Students Labor in Leader’s Honor

Some of the children didn’t know who Cesar Chavez was. Others thought he was a boxer.

But though there is a boxer by that name, the 200 students at Gompers Middle School painting murals and planting gardens Wednesday were honoring the founder of the nation’s first farm workers union, not Julio Cesar Chavez, the legendary Mexican fighter.

“I knew who he was,” said Chris Moran, an eighth-grader from Berendo Middle School. “He was like the Latin Martin Luther King Jr. He organized strikes.”

Across California, thousands of children and adults participated in beautification projects, harvested crops and held community health fairs as part of the fourth annual Cesar Chavez Day of Service and Learning.

The South Los Angeles event at Gompers was organized by the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. For many, it was an opportunity to learn about the labor leader.

Students listened to lectures about Chavez and later were quizzed about the union’s name and the kind of fruit boycotted. Answers: United Farm Workers of America and grapes.

Chris, 13, paused to survey the playground where students were dressed in khakis and green T-shirts, the uniform for the environmentally minded “Clean and Green” youth program.

“We have tools like the farmworkers, same basic hack and slash work. Cesar Chavez organized projects; we organized projects,” he said.

Joshua Luengas, 13, an eighth-grader from Carver Middle School in a hard hat and work gloves, panted as he hoed weeds to make room for a rose garden in the school’s overgrown “ag” area.

He said he was not discouraged by the hard manual labor.

“It’s better to be doing this -- working on Cesar Chavez Day -- than to take the day off,” he said.

That’s what the Chavez family wanted.

“It wouldn’t make sense if kids had the day off,” said Cesar Chavez’s son, Paul, who manages an organization that finds affordable housing for farmworkers.

“We’d rather they learn about my father, then put it into practice, so they learn about the concept of service.”

Gompers Principal Audrey Criss has understood that message for years. She attended strikes in support of farmworkers while in college and boycotted grapes as a sign of solidarity. She smiled at the face-lift her campus was receiving. It’s a school desperately in need of repair in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, event organizers said.

Looking over a grassy area being dug up, she said that it would be turned into a park with murals, roses, benches and barbecues.

“The red brick path is also going to be fixed to spell Gompers,” she said.

That’s Gompers, as in Samuel Gompers, one of the founders of the American Federation of Labor in 1886. “It’s connected us to Cesar Chavez,” Criss said.

Other Cesar Chavez Day of Service and Learning projects included one in Orange County, where fourth-graders picked leftover crops and delivered them to food banks, and another in San Diego, where volunteers built bird houses and replanted walnut trees in areas devastated by last year’s wildfires.

Those programs and dozens of others were funded in part by state grants. Late last year, lawmakers said they had to suspend funding for the Cesar Chavez Day of Service and Learning until at least late 2006 because of the budget crisis.

Claudia Anderson, chief operating officer for the Governor’s Office of Service and Volunteerism, said only 15 annual Chavez Day participants would stop their events. An additional 45 participants, who previously received grants from the state, have found other sources of funding, she said.

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps will move on with its work, because its $17-million budget is funded almost entirely from the city and private and corporate donations. Organizers say the Corps serves as a model for other groups to follow if they hope to continue their work on Cesar Chavez Day.

“Even if the funding is shot,” Paul Chavez said, “part of my father’s work was to show people how to survive, even if you didn’t have the resources.”