By Duane E. Campbell
Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You
cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot
humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not
afraid anymore. Cesar Chávez. November 9, 1984.
On March 31, 2015, Eleven
states and numerous cities will
hold holidays celebrating labor and
Latino Leader Cesar Chavez. Conferences, marches and celebrations will occur in
numerous cities this weekend. See the post below on the Cesar Chavez Youth Leadership Conference at UCD on March 28. A recent film Cesar Chavez: An American
Hero, starring Michael Peña as Cesar
Chavez and Rosario Dawson as Dolores
Huerta presents important parts of this story and shows how Chavez was lied
about and attacked by Ronald Reagan, the Nixon Administration, the Republican
Party and numerous right wing forces. This film works well in high school
classrooms. Lesson plans for teaching about Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta are
here. https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/Home/lessons-cesar-chavez-and-dolores-huerta.Chavez lessons
The story of Cesar Chavez,
and to a lesser degree Dolores Huerta is mentioned in history books for
California students, however much of the additional Mexican American history is
missing. A group of scholars, teachers,
allies, activists have joined in our campaign to improve the history
textbooks in California by including the histories of Mexican American/
Chicano people. More than 52% of California students are descendants of
Latino and Mexican people. Unfortunately they can't they be found in the textbooks.
You are invited to
participate in this effort. We need each of you and your friends to write
a letter. Here is a guide. Here is how to write a letter :https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/Home/latino-students-and-civic-engagement/project-plan---mexican-american-history
We can each do our part.
Meanwhile, in March
of 2015 hundreds of farmworkers have
walked off their jobs in Baja California, Mexico, from the agricultural fields just
a few miles from the U.S. border , fields developed to provide a harvest to the
U.S. markets. Farm labor strikes and
violence against strikers remains a volatile issue. Farm workers deserve dignity, respect, and
fair wages. Achieving these goals will
require a union.
The current UFW
leadership, as well as former UFW leaders
and current DSA Honorary Chairs
Eliseo Medina and Dolores Huerta
are recognized leaders in the ongoing efforts to achieve comprehensive
immigration reform in the nation.
 |
| Arturo Rodriquez |
On immigration, UFW President Arturo Rodriquez
says, “We urge Republicans to abandon their political games that hurt millions
of hard-working, taxpaying immigrants and their families, and help us finish
the job by passing legislation such as the comprehensive reform bill that was
approved by the Senate on a bipartisan vote in June 2013,” Rodriguez
said. Similar compromise proposals, negotiated by the UFW and the
nation's major agricultural employer associations, have passed the U.S. Senate
multiple times over the last decade. The same proposal has won majority support
in the House of Representatives, even though House GOP leaders have refused to
permit a vote on the measure. “The UFW will not rest until the President's
deferred relief is enacted and a permanent immigration reform, including a path
to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants, is signed into law.” www.UFW.org
What Chavez, Huerta did accomplish along with Philip Vera Cruz , Marshall Ganz, LeRoy Chatfield, Gil Padilla,
Eliseo Medina and hundreds of others was
to organize in California the first
successful farm worker union against overwhelming odds.
Prior to the creation of the UFW as a union in the 1960’s, attempts to organize a farm worker union had been
destroyed by racism and corporate power. Chavez, Huerta, Philip
Vera Cruz, and the others deliberately
created a multiracial union; Mexican,
Mexican American, Filipino, African-American, Dominican, Puerto Rican
and Arab workers, among others, have been part of the UFW. This cross racial organizing was essential in order to combat the prior divisions and exploitations of workers
based upon race and language. Dividing the workers on racial and language lines, as well as immigration status always left the corporations the winners. See
more on the UFW at www.MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org
The violent assaults
on the farmworkers and UFW from 1960- 1980 shown in the film, along with the current reconquest of power in
the fields by corporate agriculture are
examples of strategic racism as described by Ian Haney López in Dog
Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked
the Middle Class ( 2014) . It is the development and implementation of racial practices because they benefit a group
or a class.
Chávez chose to build a union that incorporated the
strategies of social movements and community organizing. They allied the union with churches,
students, and organized labor. The successful creation of the UFW
changed the nature of labor organizing in the Southwest and
contributed significantly to the growth
of Latino politics in the U.S.
The UFW and Chavez and Huerta have always had severe critics
from the Right and from corporate
agriculture. Just as Martin Luther King
Jr. had severe critics in the African American community of his time, Chavez
faced fierce criticism from within the Mexican and Mexican American
communities. Dolores Huerta has been banned from the history text books in Texas
and Arizona as too radical. As they did
with Chavez, they accuse her of being a communist. Both also have critics from
the left.
For critiques of
Chavez and the UFW from the right and the left see.
Teaching materials and videos have been made recording their
work. Schools, scholarships,
foundations, organizing institutes and
political organizations have been named
after them. Few labor or Latino leaders have achieved such positive recognition.
The role of racism, and the individual reactions to systemic
structural racial oppression are complex and
vary in part based upon the differences in experiences of the
participants. As the Chicano movement
argued at its core- the experiences of U.S. born and reared Mexican Americans and Chicanos were different
than the experiences and the perceptions of racism of Mexican immigrants, both
documented and undocumented. There are
a diversity of racisms and a diversity in the manner in which workers learn to respond to oppression. Chicanos and Mexican Americans grew up, were
educated, and worked in an internal colony.
Their schools, their unions, and their political experiences were
structured along racial lines. They learned colonized structures. The authors do not sufficiently acknowledge
the struggle of the UFW and the Chicano Movement in breaking this
colonial legacy.
Chavez knew well some of
the failings of unions in the
1960’s, including the problems of a
growing internal bureaucracy, but the UFW in the 1980’s was not able to create a viable democratic union movement. Marshall Ganz
argues that Chavez deconstructed the organizational strength of the UFW
in the 1979 -1981 period in an effort to keep personal control of the
union. (Ganz, p. 247 )
The critics who blame
individuals for the union’s decline also
miss the important rise of Latino politics in the Southwest today. Chavez and the UFW played a significant role by training generations of future leaders as organizers
as is well described in Randy Shaw’s, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW,
and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st. Century.
The UFW was a place
where hundreds learned organizing skills, politics, discipline, and how
to work in multi racial movement
politics – skills needed by many on the left.
Today hundreds of union community
leaders and legislators, particularly in California, are veterans, trained in for
the long distance struggle of the UFW.
The Current Situation – Strategic Racism
The
movement led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and others
created a union and reduced the oppression of farm workers for a
time. Workers learned to not accept
poor jobs, poor pay, unsafe working
conditions as natural or inevitable.
Then the corporations and the Right Wing forces adapted their strategies
of oppression and counter attacked.
The assault on the UFW and the current reconquest of power
in the fields are examples of strategic racism, that is a system of racial
oppression created and enforced because it benefits the over class- in this
case corporate agriculture and farm owners. Strategic racism includes a complex structure of institutions and
individuals from police and sheriffs, to immigration authorities and anti
immigrant activists, and elected officials and their support networks. These groups foster and promote inter racial
conflict, job competition, and anti union organizing, as strategies to keep wages and benefits low and to promote
their continuing white supremacy in rural California.
As
the union was weakened by the Right Wing corporate assault, the conditions in
the fields returned almost to their prior level of exploitation. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act had it
budget cut by 30 % for years under
Governor Deukmejian in 1982- 1986 along with other assaults on the law. Now,
thousands of new immigrants harvest the crops and only a small percent are protected
by union contracts. Over 200,000 indigenous workers, mostly from
Mexico, harvest the crops in the Southwest.
They are Mixtec, Zapotec, Triqui and more. They do have a few health, safety and wage
protection by California labor laws, along with the right to farm worker collective bargaining elections
and binding arbitration established
significantly by the political activity of the current UFW – more than farm
workers have in any other state.
For
a record of this period see David Bacon’s,
The Right to Stay Home: How
US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (2013).
Although the children of
Mexican, Mexican American and Latino parents currently make up over 52% of all
the school age children in California, there
is only a little about their history in
the state textbooks. A campaign is under
way to change this inappropriate situation. http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2015/03/write-chicano-history-into-california.html.
 |
| the author and Cesar Chavez, 1972 |
Duane Campbell
is a professor emeritus of bilingual multicultural education at California
State University Sacramento, a union activist, and a former chair of Sacramento DSA. He was a
volunteer for the UFW from 1972- 1977. He is the Director of the Mexican American
Digital History project. www.MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org
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