Cesar Chavez

Faith and the Farmworkers' Movement

Cesar Chavez, the co-founder and organizer of the first farmworkers’ union (originally called Farm Workers Association), sent his aide Marion Moses to New York in 1967 in order to promote a national boycott of grapes to draw attention to the exploitation of farm workers by mega-farm corporations. There she met feminist writer and editor Gloria Steinem, and together they planned an event featuring Peter, Paul, and Mary, Alan King and Lauren Bacall to help to raise consciousness about the movement.  

Milton Glaser, the widely celebrated graphic designer who had created the graphics for PP&M  albums, stationery, and many other projects, enlisted his colleague, Paul Davis, to create the poster for the benefit concert. In order to invoke sympathy for the bitter and protracted strike of the California grape pickers against repressive working conditions, Davis painted an iconic portrait of a young laborer and added the name of Cesar Chavez to announce the Dec. 4, 1968, event at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Support for the controversial issue lowered grape consumption in the United States, and by July 1970 a number of growers signed contracts with the union, resulting in  wage increases for pickers, a health plan, and safety measures related to the use of pesticides.

Peter, Paul, and Mary continued their support for farmworkers, and some twenty years after the Carnegie concert, the trio's manager Martha Hertzberg called on them to join in efforts in Watsonville, California, to organize underpaid strawberry workers, whose health was being affected by pesticides and who were having to work in fields that lacked potable water and toilet facilities. She partnered with Arturo Rodriguez, Chavez's son-in-law, to organize a benefit concert and a trip to the strawberry fields of Watsonville to increase public awareness.

Off the stage and into the fields, the response of the workers to the trio’s singing of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” was visceral.  Several times the trio paused the song to acknowledge murmurs of recognition and support.

Chavez’s early years were spent on his family’s range near Yuma, Arizona, a place of security and comfort to him—that is until the county seized their property because his father could not pay back taxes. The family became migrant workers, essentially homeless. That experience opened his eyes to the plight of farmworkers. 

In a chapter of Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice, Daniel P. Rhodes  tells the story of how Chavez’s quest for justice for farmworkers was rooted in his family’s experience of becoming migrant workers after having to leave their home and in his Catholic upbringing.   

In much of the Southwest there were no priests, and there was no church close to his home. His mother’s and grandmother’s Catholic teaching and deep spirituality taught him honesty, selflessness, and nonviolence through dichos (proverbs) and stories many years before he himself read Catholic social teaching, St. Francis and Gandhi. In his mother’s service to her community, she modeled for him that love of neighbor meant helping  others.

Rhodes describes how the spiritual disciplines of prayer, regular Mass, pilgrimage, and willingness to suffer for the cause undergirded Chavez and the farmworkers in their quest for justice.

Chavez always understood the movement to be about more than wages or contracts; it was a spiritual campaign.  For him, the work of the union was woven inextricably in a fabric of religious significance.  Jesus was with them, and in their struggle and sacrifices they were a part of his kingdom, his people.  It was nearly sacramental—eucharistic.

A NOEL NOTE: During Peter, Paul, and Mary’s 50-year career, we supported a number of justice causes in which the leaders were motivated by their faith to put love into action. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was a pastor with graduate degrees in theology. William Sloan Coffin, chaplain at Yale and later senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, was active in both the civil rights and the peace movements. Cesar Chavez recognized the Holy in the struggle and sacrifices of the immigrant labor force. During El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s U.S. Catholic Bishops and mainline Protestant denominations voiced opposition to U.S. military aid in El Salvador. In our trip to El Salvador in 1986, the trio witnessed the diligent work of Catholic priests, keeping the faith in the face of the injustices brought about by the U.S. support of a repressive government.

It is important to recognize, however, that faith-based opposition to injustice is night-and-day different from the Christian nationalism that threatens to turn the U.S. government into a theocracy. The separation of church and state and the freedom of worship being such a basic component of our Constitution, it is critical that we be aware of the current compassionless adherence to doctrine and the concurrent skewing of religious principles to accommodate the political ambitions of a few.

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Connections:

Top photo: Public domain image of Cesar Chavez  from Picryl

Carnegie Hall Poster (by Paul Davis) available at Rennert’s Gallery

Can I Get a Witness? was co-edited by Charles Marsh, Shea Tuttle, and Daniel P. Rhodes and published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 2019. 

Vibrations: 

“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) ” written by Woody Guthrie and Robert Hoffman.  Video excerpted from Peter, Paul, and Mary’s Lifelines Live TV show and album.  PP&M are joined by Tom Paxton. 

Resonance:

Is voting alone a sufficient political statement about an injustice?  At what point is some form of nonviolent protest necessary to raise consciousness about the problem?  Can music still be an effective way to bring attention to an issue? 

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