March and Rally Open 3-Day Chavez Tribute

MISSION HILLS — It was the summer of 1971 in Dinuba--one of the scores of farming towns sprinkled across the San Joaquin Valley--when Cesar Chavez came to town on a recruiting mission.

The local sheriff met the labor leader at the city limits and said: “You can’t march here, Cesar Chavez. You don’t have a permit.” Miguel Contreras, who was 18 at the time, related the event for a crowd at Brand Park on Sunday.

“The choice is yours,” Chavez replied. “I don’t know how big your jail is.”

The sheriff finally gave in and the campesinos--farm workers, including Contreras, now the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor--met peacefully for two hours at a local park.

“Si, se puede”--it can be done--Contreras yelled into a microphone at the Sunday rally commemorating the union leader’s birthday. The crowd, about 1,000 strong, echoed Chavez’s trademark slogan.

Chavez, the legendary co-founder of United Farm Workers, died in 1993 at age 66. He would have been 71 on Tuesday.

Contreras and Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the union with Chavez, were among the speakers at the rally, the first of various activities planned for the next three days to remember Chavez.

The crowd of all ages waved red flags with a black eagle, the UFW symbol, during a two-mile procession from the site of the rally to a cultural arts festival at San Fernando Recreation Park.

“This is marvelous,” said Huerta, 67, who in the last few days has attended celebrations in cities across the country, including New York. “Cesar’s legacy carries so much weight with the young people and the Latino community.”

“He stood up for other people’s rights,” said Maritza Flores, 15, a San Fernando High School sophomore. “He’s an example for kids.”

Other activities leading up to Chavez’s birthday include a voluntary fast beginning today and ending Tuesday at 7 p.m., said Xavier Flores of the Cesar Chavez Commemorative Committee--a collection of business, educational, religious and labor entities sponsoring the events.

A candlelight vigil will be held Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at Mary Immaculate Church in Pacoima, with a Mass at 7 p.m.

Chavez was born in 1927 on a farm near Yuma, Ariz. At 10, his family lost the farm and came to California to work in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.

His radical idea to unionize farm workers was born in the grape orchards around Delano, a small town about 150 miles north of Los Angeles. The National Farm Workers Assn. was formed in 1962.

In 1966, he led workers on a march up the San Joaquin Valley to Sacramento. Through fasts, boycotts and strikes--huelgas--they focused attention on the mostly Latino families who picked the nation’s fruits and vegetables, including grapes, strawberries and lettuce.

That year, California’s wine-grape growers agreed to accept the union as the collective bargaining agent for the grape pickers. But table-grape growers refused.

Chavez organized a national boycott of California table grapes that ended in 1970 when most table-grape growers agreed to accept the union.

Chavez came to be globally respected. He gave the speech nominating former Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. for president at the 1976 Democratic Convention.

After he died in his sleep in April 1993, his body was carried through the San Joaquin Valley fields in a procession that included 35,000 marchers.

He “was one of the great motivators of my involvement in the political process,” said Rep. Howard Berman (D-Mission Hills), who marched with Chavez in 1965 and attended Sunday’s rally. “He [faced] an outpouring of racism, and through fasting, he got the world to focus on his cause.”

Other speakers Sunday included Los Angeles Councilman Richard Alarcon and Assemblyman Tony Cardenas. They urged the crowd to bring the lessons Chavez taught in rural California--organizing and voting--to the city to promote good jobs, education and health care for the working class.

“We are here to celebrate his legacy,” Alarcon told the cheering crowd. “We are his legacy.”

Said Cardenas: “I’m so proud to say I’m the son of migrant workers. I’m so proud to say I’m the son of emigrantes.”

While praising Chavez for his work, many celebrants said there is still much to be done.

Claudia Williams, a bilingual teacher at San Fernando Elementary, said she has seen the working and living conditions today in the strawberry fields around Watsonville, where growers are fighting off workers’ efforts to organize.

“There’s up to seven people living in one-bedroom apartments,” she said.

Huerta said some employers don’t provide water for workers to wash off the chemicals from their hands before eating lunch.

Though the day was filled with Chavez’s original spirit of activism, the crowd also focused on political fights of the 1990s.

Signs denounced laws that have done away with affirmative action programs and certain immigrant rights. In impromptu conversation, people also protested efforts to halt bilingual education in the state’s public schools.