With his arms around three of his children, Paul Chavez looked up at an arched mural in Los Angeles featuring his father — civil rights and labor leader Cesar Chavez — breaking bread with Robert F. Kennedy after his 25-day fast.
The 1968 hunger strike and commitment to nonviolence called attention to the farmworker strike and national boycott of California table grapes that lasted five years. The strike ended in 1970 when the United Farm Workers — formerly known as the National Farm Workers Association co-founded by Chavez — signed a contract with growers.
The thorny conflict between the UFW and growers during the 1960s in California and the labor rights movement led by Cesar Chavez is the focus of the first feature-length film about the farmworker advocate. It is being released throughout the country Friday.
“There were more setbacks than victories in his life, but what defined him was his refusal to give up,” said Paul Chavez, sitting in the library of RFK Community Schools in Los Angeles.
Paul, president of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, said even though his father was a farmworker and Latino leader, the message portrayed throughout the film applies to people from all walks of life.
“You don’t have to be a big, tall, booming physical presence. You don’t have to come from a family of opportunity or a lot of wealth to make a contribution to society,” Paul said. “The one thing that’s within all of our power is to have the desire to keep on working and the persistence to do so.”
Not only does the film exhibit the historic moments of the movement spurred by the plight of farmworkers and hardships faced by their families, but also the personal sacrifices Chavez made after he co-founded the labor union with Dolores Huerta in 1962.
“My father, he understood that his work would have to be more than a union,” Paul said. “He knew that after a long, hard days work in the field that farmworkers would go home to their communities and they’d face a whole different set of problems — lack of affordable housing, access to health care and just a whole slew of social problems. He knew that it would take a movement to address those concerns.”
Chavez understood the struggle of farmworkers firsthand. He started working in the agricultural fields at age 11 and continued until he joined the Navy when he was 19.
But at age 25, he was recruited from working in a San Jose lumberyard to join the Community Service Organization — “the most effective and militant Latino civil rights group of its day in California and Arizona,” said Marc Grossman, who served as Chavez’s press secretary, spokesman and speech writer for nearly 25 years.
The organization focused on naturalization, voter registration, achieving basic city services and combating police brutality, but Chavez joined “with the idea that he wanted to learn how to organize in order, eventually, to help farmworkers,” Grossman said.
When Chavez worked in the fields, Grossman said he would come home after a long day and tell his wife, “Someone has to do something — I don’t want my son to have to go through what I went through.”
“He didn’t have a clue then that that person would be him,” Grossman said.
LOCAL CONNECTION
Chavez first tried to organize farmworkers when he moved to Oxnard to start a local Community Service Organization chapter in 1958.
“What the two years he spent in Oxnard did was convince him that ... it could be done,” Grossman said.
The unifying issue that Chavez found when he came to Oxnard was that the Bracero Program — a guest worker system that brought 4.6 million laborers to the U.S. from 1942 to 1964 — had displaced domestic farmworkers living in Ventura County.
Chavez led unemployed farmworkers from Oxnard to the Farm Labor Placement Service office in Ventura for 40 days in a row in 1958 to document the abuses of the Bracero Program, according to the National Park Service Cesar Chavez Special Resource Study and Environmental Assessment.
“Cesar used to say that the organizer’s job is to help ordinary people do extraordinary things,” Grossman said. “He gave people hope and faith that they could make change happen, even if they were uneducated and impoverished.”
Chavez brought state and national labor officials to Oxnard and was able to achieve a temporary solution to get local farmworkers employed before the Bracero Program ended in 1964.
The National Park Service found two sites in Oxnard that are potentially eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places: the Chavez family home rented in El Rio from 1958 to 1959; and the former National Farm Workers Association office in La Colonia that opened in 1966, the year of a historic march from Delano to Sacramento.
Despite Chavez’s success in Oxnard, the Community Service Organization was mostly focused on “middle class Latinos in the cities, so they weren’t that interested in organizing farmworkers” when he returned to Los Angeles in 1959, Grossman said.
Failing to convince the Community Service Organization to focus on farmworkers, Chavez left the job that brought him and his family into the middle class to form what became the United Farm Workers labor union in Delano.
“He gave up the best job he ever had,” Paul said. “It was certainly a life that was headed in a comfortable middle class existence and he gave it up to go back to Delano to organize farmworkers, where he had no membership, no treasury. There was no financial security at all.”
And that’s where the film, “Cesar Chavez,” directed by actor Diego Luna, begins.
“I remember learning at an early age that he just wasn’t ours,” Paul said. “When we got to Delano, he was constantly on the go, and when he was home there was people coming to get his attention. There wasn’t a whole lot of time to do those normal things that parents do with their kids — not because he didn’t want to, he was just being pulled by his work.”
LASTING LEGACY
Paul decided when he was still in high school that he would commit his life to the union and find a way to better the lives of workers facing discrimination and poverty.
“Of course we’re fighting for better wages and better conditions, but the fight is really about something much more profound than that,” he said. “We’re there and we’re reminding people that farmworkers are human beings and they deserve respect. My dad would tell people that the fight was always about respect.”
Paul said the greatest lesson he learned while he worked alongside his father was that “you only lose when you give up.”
“Victory is never assured,” he said. “He says the only thing assured is that the sun is going to come up tomorrow and then you decide whether you’re ready to get out of bed and continue the fight.”
That sentiment is echoed by the Oxnard chapter of United Farm Workers, which has planned marches, educational movie screenings and fundraisers Friday through Sunday to coincide with the film release and the celebration of Cesar Chavez’s March 31 birthday.
The UFW strives to maintain Chavez’s resilience as the organization pushes for national immigration reform, along with issues of local concern and ensuring that Ventura County farmworkers stay employed, said Roman Pinal, a UFW organizer in Oxnard.
Chavez was “a common man that brought people together to do uncommon things,” he said.