Marchers Follow Path of Chavez : Labor: Residents in streets of San Fernando and new UFW leaders in fields of Central Valley pay tribute.

As the new leaders of the United Farm Workers union marched over the Central Valley road their founder, Cesar Chavez, took three decades earlier, residents in the tiny city of San Fernando--first in the nation to make Chavez’s birthday a legal holiday--marched through their streets Thursday in honor of the late labor leader.

In the town of Delano in the San Joaquin Valley, the UFW, hoping to reclaim the magic that once made it such a force in the fields, began a 330-mile march up the spine of the Central Valley on Thursday--a trek that signals the union’s return to the work of organizing farm laborers.

The pilgrimage retraces the path Chavez took 28 years ago this spring, a march that transformed Delano and the relatively unknown Chavez into nationally known symbols.

Meanwhile, in San Fernando, about 250 residents, many of them younger than the union Chavez organized, marched through the streets waving “Boycott Grapes” picket signs and wearing the black and red Aztec eagle symbol of the UFW, shouting “Viva Chavez!”

Thursday was the 67th anniversary of the birth of Chavez, who died in San Luis, Ariz., on April 23, 1993 at age 66.

In Delano, the UFW pilgrimage, or peregrinacion, opened with a 90-minute Mass. About 750 people led by Arturo Rodriguez, Chavez’s son-in-law and successor, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the union, marched from the UFW’s Forty Acres compound to the first overnight stop, the town of Richgrove, about eight miles northeast.

The march will end with a big rally in Sacramento in three weeks, on the first anniversary of the union founder’s death, after moving for 24 days through some of richest farmland in the world.

“The pilgrimage is about recommitment and penance,” Rodriguez said at the outset of the march. “Recommitment to building a national union for farm workers, penance, because all of us let Cesar carry the responsibility for organizing the union on his shoulders. Now the burden for fulfilling Cesar’s dreams and our own rests squarely on each of us.”

The purpose of the holiday, according to San Fernando’s City Council, is to keep Chavez’s memory alive in the 2.4-square-mile city, which has an 82% Latino population, and to educate young people about his deeds.

“When kids here were asked about the death of Cesar Chavez last year, they thought the boxer had died,” said Jenaro Ayala of La Raza Unida, a San Fernando-based Chicano group, referring to Mexican fighter Julio Cesar Chavez. “They don’t teach it in the schools, so we have to go out and do it ourselves.”

Passing out flyers at every home they passed, and coaxing residents into coming along, the marchers finished with more people than had started.

“He was a great leader for the campesinos , especially the underprivileged Latinos, and we can’t let people forget,” said Isabel Salazar of the San Fernando Cesar Chavez Memorial Committee, co-sponsor of the march. “Our sons and daughters have to be made aware of Chavez and his legacy.”

Two groups marched through the San Fernando streets, coming together in the city’s Las Palmas Park for a celebration including Aztec dancers, mariachis, folk dancing, and a commendation for Councilman Jose Hernandez, who introduced the measure to make Chavez’s birthday a legal holiday last year. The measure passed by unanimous vote of San Fernando’s City Council.

“I’m very much impressed that the community would come out like this,” Hernandez said. “Look at all the young people! Every year it’s going to get bigger and bigger.”

The march in the San Joaquin Valley signals an important departure from the strategies of Chavez. No longer will the grape boycott be the centerpiece of the UFW’s activities, as it has been for the past decade. The union’s leadership has decided to return to the fields to enlist new members, confront growers and push for new contracts.

The shift in strategy is a concession that the boycott alone has not been enough to improve the lot of farm workers, whose wages have leveled off or dropped in the past decade.

The return to organizing is seen as a gamble for a union that has suffered years of defeat and infighting. In 1973, the UFW had contracts with 80% of the grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley. Today, not a single contract remains. At its height, the union had 100,000 members; now there are fewer than 15,000. It hopes to enlist 10,000 new members by the end of the trek.

Critics called the march a desperate public relations ploy to revive a dying union.

“This march is a publicity stunt,” said Richard Baiz of the Grape Workers and Farmers Coalition, an advocate group representing the grape industry that opposes the UFW. “The grape boycott was a huge failure and now they want to organize in the fields.

“Well, they’re going to find it tough out there. The farm workers are happy just to have a job, and working conditions have improved a great deal since the 1970s. For the UFW, this is Custer’s last stand.”

Rodriguez acknowledges the risks of returning to the difficult work of organizing, but he believes the laborers in the fields will heed the union’s call.

“Sure, we’re taking a risk,” he said. “But everywhere we’ve gone this past year, farm workers are tired and fed up with abuse from growers and labor contractors who have no respect for them or their families. They are ready to fight.”

The shift in strategy is welcomed by longtime supporters and former top UFW organizers. Chavez’s original march through the San Joaquin Valley ushered in a heady decade for the union. Growers who had sworn never to deal with Chavez were forced to the bargaining table. It culminated with the state Legislature passing the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the landmark law that gave farm workers the right to collective bargaining and the right to seek redress for unfair practices on the job.

But Rodriguez argues that the board set up to enforce the labor law has been gutted by 12 years of the administrations of former Gov. George Deukmejian and Gov. Pete Wilson. He acknowledged the difficulty in winning contracts at a time when the board was headed by a general counsel he said is “averse to the plight of farm workers.” But the union has no choice, he said.

In East Los Angeles, a ceremony was held to unveil the first street sign changing the name of Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar E. Chavez Avenue.

About 250 people, including schoolchildren from Pacoima, Pico Union, and East L.A., Mayor Richard Riordan, City Council members Richard Alatorre, Mike Hernandez, Richard Alarcon, Jackie Goldberg and Rita Walters, and county Supervisor Gloria Molina, took part in the two-hour event in Boyle Heights.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the City Council approved the name change of one of the city’s oldest streets, which extends from just east of the Los Angeles River to Atlantic Avenue, last October.

The Los Angeles Board of Education in February called on schools to teach Chavez’s life and work, between Thursday and April 23.

Last year, the state Senate approved a measure designating Chavez’s birthday as a state holiday. The measure, which would not have given government workers the day off, was vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson.