"We can choose to use our lives for others to bring about a better and
more just world for our children..." Words of Cesar Chavez, founder of
the United Farm Workers of America who died ten years ago on April 23.
"...People who make that choice will know hardship and sacrifice ..."
Working for a just world sometimes is lonely and difficult work. Working for
a just world sometimes means speaking truth not only to power, but to our friends.
Working for a just world sometimes means being labeled as a trouble-maker, a
zealot or as unpatriotic or un-Christian.
"...But if you give yourself totally to the non-violent struggle for peace
and justice you also find that people give you their hearts and you will never
go hungry and never be alone..." Martin Luther King, Jr. gave himself totally.
Malcolm X gave himself totally. Charlene Teeters gives herself totally. The
Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu give themselves totally.
"...And in giving of yourself you will discover a whole new life full of
meaning and love."
The son of a poor farm worker and general store owner, Cesar Chavez was a warrior
for justice, born in Arizona in 1927. When his family lost their land during
the Depression, he was forced to quit school and work in the fields. In the
early 1960's he and his wife and eight children moved to California, where he
dedicated his life to organizing farm workers, who lived in dingy, overcrowded
quarters without electricity, bathrooms or running water. In his lifetime he
never owned a house or earned more than $6,000 a year. But when he died in 1993,
40,000 people marched behind his casket.
Cesar Chavez' life was an inspiration to a whole generation of farm workers;
men and women, some even today living very closely to slavery. In helping to
found the United Farm Workers of America, Chavez showed that in unity there
is power, even for the powerless. For his organizing work, for his voter registration
work, for his repeated jailings because of this work and for his fearless and
yet non-violent approach to those who threatened him, Chavez is remembered as
a human rights advocate and a man of justice and peace.
But to do honor to this great man, it is not enough to recall his manner or
his accomplishments or his faith or his dedication to the poorest of the poor.
It is not enough to lift up his name as one of the prophets sent to remind the
wealthiest nation in the world of the plight of those who work so that we might
be fed.
Rather, Cesar Chavez would want us to work for justice ourselves. Cesar Chavez
would want us to join the farm workers' struggles against Mt. Olive pickles
and against Taco Bell and the growers who supply these large companies. In an
article in the April 21 and 28 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a U.S. border
patrol agent was quoted as saying, "Most of the time these workers are
housed miles from civilization, with no telephones or cars. They're controllable.
There's no escape." The Immokalee farm workers, who live in the little
town of Immokalee not far from Ft. Myers, FL and who pick tomatoes which then
are sold to Taco Bell and others, are paid 40 cents for filling a 32 pound bucket.
Like the migrant farm workers who pick cucumbers for Mt. Olive pickles in North
Carolina, they have not had a pay raise in three decades. When they finish paying
for their lodging, for the transportation and for the food which they receive
(conveniently) from the nearby little grocery stores mostly owned by their overseers,
there is little or no money left over. If they try to run away they are beaten
and sometimes worse. Girls and women sometimes find themselves sold into lives
of prostitution by the same overseers.
Meanwhile, the large corporations, the citrus companies, the food industries
which use tomatoes and cucumbers for their foods, purchase what they need from
these growers while winking at these skirtings of the law and proclaiming their
own innocence. Cesar Chavez was a fine man and a great American who forced this
nation to look at how we treated farm workers. Many of us, people of faith,
people of conscience, people who recognized injustice when we saw it, responded
by not buying table grapes then. The spirit of Cesar Chavez lives on and forces
us to look at the below-poverty wages, the unsafe working conditions of those
picking pesticide-laden fruit; the unsanitary, sub-sub standard living conditions
and the involuntary servitude that thousands of farm workers face today. Will
we respond to this injustice now?