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“Cesar Chavez An American Hero”
Written by John D. Trausch, MA
He was a villain to the growers, but a hero to the workers. Called the Latino Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez worked the fields of California to give a better life to the migrant workers cut off from their families, friends, from the rest of civilization, whilst toiling in the burning fields for few rewards.
Often armed with nothing but pamphlets, petitions and his charisma, Chavez worked the fields harvesting hands to join him in his fight for fair wages, medical coverage, pension benefits and humane living conditions.
It was a struggle that Cesar Chavez had learned the hard way, growing up in the American Southwest. Cesar’s grandfather was an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, who came to El Paso, Texas seeking a better life for his family. Decades later, Cesar was born on March 30, 1927 near Yuma, Arizona on land his grandfather had homesteaded. Cesar’s family of 12 lost their farm in the Great Depression, and he was forced to leave school in the eighth grade to help support his family in the fields full-time as a migrant farmworker.
World War II broke out, but Chavez was too young to enlist, and was forced to wait until he was 19 to join the Navy, in 1946. While on leave, he sat in the white section of a racially segregated movie theater and refused to move, foreshadowing his future as a civil rights activist.
 After being discharged, he married Helen Febela, whom he met while working the vineyards of Central California. Chavez became a community organizer with Community Service Organization (CSO), a prominent Latino Civil Rights Group in 1952. With Fred Ross, he organized 22 CSO chapters up and down California. Chavez urged Mexican-Americans to register and vote, and traveled throughout California and made speeches in support of workers' rights. He became their national director in the late 1950s. "La Causa," as it was called, held a successful nationwide grape and lettuce boycotts and public support exposed the injustices of California agribusiness, resulting in the first collective bargaining agreements for migrant workers. A decade later Cesar moved his wife and eight children to Delano where he and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, the predecessor to the United Farm Workers (UFW).
 It was with the UFW that Chavez became well known to the world outside the fields. To much of the urban world, he stressed nonviolent social protests, education, sacrifice, demonstrations, rallies, marches and boycotts of produce. Many times he went on lengthy fasts to show his own resolve. Senator Robert F. Kennedy called Chavez “one of the heroic figures of our time."
In the early 1970s, the UFW organized strikes and boycotts. During the 1980s, he led a boycott to protest the use of toxic pesticides on grapes. Chavez, a student of both Jesus and Gandhi, again fasted to draw public attention.
Cesar Chavez, who insisted that those who labor the earth were entitled to share the rewards of their toil, died in his sleep in 1993.
President Bill Clinton awarded Chavez the Medal of Freedom posthumously for having "faced formidable, often violent opposition with dignity and nonviolence. And he was victorious. Cesar Chavez left our world better than he found it, and his legacy inspires us still. He was for his own people a Moses figure," the President declared. In addition, Cesar was also awarded Mexico’s highest civilian award, the Aquila Azteca, as a testimony to his lifelong contributions to humanity.
 The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative First Class Cesar Chavez postage stamp in 2003, upon the 10th anniversary of his death in 1993.
In California, Cesar Chavez is the first Latino to be honored with a statewide holiday. March 30 is a holiday for state workers and an optional holiday for public schools.
The struggle of the migrant workers lives on.
To learn more about this year’s event at Olvera Street, bordering Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Los Angeles, click here!
A few quotes from Cesar Chavez:
“!Si se puede!” (Yes we can!)
“You are never strong enough that you don't need help.”
“You knock on twenty doors or so, and twenty guys tell you to go to hell, or that they haven't got time. But maybe at the fortieth or sixtieth house you find the one guy who is all you need.”
“If you give yourself totally to the nonviolence struggle for peace and justice you also find that people give you their hearts and you will never go hungry and never be alone.”
“If we have the capacity to endure, if we have the patience, things will change.”
“We can choose to use our lives for others to bring about a better and more just world for our children.”
“If we have the capacity to endure, if we have the patience, things will change.”
To visit more links about Cesar Chavez visit:
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