FELIZ CUMPLEANOS CESAR! SI SE PUDO HERMANO! SURCO!

 

By Juan Montoya

I had heard about Cesar Chavez and his United Farmworkers Organizing Committee in California as a kid working in the fields as an agricultural migrant with my family in the Midwest.

I knew and was part of his cause vicariously because I, too, had toiled all the livelong day either thinning sugar beets with a hoe in Nebraska on mile-long rows, picking cherries in Michigan, or tomatoes and pickles in Ohio.

It always seemed to me that we never got paid enough for the long work days. And it always seemed wrong to me that even after school started, kids were still going out on the fields picking tomatoes in the rain and coming back in the afternoons to sit together against a wall of one of the housing units of the labor camp as their muddy clothes dried, their hands stained green.

Most families kept their kids out of school, and I am eternally grateful that our parents willingly sent us to school and we worked after classes, only a few hours until dusk compared to some of our fellow migrants whose kids worked all day from sunup to sundown.

I don't mind telling you that it seemed impossible to me that one could organize farm workers, a nomadic tribe, especially since they had traveled so far from home to work. How do you get them to join a strike when they depended on their summer labor to survive the rest of the year?

Chavez, who was born in Yuma, Arizona, and later moved with his family to a little farm town in California called "Sal Si Puedes" believed he could. And he did. Through combination of boycotts, hunger strikes, and political pressure, Chavez was able to secure contracts with the big growers and later forced agribusiness concerns to come to terms with the union for better wages and labor conditions in the fields.

What were the farm workers' demands? A just wage, water to drink and portable bathrooms in the fields.

People from all over the nation stood in solidarity with Cesar, and with farm workers. It was a long time before I could get myself to eat grapes. Years later we found out he wasn't perfect. But then, who is?

Later, after the military and college, I was working for a newspaper in Saginaw, Michigan when he came to visit the United Auto Workers to gain support for his campaign against the overuse of pesticides on produce which ended up on the dinner tables across America. And poisoned farm workers.

A soft-spoken, almost shy, man, Chavez was forceful and passionate in his message and he carried the crowd when he spoke to the union members. One could feel the admiration and respect that this Midwest – mostly white – audience felt for him.

As I was about to leave the union hall, one of them pulled on my sleeve and invited me to take a photo with him. I had been taught that the reporter wasn't the story, and I was reluctant. But Cesar looked at me and extended his hand in invitation. I shook it and told him that like him I had been raised as a migrant farm worker and the bond was instant.

At the moment, I realized that it was his charisma and conviction in his struggle that had attracted farm workers to walk out of  the grape and lettuce fields to join him in the fight for justice.

Today I am grateful I allowed the union member to take our picture. Si se pudo.

Happy birthday Cesar.