My Father the Organizer
Cesar Chavez
Cesar Estrada Chavez, born in 1927 outside Yuma, Arizona, was a farm labor organizer and civil rights leader who began the National Farm Workers Association (later called the United Farm Workers union) in 1962. He led the famous Delano grape strike, which lasted five years and ended with the UFW getting their first union contract with growers in the area. Beyond organizing strikes and marches, Chavez focused on pushing legislation that protected farmworkers. He and his wife, Helen Fabela, raised eight children, Elizabeth, Anna, Linda, Sylvia, Paul, Fernando, Eloise, and Anthony. Chavez died in 1993 at age sixty-six and is buried at the National Chavez Center in Kern County, California.
Paul and Cesar discussing handball strategy in California, 1970s
i remember once, when I was about ten years old, writing my name on the ceiling above my dad’s bed. I assume it was my way of saying, “Hey, Dad, don’t forget about us.” Unlike other fathers, my dad didn’t take me to Little League games. I don’t remember doing a lot of things my friends did with their fathers, because my dad was on the road, organizing and building the farmworker movement. One of the many sacrifices he made was not spending time with his children.
After high school, in part to find a way to connect with my dad, I decided to work full-time with the United Farm Workers union. I wanted to be an organizer, but my father promptly put me to work at the UFW’s print shop, running the presses—something I knew nothing about and had no interest in. But I became a pretty good printer, and eventually I came to enjoy it.
After I spent a few years at the print shop, my dad asked me to work as an assistant in his office. I resisted. By this time, I had grown to love the print shop. I thought I’d been born with ink in my veins. Besides, I had never worked in an office. I finally joined his staff, did well, and became interested in how plans and budgets were made, how to identify issues and allocate resources to solve problems—tools I still use today.
By then, the union had achieved much success in organizing workers. It needed negotiators to bargain union contracts. Some union leaders wanted to hire experienced outside negotiators. My father was convinced that the sons and daughters of farmworkers could learn those skills. But they would need training and opportunities to make mistakes while learning.
This was one of the important consejos, or life lessons, I learned from my father, and which still offers me direction: have faith in people. At the heart of our movement is the unfailing faith my dad had in the poorest and least educated—a belief that they could challenge one of California’s mightiest industries and prevail. My dad understood that individual lives and successive generations would be forever changed and people uplifted if they were given the chance to negotiate their own union contracts. He asked me to be a part of it. I was content to be an administrative assistant. But he insisted, and I joined the first class of fifteen students training to become negotiators at a school he established at our headquarters. It was a tough yearlong academic curriculum. We worked hard, made some mistakes, but gained confidence going up against seasoned grower negotiators, many of them lawyers.
After that experience, I thought my calling was as a negotiator. Then my father asked me to become the union’s political director and lobbyist. That also took convincing. Though I had seen him up close as an organizer, I knew nothing about lobbying and very little of how to navigate the legislative process. I’d learn quickly. At the time, new, hostile administrations were taking over in Washington and Sacramento. The incoming California governor campaigned on dismantling the historic state farm labor law, which let workers organize, that my dad had worked hard to pass under Governor Jerry Brown.
After a couple of years, my father pushed me to leave the lobbying and political job to take over and expand what today is the Cesar Chavez Foundation, which helps workers and other poor people with the crippling dilemmas they face off the job site and in the community. I asked myself, What do I know about affordable housing and educational radio? But my dad was confident I could do the job.
Looking back, I realize that at every step of the way, I was unsure I could do the jobs my father thought I could. I lacked confidence, yet my father was persistent. He encouraged and pushed me at each turn. And I came to realize that he had more faith in me than I had in myself.
Today, the foundation takes part in Cesar Chavez commemorations across the nation. I meet men and women my father personally influenced—and they tell me their stories. There was the young teacher’s aide whom my dad convinced to become a teacher. She went on to become an administrator, and today she is a district superintendent. There was the nurse who became a doctor at my dad’s urging. And there was a paralegal, the son of striking farmworkers, who was challenged by my father to become a lawyer. He is now a superior court judge in Kern County, California.
My father gave people opportunities no one would have given him when he was a migrant kid with an eighth-grade education. Whenever he met young people, especially if they came from farmworker or working-class families, my dad challenged them to believe in themselves and their capabilities. He helped hundreds fulfill dreams many didn’t even know they had at the time.
The faith my father had in me, he had in an entire community as well. He trusted people to create their own future.
The second lesson I learned from my dad was perseverance.
In 1982, as the union’s political director, I led a statewide campaign in California to confirm a nominee to the farm labor board and ensure enforcement of the farm labor law. My father and I joined hundreds of farmworkers watching the final vote in the gallery above the ornate Senate chamber at the state capitol in Sacramento. We were one vote short.
I was devastated. Around 10:00 p.m., after my dad offered encouraging words to the workers, he said to me, “Let’s drive home.” It was about five hours from Sacramento to our headquarters in Keene, near Bakersfield.
After about an hour on the road, my father asked how I was doing. I told him I felt I had let him, the farmworkers, and the movement down. I felt terrible.
“Did you do everything you could do?” my dad asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Did you leave any stone unturned?”
“No, I did everything I knew how to do.”
“Did you work as hard as you could?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Remember,” my father said, “our work isn’t like a baseball game, where after nine innings, whoever has the most runs wins and the other team loses.
“It’s not a political race, where each candidate runs a campaign and on Election Day whoever gets the most votes wins and everyone else loses.
“In our work, La Causa, the fight for justice, you only lose when you stop fighting—you only lose when you quit.”
Then he added, “Let’s go home and get some rest, because tomorrow we have a lot of work to do.”
People forget that Cesar Chavez had more defeats than victories. Yet each time he was knocked to the ground, he’d pick himself up, dust himself off, and return to the nonviolent fight. The lesson was clear: Victory is ours when we refuse to give up.