César Chávez – a Mexican American with radical views on immigration, who swore by nonviolence but subsidized an illegal border patrol operation – was a man of many contradictions. | via TexasStandard
On Oct. 9, 2012, under the soft light of the Southern California sun, President Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of thousands., located at the former headquarters of the United Farm Workers, nicknamed La Paz – “the peace.”
Chávez’s contributions to farmworkers and the history of labor are historic – but like all historical figures, he’s complicated.Born in 1927, Chávez was raised in Yuma, Ariz. Like most minorities, he didn’t grow up with much, but he was raised around family, and they usually had enough to eat from working their land.
“When I was working, when we were picking cotton in South Texas, I was 10 years old. My sisters I think were 14, 14, 13 and 12, something like that,” she said. “And so we were all, you know, young, little kids working in the fields, holding down a job to add to the income that my family so desperately needed.
The way Flores talks about this – the decision to exclude farmworkers from perhaps the biggest labor victory in American history – almost sounds like she’s describing the concept of original sin. When he arrived, he found out the trees had all been sold, so he made the next logical decision: He drove another hundred miles to Portland to get in contact with dealers there.
“One of Chávez’s great strengths as an organizer was just this relentlessness,” Pawel said. “I mean, if you talk to people today who are good labor organizers, often it’s just a matter of going back over and over again and just never giving up.” The organization’s most noteworthy challenge came in 1965, when 2,000 Filipino farmworkers went on strike for better wages in Delano, Calif. After about a week, Chávez and the UFW joined what would become one of the biggest labor battles of the ’60s.
In 1956, Chávez was scurrying around California trying to sell Christmas trees. In 1968, he was rubbing elbows with America’s political aristocracy. In the mid-70s, Chávez launched what he called the Illegals Campaign, an effort to raise awareness about illegal immigration and report undocumented workers to federal authorities.
To Chávez, the civil rights era leader who swore nonviolence, any influx of foreign labor represented a threat to the farmworkers’ movement. The people who crossed the border illegally were in search of a better life. But they were also scabs, willing to do the jobs that American farmworkers were organizing to improve.“All of a sudden yesterday morning, they brought in 220 wetbacks – these are the illegals from Mexico,” Chávez said in an interview with KQED in the ‘70s.
At every step in their fight, the farmworkers were outmatched. If that complicates the historical record decades later, it’s not something she’s going to dwell on.
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