In the
commentary below, historian Roger Bruns reflects on President Barack Obama's
recent dedication of the Cesar
E. Chavez
National Monument .
Notably, Bruns draws out parallels between Chavez's activism on behalf of farm
workers and President Obama's work as a community organizer—both of which had
roots in Chicago 's
South Side—as evidence of the labor leader's continuing and inspiring legacy.
On October 8, 2012, President Barack Obama
dedicated a new national memorial—the Cesar
E. Chavez
National Monument in Keene ,
California , at La Paz , the headquarters of the United Farm
Workers (UFW) and final resting place of Chavez, who passed away in 1993. At
the dedication ceremony, President Obama said that when Chavez began his farm
worker movement, "no one seemed to care about the invisible farm workers
who picked the nation's food—bent down in the beating sun, living in poverty,
cheated by growers, abandoned in old age, unable to demand even the most basic
rights." The president said, "Cesar cared. . . . In his own peaceful
and eloquent way he made other people care too." President Obama has an
abiding respect for Chavez. The president also shares with Chavez common
historical roots.
In
the early 1950s, Chavez, a farm worker and Navy veteran, began work with the
Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civic-action and self-help group
that became highly successful in registering new voters and establishing
citizen involvement in social issues. The CSO traced its founding to the work
of Saul Alinsky, called by many the "Father of Community Organizing."
In Chicago's tough neighborhoods of the 1930s, Alinsky, a graduate of the
University of Chicago and a man who had grown up in the city's Jewish ghetto,
began his life's work of helping ethnic groups, unions, and others organize
themselves to take on governments and corporate interests that had wielded
power over them. In 1939, Alinsky established in South Side Chicago the
Industrial Areas Foundation to help reform declining urban neighborhoods. His
approach was to unite and organize ordinary, struggling citizens. He taught such
techniques as house meetings, marches, and communication strategies to help
them become effective forces for change.
Fred
Ross, one of Alinsky's protégés, became the leader of CSO, and it was Ross who
became Chavez's mentor. By building Mexican American economic power and voter
strength, Ross sought to improve living and working conditions; to promote
educational and youth programs and community outreach; and to protest
violations of human and civil rights. It was under Ross's tutelage that Chavez
learned the techniques of community organizing.
When Chavez decided in the early 1960s to found
a labor union to help Mexican American farm workers in California , it was these methods that he
used to organize a group of workers long deprived of fair wages and working
conditions and even human dignity. His cofounder of what eventually became the
UFW was Dolores Huerta, another of Ross's CSO workers.
Although the UFW never ultimately achieved great
lasting gains as measured by traditional labor unions, it did, for a time,
attract much international recognition for its struggle against agribusiness
interests to win union contracts. It helped win the first state law in the
country granting agricultural workers the right to organize. It taught
organizational techniques and led many Latino voter registration drives and
other actions to gain empowerment.
Chavez and his lieutenants struck away at the
defeatism and convinced large numbers of people that they could fight back. Not
only for farm workers but for other Mexican Americans, the movement became an
exciting struggle. People for the first time in their lives joined picket lines
in front of grocery stores, passed out leaflets, registered others to vote,
sang songs and chants of protest, and gained a new awareness that they could
actually make a difference.
The farmworker movement contributed to a more
general drive for civil rights among Mexican Americans during the 1960s and
1970s. It helped inspire a new generation of urban Mexican American youths to
organize their communities and become active in social and political programs.
As the Chicano movement grew, the picture of Cesar Chavez became one that hung
on the walls of Latino homes.
In 1985, at a time when the UFW was engaging in
boycotts and launching various campaigns to help farm workers, 23-year old
Barack Obama took a job in Chicago
as a community organizer in a neighborhood in South Side Chicago, the general
area that had been a proving grounds for Saul Alinsky's community organizing
methods. Obama worked with the Calumet Community Religious Conference, created
by several local Catholic churches to combat the poverty and dislocation
resulting from the closing of Wisconsin Steel and other industries. He helped
build the Developing Communities Project, an organization devoted to
after-school programs, drug prevention, and voter registration.
In his three years as a community organizer,
Obama, in these distressed Chicago
neighborhoods, adopted the same methods used by Chavez in the harvest fields of
California —the
house meetings and other organizational structures that stirred local
collaboration and political participation. He taught empowerment techniques to
help grapple with problems stemming from racial and religious bigotry, poverty,
and homelessness.
Looking back, Obama credits the three years of
work in the neighborhoods of South Side Chicago as important as any educational
experience in his life. It taught him, he said, to put aside predetermined
agendas, to listen to people, and to understand their struggles. Cesar Chavez
had often expressed the same feeling.
Unlike Chavez, Obama went on to pursue a career
in politics. In 2008, when Obama decided to run for President, he enlisted some
individuals with whom he had worked in his days as a community organizer. They
taught new campaign workers and volunteers techniques they had used years
before in Chicago .
Those new team members would form the nucleus of what became the most powerful
grassroots organizing group in the history of American politics: Organizing for
America .
Its members continue to use, along with increasingly sophisticated computer and
social media tools, the same basic methods that both Chavez and Obama used as
community organizers. And when his presidential campaign of 2008 needed a
rallying slogan, Obama looked to the history of the UFW.
In 1972, during a campaign in Phoenix , Arizona ,
to rally Mexican Americans to fight against Republican legislation denying farm
workers the right to organize, Cesar Chavez and his UFW forces had waged a
relentless voter registration drive that helped Latinos for the first time to
gain a degree of political power in the state. On makeshift tables and even
ironing boards, volunteers set up registration sites in heavily trafficked
areas across Arizona ,
especially shopping centers. They marched from door to door. In only four
months, 100,000 new voters had put their names on recall petitions and, most
importantly, registered to vote. It was during that 1972 campaign that, in
response to some who said no se puede
("it cannot be done"), Dolores Huerta insisted that from now on they
would never say it could not be done. From now on, they would say si se puede ("yes we can do
it"). Si se puede became a
battle cry for the Arizona
fight and others that followed. In 2008, candidate Obama used that same battle
cry in his presidential campaign: "Yes, we can!"
In 2010, President Obama declared March 10 to be
Cesar Chavez Day. He mentioned the rallying cry: Si, se puede or "Yes, we can," inspires hope and a spirit
of possibility in people around the world. His movement strengthened our
country, and his vision lives on in the organizers and social entrepreneurs who
still empower their neighbors to improve their communities.
In May 2012, President Obama presented Dolores
Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the East Room of the White House,
the president again mentioned the slogan, quipping, "Dolores was very
gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, Si, se puede—'Yes, we can.' Knowing her, I'm pleased that she let
me off easy. Because Dolores does not play."
And so, in 2012, as President Obama dedicated
the Chavez Memorial, he reflected upon the power of organizing that had meant
so much to Chavez and to him: "Every time somebody's son or daughter comes
and learns about the history of this movement, I want them to know that our
journey is never hopeless. Our work is never done. . . . I want them to
remember that true courage is revealed when the night is darkest and the
resistance is strongest and we somehow find it within ourselves to stand up for
what we believe in."
Roger
Bruns is a historian and former deputy
executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records
Commission at the National Archives in Washington ,
D.C. He is the author of many
books, including Negro Leagues Baseball (Greenwood , 2012) and Icons
of Latino America: Latino Contributions to American Culture (Greenwood , 2008). He is
the author of the forthcoming Encyclopediaof Cesar Chavez: The Farm Workers' Fight for Rights and Justice (Greenwood , March 2013).
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