Happy Cesar Chavez Day

If you live in Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin, I want to wish you a happy Cesar Chavez day. For the rest of you, it’s time for some more education. Cesar Chavez was an American of Mexican descent who organized farm workers in order for them to earn better wages and work less hellacious hours. He, along with Dolores Huerta started what was to become the United Farm Workers.

Chavez took the lead of civil rights leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and utilized non-violent means to achieve direct results.

From the Wiki:

In 1965, Filipino American farm workers initiated the Delano grape strike on September 8, 1965, to protest in favor of higher wages. Six months later, Chávez and the NFWA led a strike of California grape pickers on the historic farmworkers march from Delano to the California state capitol in Sacramento for similar goals. In addition to the strike, the UFW encouraged all Americans to boycott table grapes as a show of support. The strike lasted five years and attracted national attention. When the U.S. Senate Subcommittee looked into the situation, Robert Kennedy gave Chávez his total support. This effort resulted in the first major labor victory for U.S. farm workers.

What might strike some as odd, Chavez was against illegal immigration, and for limiting legal immigration.

The UFW during Chávez’s tenure was committed to restricting immigration. César Chávez and Dolores Huerta fought a federal law that prohibited hiring illegal immigrants in 1973…

In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valleys to the border of Mexico to protest growers’ use of illegal immigrants as strikebreakers. Joining him on the march were both Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale.[3] In its early years, Chávez and the UFW went so far as to report illegal aliens who served as strikebreaking replacement workers, as well as those who refused to unionize, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Personally, I worked phone donations on behalf of the UFW as one of my first jobs out of High School. I then quickly discovered that, even when raising money for a good organization, telemarketing is the Devil’s instrument, and sales in general was not for me.

Here in Chico, the students often take Cesar Chavez day as a drinking holiday, and I’m pretty much against it. I mean, drinking on Cesar Chavez day is ten times better than picking grapes for 16 hours, but it still rubs me as wrong. I mean, that’s why we invented Groundhog Day.