Linda Chavez Rodriguez; Daughter of UFW Founder

Linda Chavez Rodriguez, the daughter of the late United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez and wife of the union’s current president, died Monday of complications from scleroderma. She was 49.

Rodriguez died at Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Elysian Park, where she was being treated for the breathing problems that accompany scleroderma, a disease in which connective tissue in the body becomes hardened and rigid.

The third of eight children of Cesar and Helen Chavez, she was born in Crescent City, Calif., a community near the Oregon border where her father worked in the lumber mills.

Over the next year, the Chavez family lived in San Jose, Oxnard and East Los Angeles before settling in Delano, Calif., where Cesar Chavez laid the foundation for the UFW.

By about the age of 11, Linda Chavez joined her mother and her older siblings going door to door throughout the Central Valley, distributing leaflets that urged people to attend union organizing meetings.

“The night before, Linda would stay up late helping make leaflets on an old mimeograph machine,” her sister Sylvia recalled. “The next morning we would be in places like Dinuba and Hanford.”

After graduating from Delano High School in 1969, Rodriguez continued to do volunteer work with her father’s union. She helped workers get union cards and volunteered at a medical clinic in Lamont, Calif.

In 1973, she traveled to Detroit to help organize the UFW’s second grape boycott. There she met Arturo Rodriguez, a former University of Michigan student who was working for the union. They married in 1974, and Arturo Rodriguez became the union’s second president in April 1993, after the death of Cesar Chavez.

Until her health declined earlier this year, she continued to work at UFW headquarters in Keene, Calif.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by their three children, her mother and seven brothers and sisters, all of California.

A rosary is planned for 7 p.m. Thursday at St. Malachy Catholic Church, 407 West E St., Tehachapi. A procession behind the casket from the UFW headquarters in Keene will begin at 9 a.m. Friday to a burial Mass at 10 a.m. at St. Malachy.

The family requests that remembrances go to the Linda C. Rodriguez Memorial Scleroderma Fund, P.O. Box 62, Keene, CA 93531.