A Fierce Dedication and a Lasting Legacy: Remembering One of
America’s Great Social Justice Leaders
I was recently traveling down Highway 58 through Tehachapi,
California, as the words to the Little Feat song “Willin’” were rolling through
my head: “from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah.” It was on that
lonely road that I spotted one of those ubiquitous brown highway signs
announcing that the César E. Chávez National
Monument was one mile ahead. This sign was a bit of surprise, as the
national park guidebook I use for trip planning did not list this new national
monument. But always nimble and on the lookout for a new park, I engaged my
right-hand blinker and went off to explore the life of one of America’s
greatest labor organizers.
This park hadn’t been on my radar, in part, because it is so
new. The Obama administration created
15 National Park Service monuments over the course of the president’s two
terms (two of which are now national historical parks), mostly celebrating
visionary leaders and historic landmarks. When President Obama created the
Chávez monument in 2012, it was the first — and is still the only — Park
Service site devoted to the life of a contemporary Latino.
Why was this designation so important? For one thing, many
visitors might simply not have known about it without the Park Service
arrowhead and resources to interpret the visionary leader’s history. At the
visitor center, I learned from Bernadette, the employee behind the desk, that
visitation at the site had gone up 700 percent since Obama signed the monument
proclamation. She told us that people were planning their vacations around
visiting the monument and getting a stamp in their national
park passport. She told us, “that
little blue passport book is huge” in raising awareness of Chávez’s Tehachapi
campus, the headquarters for the United Farm Workers.
Growing up in Oregon in the 60s, I remember well the
campaign Chávez organized to boycott grapes, highlighting the plight of the
farm workers in California. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was the extent
to which the farm workers movement was organizing workers in other agricultural
areas, not just grapes — and how the issues were about much more than labor
relations.
So much of the farm worker movement was also about civil
rights issues such as free speech and assembly, which were being challenged by
growers, judges and local law enforcement. Chávez himself was jailed numerous
times as he agitated for the right of farm workers to be able to collectively
bargain for better wages and working conditions. Those basic labor rights were
not extended to farm workers in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. But
as Chávez struggled against a system that profited from keeping farm labor
cheap and unorganized, he grew the movement to be a voice not only for farm
workers, but for the poor and disenfranchised everywhere. The union’s greatest
victory was working to pass the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act,
which became law in 1975, giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights.
César Chávez was born in 1927 in Arizona. In 1938, his
family moved to California after the bank foreclosed on their farm near Yuma
during the Dust Bowl, an agricultural and economic crisis that displaced tens
of thousands of families from their land. This experience helped inspire
Chávez’s fierce dedication to the plight of poor farm workers. Later, while
working California’s agricultural fields, Chávez experienced firsthand the
unsafe working conditions, poor wages and rampant discrimination that was the
everyday reality of farm workers.
During the 1950s, Chávez worked with the Community Service
Organization (CSO) and embraced community grassroots organizing as the way to
not only address fair labor issues, but also basic civil rights issues like
voting, housing and police brutality. When, in 1962, the CSO declined to
support Chávez’s desire to organize a labor movement, preferring to stick to
other issues, Chávez and several friends, including leader and long-time
collaborator Dolores Huerta, started the National Farm Workers Association, the
precursor to the United Farm Workers Union.
As the agricultural labor movement grew, Chávez recognized
that a well-coordinated labor movement demanded that he move from Delano, his
hometown, to a more central location to facilitate ongoing education and
training and to ensure that the movement was not geographically bound to a
specific labor fight. That new location ended up being 187 acres in the
Tehachapi Mountains, 30 miles east of Bakersfield at a former Kern County
tuberculosis sanitarium. The site had many of the amenities needed for an
educational retreat center, including meeting rooms, residential buildings,
maintenance shops, water, sewer and office space.
In 1971, the county was offering up the sanatorium for
auction, but Chávez knew the owners would not sell to union organizers, let
alone Latino union organizers. So he enlisted help from Edward Lewis, a movie
producer in Hollywood who was supportive of Chávez’s work. Union employees were
not allowed access to the site, so to make certain the facility would meet the
needs of the Farm Workers Union, Chávez’s brother, Richard, posed as Lewis’s
chauffeur when Lewis went to inspect the property. Richard reported back that
it was just what they were looking for. After a spirited round of bidding with
a local rancher, Lewis bought the property for $231,500, and by 1972, the
United Farm Workers Union had a new home. Chávez named it Nuestra Señora Reina
de la Paz (Our Lady Queen of Peace), often referred to as just “La Paz.”
Ironically, Chávez’s wife Helen had spent time at the
sanatorium when she was young, and she was initially not at all pleased that
her husband had bought it and wanted to live there. Yet she ended up living at
La Paz until her death in 2015, and the Park Service now has plans to renovate
the family house to include in its preservation and interpretation efforts. The
site is also still the working home of the United Farm Workers Union. Staff
live on-site, and the retreat and education center actively support union
organizers. Since the monument proclamation, the National Park Service and the
National Chávez Center have cooperatively run the visitor center, with plans to
eventually open the Chávez home to visitors.
The Park Service is busy digitizing a vast collection of
Chávez family and United Farm Worker videos that will eventually be available
for the public to view. We saw one of those videos as well as a gallery of
photos from the union’s early days. There is a replica of Chávez’s office
showing how simply he lived and worked. Visitors can also see Chávez’s grave
and the beautiful outdoor memorial garden where he was buried after his death
in 1993.
This new monument is a work in progress, but well worth the
visit. The best part of my visit was the walk I took around the grounds of the
retreat and education center where the spirit of this great American leader,
César Chávez, is still alive in the many organizers continuing his legacy for
justice.
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