Mar
31
California Celebrates Cesar Chavez Day
By
March 31st marks Cesar Chavez Day in California. State offices are closed.
“When California in 2000 became the first of eight states to declare March 31 as Cesar Chavez Day, the goal was to connect the honor with a curriculum that would educate students about Chavez. Yet ten years later, it is clear that young Californians know little about Cesar Chavez, and that those raised outside the West Coast and Southwest know even less. Millions of Americans even think Barack Obama invented the ‘Yes We Can’ rallying cry, unaware of its roots in the UFW’s ‘Si Se Puede.’â€
Read more here from Randy Shaw, author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.
2 Comments
March 31st, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Today, in honor of Cesar Chavez, I will have no grapes.
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March 31st, 2010 at 7:15 pm
I remember Chavez and the grapes and the lettuce – and dutifully not buying OR eating either. I believed a union was a necessity for those who harvested the crops for huge growers. BTW, not all those workers were Mexican; there were large numbers of white Americans working in those fields. I suppose they were left-overs from the migration to California in the depression. Profit, while necessary, does not discriminate in its oppression and abuse on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex – when it is allowed to run unfettered.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. At some point in the last two years, a blonde Republican lady was on a cable news program explaining that if we (the U.S.) didn’t have all these Mexican laborers we might be paying $10.00 a pound for grapes. A rise in the price of grapes was clearly meant to be an apocalytic event. Sigh.
* Age will tell, if I’m not careful I go on auto-pilot and refer to Caesar Milan the dog trainer as Cesar Chavez.
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