Proud Harvest

Sixty years ago, a penniless family in a battered Studebaker landed here after losing their small farm in Arizona. A grocer ended up giving them shelter in a backyard shed.

Today, the shed behind 452 N. Garfield St. is gone and the grocer, Felipe Navarro, is dead. But on Wednesday an American flag and a Mexican flag flanked his tiny white frame house in the city’s poorest neighborhood.

Songs were sung, prayers were said, and a plaque was unveiled. Dignitaries trooped to a lectern on the sagging porch, paying their respects to one of the six children who had lived in the backyard for a time in 1938.

Cesar Chavez, the charismatic organizer who gave voice and muscle to thousands of farm workers, was just 11 years old when his family slept on the dirt floor of Navarro’s shed. With a small crowd watching, the house in front of that long-gone structure was dedicated as Ventura County Point of Interest No. 9.

Local politicians were on hand, as well as Chavez’s younger brother Richard. Veterans of decades-old farm-labor struggles spoke reverently of a man who has been likened to Gandhi.

“He fought for us to use a long-handled hoe so we could hold our heads high,” said Josie Salinas, who wore old protest buttons and who let loose an enthusiastic whistle after each song.

Two students from Oxnard’s Cesar Chavez School--Arturo Leal and Anna Anguiano --led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, first haltingly and then fiercely. In the crowd, Jess J. Ramirez, president of the Oxnard Harbor District, escorted three Tarahumara Indians, men from Mexico who are to compete later this month in a 100-mile run on the trails of Angeles National Forest.

Chavez’s parents came from the same region in Mexico and Chavez reflected the same quiet determination as the Indians, Ramirez said.

The moving force behind the United Farm Workers, Chavez did his first organizing among the fieldworkers of Oxnard, and his memory is still held sacred by many in the community.

“He did Christ’s work,” said John Flynn, an early ally of Chavez who now represents Oxnard on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors.

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Mayor Manuel Lopez also spoke in tones of awe.

“We in Oxnard hold him in great reverence, as do countless others who have benefited from his life’s work,” Lopez said.

Chavez, a soft-spoken man who was to become as inspiring to a generation of Latinos as he was threatening to big agriculture, died in 1993 at age 66.

His brother Richard, a semiretired UFW organizer, recalled not a saint-like figure but a boy who, like other children in countless Depression-era families, made the best of bad times. The family stayed in Oxnard for three harvest seasons, bouncing from one form of homelessness to another--car, field, shed.

“I remember this huge avocado tree,” Richard Chavez said. “We couldn’t afford avocados. I had never tasted one. But here they fell to the ground and we ate them like apples!”

One winter, the family huddled in a tent beside an Oxnard bean field.

“As kids, it was fun,” he said. “We got to hear the rain falling on the tent.”

Richard, Cesar and their sister Vicki would walk barefoot from the Navarro house to Our Lady of Guadalupe School a few blocks away.

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At harvest time in the bean fields surrounding the La Colonia neighborhood, they would follow the combines churning through each row. As the huge machines swiveled on to the next row, they would always spill a small pile of beans that the kids would eagerly scoop into paper bags.

“We’d take them home for Mom to cook,” Chavez recalled.

But beans were about the only bonus in the grueling life of the migrant family. To survive, the Chavezes followed the crops the length of California, living in one squalid hovel after another. Most were labor camps--and most are now subdivisions, Richard Chavez said.

Cesar Chavez attended 37 schools. In 1958, he returned to Oxnard--as an organizer for the Community Service Organization, a forerunner of the UFW.

Several people at Wednesday’s dedication had been in on the ground floor of Chavez’s first voting drives and labor protests.

Rafaela Corona, 74, wearing a UFW T-shirt and a straw hat from Ensenada, still lives in the house on nearby Roosevelt Road where Chavez held one of his first neighborhood meetings.

“We never got tired of helping him because we were really helping ourselves,” she said.

On a guitar, a retired Moorpark College counselor named Donato Ventura strummed “Viva Huelga Generale,” an anthem to the labor movement.

He remembered returning to the neighborhood as a fresh graduate of UC Santa Barbara and suddenly finding himself registering voters. He remembered the 200 or so farm workers who marched with Chavez to a farm employment office in Ventura, protesting the growers’ preference for cheap bracero labor from Mexico.

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Years later, he saw Chavez again at UFW headquarters in the San Joaquin Valley and was humbled by his presence.

“When he appeared, I felt strange, as if I were in another world, floating in air, suspended in space,” he wrote in an account of the meeting.

Ventura went on to advise workers during their bitter four-year strike at the Egg City poultry farm near Moorpark. The strike ended in 1979.

For Martha Navarro, Wednesday’s dedication capped years of anticipation. The daughter of Felipe and Theresa Navarro, she inherited the home after her parents died. For three years, she kept it vacant, realizing that the dedication was just around the corner.

Several months ago, she rented it to a family of farm workers--a practice she vows to continue in the memory both of her parents and of Chavez.

“My mother knew he would be a great person--even as a young boy,” she said.