a car, a drowsy 5-year-old, and watching crop dusters spray the fields alongside his working parents. He remembers having to squat in fields, where nobody provided a sanitary toilet. He remembers arriving at run-down labor camps, infested with wasps, and trying to make them home.
“This was where we were expected to work,” Montoya said.
“It’s just the way life was,” added Antonia Alvarado Burnham, who worked San Luis Obispo fields, picking peas and string beans, cucumbers and apricots. “Until Cesar fought for us, I didn’t even think of the dangers, the conditions we worked under.”
And though the struggle continues, said Vasquez, Chavez showed that the battle could be won by the little guy – if the little guys stuck together. When he died, Chavez had never earned more than $6,000 a year – a pittance compared to most big-name organizers – owned little, and often drove donated cars, some of which broke down en route.
Even at the height of his fame, added Vasquez, Chavez always answered his phone.
“California is the largest agricultural corporate conglomerate in the world,” Vasquez said, “and Cesar brought it to its knees.”
But to Burnham, what ultimately mattered was his heart.
“He was a decent man, and he cared for the people,” she said. “He was such a good man.”
