Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction The contest for property and profit [in the United States West] has been accompanied by a contest for cultural dominance. Conquest also involved a struggle over languages, cultures, and religions, the pursuit of legitimacy in property overlapped with the pursuit of legitimacy in way of life and point of view. Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest On 1 April 1994, nearly 750 people assembled in the vineyards of Delano, California, about thirty miles north of Bakersfield. Before beginning a 330-mile march to the state capital in Sacramento, they celebrated a morning mass. During this service of worship, farm workers laid offerings on an altar adorned by a statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, patroness saint of Mexico. Then they set out on their march, carrying the United Farm Workers’ flag—a black Aztec eagle set against a red background. Along the way they sang “De Colores,” a Mexican folk song celebrating spring colors in the countryside. One of the marchers was a woman whose wrinkled face and brown, downcast eyes suggested a life of sadness and hardship . She shouldered a large, wooden cross. A white, broad-rimmed hat shielded her eyes from the rays of the morning sun. A Comparative Study This three-week march began on the sixty-seventh anniversary of the birth of farm labor leader César Chávez and ended on 23 April 1994, the first anniversary of his death. Organizers marked it as a pilgrimage, a peregrinaci ón. They even described it as a penitential march. Dolores Huerta, longtime leader in the farm worker movement, and Arturo Rodriguez, new president of the United Farm Workers, identified the event’s purpose as twofold: first, to encourage farm laborers and supporters to recommit themselves to unionizing efforts; and, second, to provide a means for these same people to do penance for having failed their “brother and founder” 2 Chapter 1 César Chávez. Rodriguez, a holder of a master’s degree in social work and son-in-law of Chávez, said, “[All] of us let César carry the responsibility for organizing the union on his shoulders. Now the burden for fulfilling César’s dreams and our own rests squarely on each of us.” In short, UFW officials were seeking to recapture the mood and momentum of the first farm workers’ march held in March and April of 1966. Using the very same symbols—and invoking the name of Chávez as well—they were trying to reawaken the feelings and visions that Chávez had inspired twenty-eight years earlier. At that time the grape strike and boycott, or La Causa as it came to be known, had entered its seventh month. Greater visibility was crucial, and the union needed more members . So Chávez and others proposed a daring event—a civil rights march with a cultural twist. A one-page paper, titled “Peregrinación, penitencia, revolución,” was written and circulated. In it Chávez gave the upcoming march a triple meaning: it was a Mexican religious pilgrimage, a Lenten penitential procession, and an act of defiance, all in one. It was an opportunity , on the one hand, for the marchers to celebrate their spiritual heritage. It also served as a vehicle to express contrition, to do “public penance for the sins of the strikers, their own personal sins as well as their yielding perhaps to feelings of hatred and revenge” toward the growers. On the other hand, the protest elements of the event were undeniably clear. It signaled the Chicana/o’s demand for “justice, freedom, and respect from a predominantly foreign cultural community in a land where he was first.” The 1966 march was a great success. The National Farm Workers Association recruited many new members and supporters and gained much needed news coverage. In addition, Schenley Industries, one of the companies against which the union was striking, bowed to the media exposure and capitulated to union demands. Chávez’s creative use of religious and nationalist symbols associated with Mexican devotional Catholicism had accomplished its purposes. Over the next four years Chávez employed similar strategies that, along with other factors, led to the historic 1970 contract between the union and the Delano grape growers. The term Mexican devotional Catholicism needs to be explained. It refers to a subcategory of what theologian Orlando Espín has called Latina/o popular Catholicism. He has written: “Its...