Group Joins Bid for Approval of Chavez Stamp

Latino community leaders and elected officials in Orange County said Monday that they are joining a nationwide effort to create a postal stamp in honor of Cesar Chavez.

Organizers said they hope to bypass the Postal Service’s rule that commemorative stamps may not be issued until 10 years after the person’s death.

“We have an immediate need for this stamp,” said Enriqueta Ramos, a Rancho Santiago Community College District trustee. “We need that message of nonviolence that Chavez gave because our world has become so violent. We need his humanist approach.”

Chavez, founding president of the United Farm Workers, died in his sleep on April 23 in Yuma, Ariz.

About 35,000 people attended a memorial service in the central California city of Delano.

The Postal Service receives more than 30,000 suggestions for commemorative stamps every year, a spokesman said. But only about 25 are recommended to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee to become stamps.

The rule requiring a 10-year waiting period after a subject’s death “was done to preclude politics from entering stamp selection,” Postal Service spokesman Frank Brennan said. “There have been exceptions for U.S. Presidents, however.”

A stamp in memory of President John F. Kennedy was issued within two years after his death in 1963.

But stamps honoring Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were issued 11 years after their deaths in 1968.

At a news conference attended by about half a dozen community leaders and officials, Santa Ana Councilman Miguel A. Pulido Jr. complained that the 10-year waiting period was too long. He and others said they will lobby the Postal Service to shorten it.

“There must be a way, and we must find that way,” Pulido said.

A memorial Mass in Spanish for Chavez will be celebrated at 7 a.m. Wednesday at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the Delhi neighborhood in Santa Ana.