City Marks Cesar Chavez’s Birthday : San Fernando: Celebrants say rally at Recreation Park takes on new meaning in light of anti-immigrant climate.

A year ago, the tiny city of San Fernando, population approximately 23,000, became the first in the country to declare a holiday in honor of the late labor hero Cesar Chavez. A few hundred residents gathered at Las Palmas Park for a rally and brief celebration.

On Friday, many who participated in the city’s second annual Chavez celebration said the infant holiday tradition has taken on even deeper significance, in part because of what they say is a colder political climate for Latinos and many immigrant groups in California.

“We are facing some very serious challenges to the role we play as Americans,” said Irene Tovar, executive director of the San Fernando-based Latin American Civic Assn., before Friday’s celebration.

“With the passage of the anti-immigration Proposition 187, there is fear, even among those who are here legally. This year, Cesar Chavez and what he stood for has even more meaning for us,” said Tovar, who marched with approximately 500 residents from various parts of the city to a rally in Recreation Park. Others cited a rift between city residents over renaming a street for Chavez as an example of deep differences over how to preserve the city’s history and memorialize Chavez, viewed as a cultural icon by many in the heavily Latino town.

Friday’s celebration, which culminated in the park’s recreation center and included performances by dancers in brilliantly colored Aztec costumes, was held in honor of what would have been Chavez’s 68th birthday. Chavez died in his sleep in San Luis, Ariz., on April 23, 1993, at age 66.

Chavez and his wife, Helen, helped found the United Farm Workers union and aided migrant laborers in obtaining bargaining rights and better working conditions.

Lagging behind a group of students marching to the rally from San Fernando Elementary School, Maria Garcia Graham, 58, held a red UFW flag aloft and explained why the day was important to her.

“I owe a personal debt to Cesar Chavez,” said Graham, who, along with her nine brothers and sisters, grew up as a migrant laborer in the olive, grape and tomato fields of California.

“You should have seen the conditions we workers lived in. The housing was horrendous. The hoes were too short and hurt us. Then along came this man, and just about everything changed.”

Graham was inspired by Chavez to educate herself, and she now teaches Head Start classes in the San Fernando Valley.

Jose Hernandez, 63, a former councilman, asked the council to declare the Cesar Chavez holiday last year. Once a migrant picker who traveled from the sugar beet fields of Minnesota to the tomato harvests of Indiana, Hernandez is now a professor of urban studies at Cal State Northridge.

“The important thing is to keep his ideas alive,” he said. “Young people must recognize the need for hard work and the dignity of the individual. Cesar Chavez stood for both.”

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Although Hernandez succeeded in obtaining approval for the holiday last year, Mayor Pro Tem Rosa Chacon recently faced vehement opposition to her proposal to change the name of Kalisher Street, situated in the heart of San Fernando’s barrio, to Cesar Chavez Street.

At a council meeting in March, some residents protested that the change was tantamount to erasing part of the city’s history, although nobody at the meeting could identify Kalisher or place him in the history of the city.

Although the plan had received initial approval from the full council, the proposal later was referred to a hastily appointed, five-member committee of residents to decide how best to honor Chavez.