Dorothy Day, legendary founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, offered crucial support to Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers at several key junctures in their struggle. Most memorably, she travelled to California in the summer of 1973 to get arrested. The UFW, in the midst of a bitter struggle with the Teamsters union, had begun a campaign of […]
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is the source of many famous quotes and aphorisms, including the paraphrase of a line from Polonius that we have come to know as the saying, “clothes make the man.” Cesar Chavez, who left school after 8th grade, had likely not discovered Shakespeare when the 25-year-old discovered his lifelong passion: community organizing. But he instinctively […]
Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. never met. They overlapped only briefly in the national spotlight, though their names are often linked together because of they each championed civil rights and shared a very public commitment to non-violent protest. When John Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus bridge on Bloody Sunday, fifty years ago today, […]
Since I’m heading to New York soon (two great events – March 31 at the 92nd St Y and April 1 at the new Book Culture on Columbus Ave), today’s #chaveztrivia is about the New York City “Boycott House.” As a native New Yorker and a baby boomer, I’m well aware that most New Yorkers of a certain […]
March 31, Cesar Chavez’s birthday, is a state holiday in California, and President Obama regularly issues a proclamation of a national day of service. The intent of the 2000 law in California was not only to honor Chavez, but to draw attention to the life of this remarkable man, and in particular to educate students. There’s a long way to go. Sadly, I’ve […]
The 27-year-old just stared at the photo of the young girl. Jose Barreto’s mother is 50; he had never seen a picture of her as a child. Now through a combination of chance and history and complicated threads, he sat in an El Centro kitchen, looking back four decades at a picture of a 10-year-old girl. […]
Gov. Jerry Brown has a long, significant history as an advocate of farmworkers’ rights, dating back to his early marches with Cesar Chavez in the late 1960s and culminating with the passage in May 1975 of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the only law in the country protecting farmworkers’ rights to unionize. The law would […]
Labor Day falls this year on the anniversary of a truly historic labor victory. Forty-eight years ago today, workers gathered in a hall in Delano, California, nervously awaiting the results of the first election in the fields: The fight to represent farmworkers who picked grapes at giant DiGiorgio Company. It was an election, Cesar Chavez later said, that […]
The Robert F. Kennedy health insurance plan illustrates two extremes of Cesar Chavez’s legacy for farmworkers. In the early 1970s, the UFW-sponsored plan provided much-needed health care for farmworkers and epitomized the audacious triumphs that grew from Chavez’s soaring vision. But within a decade, the insurance program came crashing to earth in a bureaucratic mess. Staffed […]
The weeks following publication of a book are crammed with conversations about the book – what it says, how you wrote it, why you wrote it, what people think. And those conversations about “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez” have been intense and wonderful. But among the most enjoyable parts of the just-having-published-a-book-time for me are […]