[NEWS] Cesar Chevez, Dolores Huerta, and La Causa

[Dr@g0n]

The period of September 15 to October 15 is Latino Heritage Month. It’s therefore appropriate to devote this column to Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the movement they founded that still fights to improve the lives of farmworkers today. Fifty years ago, Chavez quit his job and moved his growing family to the small Central Valley town of Delano with a vision of starting a union to negotiate better pay and working conditions for agricultural workers. Soon after, Dolores Huerta joined him. No one believed it was possible to organize farmworkers. But they said, “Si, se puede” (It is possible) which became the motto of the union.

Christopher Kerosky photo.

One Sonoma County resident was there at their side during the early years of the union’s battles. In this column, I share some of his memories of Cesar, Dolores and the early battles in the struggle for farmworkers’ rights. It’s a story of how a small but determined group of people, with few resources and facing violent opposition, brought about profound social change. “I can count on my right hand the big things in my life that I can look back on and know they were 100 percent right,” says Forestville resident Ed Frankel. Going to Delano and working on the farmworkers' strike is one of them.”

Ed is a retired UCLA professor of English and an award-winning poet and writer. But, in 1965, he was an 18-year-old kid from Philadelphia who went by “Eddie” and came to the Central Valley of California to volunteer for the movement to organize the farmworkers that ultimately became the United Farm Workers (“UFW”). Ed knew some Spanish from his uncle, a refugee from Russia who had lived in Argentina. His roots were in liberal causes championed by his parents and extended family: the labor movement of the 1930’s, the Spanish Civil War, the resistance to McCarthyism in the 1950s.

Christopher Kerosky photo.

Ed would spend the next three years with the fledgling farmworkers’ organization, working only for room and board. As such, he was witness to the birth of a movement to gain power for a po[CENSORED]tion that was largely powerless; an itinerant work force that was working long hours for less than survival wages, in fields poisoned with pesticide, often without bathroom facilities or water. When he left in 1968, the UFW was already a force to be reckoned with and working and living conditions had improved markedly for their members.

“I went to Delano to help in the farmworkers’ struggle, I wound up with the kind of education I would never have gotten in college”, Ed says nostalgically. “I learned so much, perhaps more than I tried to give, and in those days, like so many people who saw the winds of change rustling the wings and blowing up the robes of the Angel of History, I was prepared and willing to give a lot.”

Also among the most charismatic of the group’s leaders was Dolores Huerta. She left her own stable job in Stockton, moved with her 7 children (she ultimately had 11 children) to the Central Valley and became one of the faces of the movement. At the union, she earned a salary of five dollars per week and survived on donations of food and clothing. “Dolores was unstoppable,” Ed remembers. “She begged, argued, cajoled, and took whatever she could get. In 15 minutes, Dolores Huerta could have the toughest roomful of union guys wiping their eyes and reaching for their wallets. She would walk out of a local meeting with $2000 stuffed into her long secondhand winter coat. I had stars in my eyes for Dolores. I suppose I always will.”

By the winter, the strike had some other allies – the AFL-CIO, clergy from the Catholic Church and Robert Kennedy, who came to Delano in March 1966. With national TV cameras filming, Kennedy famously dressed down a Kern County sheriff for his illegal arrests of non-violent strikers by suggesting he read the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

link:https://www.sonomacountygazette.com/sonoma-county-news/cesar-chevez-dolores-huerta-and-la-causa/

Edited September 16, 2022 by Dr@g0n