SI SE PUEDE:THE LEGACY OF CESAR CHAVEZ

SI SE PUEDE: THE LEGACY OF CESAR CHAVEZ
By Dick Meister

March 31 is a special day in nine states and dozens of cities -- Cesar
Chavez Day, honoring the late founder of the United Farm Workers union on
the 80th anniversary of his birth. And certainly I've not encountered, in
four decades of labor reporting, anyone more deserving of such a tribute.

I first met Cesar Chavez when I was covering labor for the San Francisco
Chronicle. It was on a hot summer night 42 years ago in the little San
Joaquin Valley town of Delano, California. Chavez, shining black hair
trailing across his forehead, wearing a green plaid shirt that had become
almost a uniform, sat behind a makeshift desk topped with bright red
Formica.

"Si se puede," he said repeatedly to me, a highly skeptical reporter, as we
talked deep into the early morning hours there in the cluttered shack that
served as headquarters for him and the others who were trying to create
an effective farmworkers union.

"Si se puede -- it can be done!"

But I would not be swayed. Too many others, over too many years, had
tried and had failed to win for farmworkers the union rights they had to
have if they were to escape the severe economic and social deprivation
inflicted on them by their grower employers.

The Industrial Workers of the World who stormed across western fields early
in the century, the Communists who followed, the socialists, the AFL and CIO
organizers -- all their efforts had collapsed under the relentless pressure
of growers and their powerful political allies.

I was certain this effort would be no different. I was wrong. I had not
accounted for the tactical brilliance, creativity, courage and just plain
stubbornness of Cesar Chavez, a sad-eyed, disarmingly soft-spoken man
who talked of militance in calm, measured tones, a gentle and incredibly
patient man who hid great strategic talent behind shy smiles and an attitude
of utter candor.

Chavez grasped the essential fact that farmworkers had to organize
themselves. Outside organizers, however well-intentioned, could not do it.
Chavez, a farmworker himself, carefully put together a grass-roots
organization that enabled the workers to form their own union, which then
sought out -- and won -- widespread support from influential outsiders.

The key weapon of what became the United Farm Workers union was the boycott.
It was so effective that between 1968 and 1975 fully 12 percent of the
country's adult population -- that's 17 million people -- quit buying table
grapes.

The UFW's grape boycott and others against wineries and lettuce growers
won the first farm union contracts in history. They led ultimately to
enactment of the California law that requires growers to bargain
collectively with workers who vote for unionization and to substantial
improvements in the pay, benefits and working conditions of the state's
farmworkers.

The struggle was extremely difficult for the impoverished workers, and
Chavez risked his health -- if not his life -- to provide them extreme
examples of the sacrifices necessary for victory. Most notably, he engaged
in lengthy, highly publicized fasts that helped rally the public to the
farmworkers' cause and that may very well have contributed to his untimely
death in 1993 at age 66.

Fasts, boycotts. It's no coincidence that those were among the principal
tools of Mohandas Gandhi, for Chavez drew much of his inspiration from the
Indian leader. Like Gandhi and another of his models, Martin Luther King
Jr., Chavez believed fervently in the tactics of non-violence. Like them, he
showed the world how profoundly effective they can be in seeking justice
from even the most powerful of opponents.

What the UFW accomplished, and how the union accomplished it, will never be
forgotten -- not by the millions of social activists who have been inspired
and energized by the farmworkers' struggle, nor by the workers themselves.

The UFW won vital legal rights and protections for them. But more than
union contracts, and more than laws, farmworkers now have what Cesar Chavez
insisted was needed above all else. That, as he told me so many years ago,
"is to have the worker truly believe and understand and know that he's free,
that he's a free man, that he can stand up and say how he feels."

Freedom. No leader has ever left a greater legacy.

Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister

Story ID:	1891
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Biography
Location:	Delano CA USA
Year:	1965
Person:	Cesar Chavez