Happy Birthday, Cesar Chavez... a worker for peace and justice. Presente!

[Tom Joad]

I believe we need to remember the birthday of our friend Cesar Chavez, I want this to be begin a thread to honor those who truly spoke for economic justice, for world peace, for environmental justice, for workers rights, for the rights of the immigrant, for nonviolent action.... We honor the legacy of this man, and the movement that grew out of the efforts of thousands of people...
Mostly immigrants...Mexicans, Filipino's, Arab-Americans

We promise to keep that dream alive. We promise to fight for all workers rights. Ain't no one gonna turn us around.





Cesar Chavez
March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993

[donsu]

1. back then I marveled and admired his courage. he did good

nt

[Mnemosyne]

2. I am still boycotting grapes. Amazing that two such great men share this birthday.

President Gore celebrates his 59th today too!


Off-topic - Rush Limpballs and Howard Stern share a date in Jan. - Just weird trivia.

[Vidar]

3. Kudos to Cesar for his lifelong crusade on behalf of the workers.

[ben_meyers]

4. Cesar Chavez is being co-opted by the illegal migrants

Here in Arizona the illegal migrants are co-opting Chavez. Cesar Chavez was not an immigrant, He was born near Yuma Az. Uncontrolled immigration destroyed much of His work.

"But this issue does not belong to the right. Or it shouldn't. Illegal immigration hurts most liberal causes. It depresses wages, crushes unions, and kills all hope for universal health coverage. Progressives have to understand that there can be little social justice in an unregulated labor market.

"Liberals are so confused on this issue," says Vernon Briggs, a labor economist at Cornell University and self-described liberal. "Immigration policy has got to be held accountable for its economic consequences."

Many Democrats used to get it. In 1964, President Johnson abolished the Bracero program, which brought in "temporary" farm workers from Mexico. Its demise let Cesar Chavez organize US farm workers. His union won some battles early on, but a new wave of illegal immigrants in the mid-1970s reversed that progress. The union barely exists today."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0516/p09s01-coop.html

[Tom Joad]

5. Chavez spoke for all workers... not just ones with documents.

The minute we start blaming workers for our problems is the time we start losing.

We need to fight the greed of agribusiness.

[ben_meyers]

8. Chavez fought for "Legal" workers rights

He was vehemently opposed to illegal immigration!


"The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers' Union (UFW) founder Caesar Chavez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chavez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability.

As Wikipedia notes: "In 1969, Chavez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike. Joining him on the march were both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale. Chavez and the UFW would often report suspected illegal aliens who served as temporary replacement workers as well as who refused to unionize to the INS."

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/03/con06114.html

[Tom Joad]

11. He was opposed to the use, by the growers, of making undocumented workers

pawns in their game of hurting all workers.
Any union organizer/supporter opposes the use of any scab... from anywhere.

You can bet your bottom dollar Cesar Chavez would have been leading the marches that took place last year that protested the anti-immigrant worker actions of the Republican congress.

[Tom Joad]

12. Dolores Huerta on immigration protests: César Chávez would be proud

Dolores Huerta on immigration protests: César Chávez would be proud
Diario de Mexico, 20 April 2006. Translated from Spanish by Marissa Billowitz.

Activist Dolores Huerta says that the boycott of anti-immigrant businesses scheduled for May 1 will show the importance of the presence, contribution and consumer power of Latinos in the United States.

“The ideal goal for the boycott is to focus on businesses that support the anti-immigrant movement and that we know have donated money to the campaigns of the senators proposing anti-immigrant legislation,” said Huerta.

Huerta, who co-founded with César Chávez the United Farm Workers union – the largest union of farm workers in the United States – recognizes the difficulty of this goal.

“But we can work on it,” she said. “César always told us that marches are the best means of communicating, organizing, and participating, and that’s why they should never stop. We need to take advantage of the wonderful spontaneous citizen response that has happened.”

Huerta participated and led the hunger strikes and boycotts organized by Chávez against businesses that exploited farm workers, mostly undocumented, several decades ago, particularly in California.

“I think that Chávez, wherever he is, beside Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Rubén Salazar – a journalist murdered at the end of the 1960s during a revolt in Los Angeles – is excited to see how people have responded in favor of fair immigration reform,” she declared.

At 76 years old and with health problems, Huerta works tirelessly in favor of the poorest workers in the country as she did in the 1960s when she and Chávez organized the grape boycott in support of field workers.

At the head of the farm workers union, Huerta negotiated the first collective contract after the boycott’s success in 1966. Dolores Huerta was born in Dawson, New Mexico. When she began her union work in California in 1955, she left her job as a teacher because she was divorced with seven children (she had 11 in all).

“When you’re organizing, you can’t reach everyone, but what you can do is keep pushing the ones closest to you,” she said.

In a demonstration of farm workers in San Francisco in 1988, Huerta was beaten brutally by police who broke several of her ribs and her arm.

Together with César Chávez, she led protests and hunger strikes in support of grape and lettuce pickers, as well as others, and was jailed 22 times for acts of civil disobedience.

“When I left the classroom to dedicate my life to activism, many times I thought I had made a mistake, but one day I found a box of food outside of my house that someone had left for me for helping them. That was my inspiration to keep going,” she recalled.

This article appeared in Edition 217 of Voices That Must Be Heard.

Translation © 2006, IPA, all rights reserved. Included by permisson of Diario de Mexico.

[EFerrari]

7. Those damn Mexican stealing OUR STUFF AGAIN.

:sarcasm:

[struggle4progress]

13. Chavez fought against growers importing illegal aliens as scabs

Over and over again, when UFW went on strike, the growers went down to the border and shipped back undocumented workers in to break the strike. Here is Briggs discussing how illegals were used in a situation he actually studied:

Immigration and American Labor
Panel Discussion Transcript

Friday, November 30, 2001
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

.... <Vernon Briggs, Jr. Ph.D., Professor of Labor Economics, Cornell University>: .... We were involved with the efforts of Caesar Chavez to organize farm workers in south Texas. I went there ....

Once I was there, it was clear that this strike was a lost cause. I spoke with Caesar Chavez later when he came to Austin, particularly about the situation at the border ....

The big issue at the time the AFL-CIO was fighting was border commuters. I didn't even know what border commuters were or how they evolved until I went down one morning at 5:00 o'clock in the morning to watch the crossing, people being picked up by bus and driven right through the picket lines to the farms in the grape strike. It was at that moment it was clear there was something about the border I didn't understand ....

.... By the way, those workers are still not organized and they never will be as long as the border immigration policy continues to be as it is, and the poorest workers in terms of income level in the United States are in that county, one of the most impoverished counties of the United States ....

http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/unionpanel.html

I think you indicate Briggs' view correctly, but the actual view of UFW organizers and workers have may been more complex. The UFW naturally fought back, against strike-breaking efforts based on imported illegals, by using whatever tools were available. But it is not at all clear that this implies Chavez and/or the union agreed with Briggs' stand on immigration issues.

[Nutmegger]

6. #5 - What an inspiring man.

:kick:

[Morgana LaFey]

9. Presente -- Flashback

OMG. "Presente" is a word featured prominently in one of the cuts on an extraordinary and probably little known CD by Kris Kristofferson, back to the Reagan administration. The name of the CD is "Third World Warrior," and the title of one of the songs, "Third World War" is a play on words: (our) war against the Third World. In particular, in those days, against Nicaragua, etc. So it certainly seems apropos.

Ouch. Here's the opening lines of "Don't Let the Bastards (Get You Down)" --

They're killing babies in the name of freedom
we've been down that sorry road before

Anyway, I always thought it was a very powerful album. I know it wrung several bucketloads of tears outta me.

So, in the spirit of the thread, let me name Kristofferson AND all the other artists who have use their art and their talent to speak up "for economic justice, for world peace, for environmental justice, for workers rights, for the rights of the immigrant, for nonviolent action."

[nam78_two]

10. K&R.nt

[struggle4progress]

14. Plane Wreck At Los Gatos

There's very moving documentary footage from the early UFW years of Baez singing Guthrie's Plane Wreck At Los Gatos at a worker rally:

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again ...

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same ...

http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Plane_Wreck_At_Los_Gatos.htm

[Cha]

15. Si Se Puede!~

How sweet that Cesar Chavez and Al Gore's birthday are both on March 31st. Gore was born in 1948~