Viva la causa!

“Why, people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone. Why, we’re the people that live. … Rich fellas come up an’ die, and their kids ain’t no good, and they die, but we keep a-comin'. Don’ you fret none. A different time’s comin'.”

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The girl giggles softly when asked if she likes the music of the mariachi band. Otherwise, she doesn’t say much. Nine-year-old Norma Pérez is a little nervous. She sits with her mom, her dad and her ESL teacher. The four wait at a small round table in the Siena Hotel Spa Casino’s ballroom. Pérez wears a pale-green dress and a gold bracelet with her initials.

Norma’s one of several students reading essays they’ve written about César Chávez tonight, says ESL teacher Pamela Fitch of Florence Drake Elementary School in Sparks.

“And you’re going to have to read it in a big voice,” Fitch says.

Norma giggles again. She’s one of three finalists for her age group in a Chávez essay contest sponsored in part by the Washoe County School District and Reno’s KUVR-TV, Azteca América. The event is a highlight of the first-ever César Chávez Day to be organized in Reno, honoring the nonviolent activism of the man who spent his life working for migrant farm laborers in the United States.

Two of Fitch’s classes wrote essays for the contest.

“They were really excited about it,” she says. The students had been reading and writing biographies on other American heroes, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Helen Keller. The chance to write about Chávez fit right into the course.

“They were excited about a Hispanic hero,” Fitch says. “They went home and talked to their families about Chávez.”

Fitch lauds the efforts of her students in the English as a Second Language Program.

“These guys are working double duty,” she says. “They are learning academic content while learning the language as well.”

Peter Padilla of Azteca América and Eloy Castro, the school district’s graduation specialist, emcee the Monday night event at the Siena. Both have stories to tell about the impact Chávez has had on their lives. Both men come from migrant farm-working families.

Castro tells of being dropped off, as a young boy, with his brothers in a watermelon field. It was early in the morning, and his father would not be back until late afternoon. The boys were given no food or water. As they picked, they also went from field to field looking for overripe melons and eating the juicy seedless centers.

“Now I can look back and lay humor on it,” Castro says. “But it was very hard work in the fields, out there under the sun.”

Padilla recalls being too young to work in the fields and waiting long days in the back of a pickup truck as a 5-year-old.

“One day I got a hold of everyone’s lunch. I opened the canned peaches and ate them all—I ate everything sweet. They weren’t too pleased with me when they got back to the truck.”

Padilla says he’s seen working conditions improve little by little over the years, thanks to such amenities as portable toilets and hand-washing units, as well as safer pesticide regulations.

A small boy with curly dark hair walks across the Siena’s ballroom carrying a plate heaped with sliced cucumbers and strawberries. He sits down at a table in time to watch a short film on the life of Chávez.

Chávez, born in 1927, was about the age of this cucumber-eating boy when his father lost the family farm land homesteaded in Arizona. The nation was in the midst of the Great Depression. Times were hard. Labor was cheap. Chávez joined the U.S. Navy in 1945. He fought in the western Pacific during the end of World War II. He came back, married and headed back to the fields to support his family.

In the early 1950s, Chávez became involved with a small barrio-based help group, the Community Service Organization. He became the national director of CSO in the late 1950s. But though the group provided some help to farm workers, it didn’t do enough. Chávez wanted to organize workers into the kind of powerful force that could improve working conditions and compensation for migrant laborers. In 1962, Chávez founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later merged with the AFL-CIO and became the United Farm Workers.

Chávez lived what he preached. He organized strikes, boycotts and marches—all nonviolent. Once he began marching to Sacramento with 80 other workers to call attention to the plight of grape pickers. By the time the march reached the California capital, it was 10,000 workers strong.

“If you’re outraged at conditions,” Chávez once said, “then you can’t possibly be free or happy until you devote all your time to changing them. … You can’t change anything if you want to hold onto a good job, a good way of life and avoid sacrifice.”

In the early 1980s, thousands of farm workers with UFW contracts were getting higher pay, health insurance and pensions. But Chávez’s battles weren’t over. When Republican George Deukmejian was elected California governor in 1984, it seemed to some that the state’s farm labor board stopped enforcing the laws that helped migrant workers. Chávez called for a grape boycott. He also continued to work throughout the 1980s to call attention to the pesticide poisoning of grape workers and their children.

In 1993, while embroiled in a lawsuit with a lettuce grower, Chávez died in his sleep. He was 66.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Chávez’s death, the U.S. Post Office will be printing a Chávez stamp this month. On local Hispanic TV stations, a series of 30-second vignettes about Chávez will air through April 20.

Latecomers to the Siena event snack on sandwiches and iced tea. A few adults sip at red wine.

“I hope no one is drinking Gallo wine,” remarks Jim “Diego” Martin of Reno’s League of United Latin American Citizens. “I have a long memory.”

Martin says the battle for workers’ rights is far from over. With leaders like Chávez gone, others need to “pick up the torch.”

“We think we’ve got it made,” he says. “That’s not the case. Now we have the casino plantation.”

When workers aren’t paying attention, their rights can be stripped away. Though Nevada had led the nation in some civil-rights legislation, Martin says, things have devolved since the 1960s.

“Today I think things are worse than when the Civil Rights Act was passed,” he says and paraphrases a quote from Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “We need younger people to carry the torch. We know that an ignorance of history dooms people to repeat it. … Viva la causa!”

The first three young people head up to the microphone to read their essays. Padilla holds the mic for Norma as she reads by the light of a decorative lamp. Norma begins her essay with observations about Chávez’s childhood: “The teacher did not like him. He spoke Spanish and had brown skin. He went to 37 schools. His family traveled in a truck and slept in tents. The whole family could not fit in the tent. César and his brother slept outside in the fields.”

The essay continues, telling of the hardships of migrant farm work and the changes Chávez sought to make. Norma concludes: “He was a great leader, and that is why I think he was important.”

Norma wins first place in the essay contest. She receives several prizes, including a plaque, a pendant with the Azteca eagle and a gift certificate for books.

“These students are a fine example of what our community is doing,” her teacher Pamela Fitch says, holding an arm out to the young finalists.

“Like Chávez, they show us that all obstacles can be overcome."