Chavez Died Near Birthplace, Site of Property Lost in Depression

In the end, Cesar Chavez returned to his birthplace, where the loss of a family farm half a century ago changed his life.

Chavez, 66, had come to his native Yuma to fight a lawsuit brought against the United Farm Workers by Bruce Church Inc., a Salinas-based vegetable producer.

For Chavez, the fight was intensely personal.

Bruce Church Inc. has extensive holdings in California and Arizona, including the acreage on the Gila River east of Yuma that was once owned by Chavez’s parents.

Ben Miranda, the UFW attorney in Arizona, who paid to have Chavez’s body flown back to Bakersfield, said Chavez talked often of what he felt was the unjust way the family had lost its property through foreclosure in the Depression. It was that turn of events that pushed the family onto the road as migrant laborers--and eventually led the adult Chavez to fight for better wages and respect for field workers.

“He felt his family had not been given justice,” Miranda said. “It hurt him. And he often said it was his first lesson that there is injustice in this world.”

Bruce Church Inc. had won a $5.4-million judgment against the UFW for alleged damage done by boycotts. On appeal, the case was sent back to the trial court.

Chavez had finished his second day of testimony in Yuma County Superior Court about 3 p.m. Thursday and spent the rest of the day driving through the poor neighborhoods of Yuma that he remembered from his boyhood.

David Martinez, 47, UFW’s secretary-treasurer and a Chavez confidant for 20 years, said the labor leader was tired but still buoyed by the court fight.

“He was in great spirits. He was working for the people,” Martinez said. “He was tired, yes, but I’ve seen him a lot more exhausted.”

Chavez, Martinez and other UFW officials went Thursday night to the small cement home of Dona Maria Hau, 66, in San Luis, a dusty rundown border town 30 miles from Yuma.

According to Hau, a former field worker who is now disabled, Chavez broke a three-day fast to have a vegetarian dinner and then went to bed.

Friday morning, Chavez did not arise for breakfast and Martinez went to check on him. Martinez said he looked into the tiny bedroom with its generations-old family portraits on the wall and saw court documents and union papers spread out on the single bed. He thought Chavez had just fallen asleep reading.

“It was like a bad dream,” Martinez said. “I had wakened him . . . before when he’d read all night. I just thought he was asleep but he wasn’t. I touched him and he was cold.”

The police and a funeral hearse were summoned and a next-door neighbor, Margo Hernandez, 27, who sells restaurant supplies, captured the scene on a camcorder.

Throughout the day, farm workers and others gathered at Hernandez’s house to view the videotape, some in disbelief. By nightfall, Hernandez was negotiating with a Spanish-language television station to sell the tape.

Hau, who said she was honored to give up her bedroom so Chavez would have a place to sleep, broke down in tears as she described her grief:

“I keep asking God, why didn’t I die, instead of Cesar. He was the one needed much more than me. He’s the one who should be alive so he can keep on fighting the rich people.”

Farm workers, some of whom had gone to court in a show of support for Chavez, drifted in to the UFW headquarters Friday near Hau’s house. They asked for information and traded remembrances of Chavez. A velvet painting of a young Chavez hangs in the small meeting room of the headquarters.

Manuel Amaya, 61, who worked in the fields until he lost his hand in an industrial accident, said, “God has taken the strongest arm that we have, but we will continue.”

Remigio Gutierrez, 70, said simply, “For all the workers, Cesar was strong.”