Principal Ruscel Reader shows off a portrait of Cesar E. Chavez in the awards room at the Science Magnet School in Bakeersfield that bears his name.

Legacy of Cesar E. Chavez is well-preserved in places grateful for his leadership of farm workers
 

By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place

BAKERSFIELD, California — Memories of Cesar E. Chavez, the migrant farm workers civil rights activist and purveyor of nonviolent social change, prevail here in the Golden State, especially in places like Delano, Bakersfield, the Imperial Valley and Keene, where La Paz, headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America, is comfortably situated off a hidden road in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains at the southern extreme of the San Joaquin Valley.

The full description of this place is Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz, which is Our Lady Queen of Peace. La Paz is the final resting place of Chavez, who died in his sleep on April 23, 1993. La Paz was deemed at the start to be a cooperative like kibitzes common to Israel and the way people came together to build a nation.

Here in Central California, the winter morning is placid and this place, La Paz, is picturesque place. Here the movement was led that won rights for farm workers. Western Brush Rabbits — there are three of them — sit near an old pick-up truck parked on grass. The rabbits don’t scurry for cover even at the approach of human footsteps.

In 1994, the Chavez family and UFW officers created the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation and established, in 2004, the National Chavez Center at Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz. Also included on the 187-acre site, besides the visitors center, are a memorial garden, library and training center.

For more than 50 years, California has been the leading agricultural state in the nation. California, according to the state’s Department of Agriculture, produces more than 350 crops. Almonds, artichokes, figs, olives, persimmons, pomegranates, prunes, raisins and walnuts are only commercially produced in California.
 

California grows more than half of the nation’s fruits, vegetables and nuts on less than four percent of the nation’s farmland. Grapes, the second leading commodity behind milk and cream, account for $2.75 billion in cash receipts annually.

It was in the cloud of this economic purview that the legacy of Cesar E. Chavez — born into a family that lost its farm during the Great Depression — became emblematic of place, time and cause. According to a public benefit organization, he was “of selfless dedication for farm workers and worker rights, economic justice, civil rights, environmental justice, peace, and non-violence, empowerment of the poor and disenfranchised.”

Prominently displayed on a wall is a banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, her of dark skin, who accompanied Chavez and Delores Huerta and those huddled masses throughout the movement.

Chavez is as much a part of the American experience as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and then Senator and later presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and world human rights as the Mahatma Gandhi. Portraits of King and Gandhi and an action shot of Kennedy huddled with Chavez during a farm workers’ meeting are also displayed in the visitor’s center here at La Paz.

North of here, in Sacramento, across from City Hall, Cesar E. Chavez Plaza, a city park in the downtown square, has a monument of Chavez leading the340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento that took place on March 16, 1966. Banners with Chavez’s image are hung on lampposts surrounding the plaza.

In March 1966, before King led the March on Washington in August 1968, Chavez and those same huddled masses, among them Filipino Americans, grape pickers, the clergy, the few elected officials there were then and others concerned with the plight of striking farm workers marched 350 miles from Delano to the State Capitol for higher wages.

Since August 2000, Cesar Chavez Day, March 31, 1927, his birthday, has been a state holiday in California.

 Senate Bill 984, the bill that made Cesar Chavez Day a state holiday, passed with annual allocations from the state’s general fund, including $5 million to the California Commission on Improving Life Through Service and $1 million to the Superintendent of Public Instruction “for the purpose of developing or revising, as needed, a model curriculum on the life and work of Cesar Chavez and distributing the curriculum to each school.”

Commemorative Cesar Chavez Days are observed in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Rhode Island. Cesar E. Chavez National Holiday, based in Los Angeles, is leading the effort to make Chavez’s birthday a national holiday. Carlos Santana and Edward James Olmos have served as national co-chairs.

Then Senator Barack Obama supported a national holiday.

“As farm workers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages, we find strength in what Cesar Chavez accomplished so many years ago,” he said. “And we should honor him for what he's taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation.”

President Obama has made no definitive statements in support of a Cesar E. Chavez National Holiday since his inauguration in January 2009. Still, cities across America, including Houston, Texas, remember Chavez with street names. Other cities have schools named for Chavez.

The high school in Delano, across the street from vineyards, not far from the starting place for the march, Delano to Sacramento, is named Cesar E. Chavez High School. Its namesake only went as far as eighth grade but was self-taught and well-read in many areas. As indicative of his office preserved in the visitors center at La Paz, Chavez was a voracious reader. There are hundreds of books in that office.

While visiting La Paz, you can watch a three-part documentary on Chavez and the labor movement he and Delores Huerta led. In one segment, Helen, his wife, says Cesar Chavez, who loved the jazz of Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, was a humble man.

She says during the oral history that Chavez, who was also given the nation’s highest civilian honor, would have been uncomfortable with all the schools and streets named for him.

On August 8, 1994, Chavez, posthumously, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton at the White House. Helen F. Chavez and six of their eight children were there to receive the award.

 In downtown Brawley, in the Imperial Valley, where the desert was made agriculturally productive 100 years ago with digging miles of canals and irrigation ditches, Cesar Chavez Street intersections with Main Street (California Highway 78).

Such schools, however, like the Cesar E. Chavez Science Magnet School — in the midst of Bakersfield farm fields being suddenly transformed into urban sprawl and development — are holding up the legacy of the man who loved learning and stood for so many intrinsic values of the human experience.

“We maintain contact with the Chavez family when we have special events,” said Ruscel Reader. “His son, Paul Chavez, came in 2002 during a recognition ceremony.” Reader is principal of Cesar E. Chavez Science Magnet School.

Huerta has spoken at the school and several of her grandchildren attended the school, which is located at Camino La Paz and Mesa Marin Dr. in Bakersfield.

“We teach the core values that Cesar Chavez extolled,” Reader said. “They are service to others, sacrifice, preference to help the neediest, determination, nonviolence, acceptance, respect for life and the environment, community, knowledge and innovations.”

The proposal to name the school for Chavez was met with controversy and push back. More than just a few in Bakersfield remembered Chavez, prior to the school’s opening in 1994, as a schismatic figure who drove a wedge between farm workers and farmers.

News accounts recall how Irma Carson, then a trustee on Bakersfield City School District Board of Education, and Pete Parra, then a Kern County Supervisor, actively led the effort to get the elementary school name for Chavez.

Most children are bused to the school. It is result of a consent decree between the U.S. Justice Department and the Bakersfield City School District Board of Education to desegregate Bakersfield Schools. The children at Cesar E. Chavez Science Magnet School are among the best performing students in the state.

The recent 862 score on the state’s Academic Performance Index (API) means that the Cesar E. Chavez Science Magnet School has reached a standard mandated by the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 that all schools must reach certain academic measures by 2014.

“Fifty percent of our kids are poor,” Reader said. “This is not a school for privileged students. We have migrant kids. Fifty percent of our students are socially disadvantaged. They are poor. We are not worried about what goes on in the home. We have the child for eight hours and we are committed to teach that child. Every child will learn at Chavez.

“We teach children and that’s what we do every day,” she said. “We have in place a higher ethical and moral belief system for our students. We have high expectations and it is possible for every kid in this school to succeed.”

Cesar E. Chavez Science Magnet School has an Autism Program. Students are mainstreamed into the core programs of the school.

“Our kids are able to see what it means to be different,” Reader said. “Our students care for and love and participate with students who are different from them and they accept them.”

A picture of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, left, and Cesar E. Chavez taken at a meeting in Bakersfield is on display in the visitors center at Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz.