Activists Observe Chavez’s Birthday

Organizers of the upcoming Cesar Chavez walkathon couldn’t help but call it a march.

That’s probably because the event announced Wednesday is in honor of a person who led farm workers in numerous marches for better wages and living conditions starting in the 1960s.

Chavez, who died in 1993, would have turned 72 on Wednesday, prompting labor activists, celebrities and politicians to converge in East Los Angeles to mark his birthday and call on the community to help pass his legacy to the next generation.

They invited people to walk or march April 17 in a fund-raiser to benefit organizations carrying on his legacy: the Cesar Chavez Foundation, which sponsors educational programs about the labor leader, and the United Farm Workers, the union Chavez founded. Other groups will hold similar events during April in cities from Fresno to Oxnard and New York to Chicago.

The Chavez walk in Los Angeles is symbolic, according to union President Arturo Rodriguez.

“He believed in very simple things, like marching and leafleting,” said Rodriguez, who was flanked by actor Edward James Olmos, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre and state Assemblyman Scott Wildman (D-Los Angeles) during a news conference at an East Los Angeles art gallery.

“These were ways of doing collective action to bring about change, and anyone could do it, whether you’re educated or not, whether you’re poor or rich,” Rodriguez said.

The event also will provide an opportunity for the whole family, including children, to get involved in social action, which is something the late labor leader advocated, he said.

Paul Chavez, Cesar Chavez’s son, knows all about that. He joked that as a child when he went to the supermarket with his family, it wasn’t to buy food. It was to picket.

“We never went to parades, but we marched,” said the 42-year-old, who serves as president of the National Farm Workers Service Center, which was founded by his father to help make homeowners of farm workers.

The son of farm workers, Cesar Chavez never went past the eighth grade, but he believed very strongly that ordinary people, educated or not, could do extraordinary things, said his son.

In the early 1960s, Chavez began to organize fieldworkers in the San Joaquin Valley. He spoke out against the paltry wages farm workers earned and the unsanitary and backbreaking conditions under which they toiled. He led the famous grape boycott to protest the unfair labor practices of growers, bringing the plight of farm workers to the public’s attention.

The fund-raising walk will begin and end at Cesar Chavez Avenue and Soto Street in Boyle Heights.