Richard Chavez, leader in farmworker movement, dies
| Wednesday, Jul 27 2011 04:08 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Jul 27 2011 08:17 PM
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In this file photo, Richard Chavez addresses a rally and candlelight vigil held by Clinica Sierra Vista workers. Chavez died Wednesday.
In this file photo, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, center, poses with Richard Chavez, right, and Camila Chavez, left, during the unveiling of the mosaic mural portrait ceremony commemorating Cesar Chavez Day, Wednesday, March 31, 2010, at the Labor Department in Washington.
Richard Chavez, who left his job as a carpenter in 1966 to join his older brother Cesar Chavez on the Delano grape strike and to help him build the United Farm Workers union, died Wednesday in a Bakersfield hospital as a result of complications from surgery.
The "little-known giant" of the farmworker movement and dedicated family man was 81.
Chavez helped his brother design the iconic black eagle logo of the UFW and construct the Forty Acres complex in Delano, the movement’s first headquarters.
Earlier this year, as the Forty Acres complex was designated a National Historic Landmark, Richard Chavez told the story of how in 1967 he and another union leader bought the 40-acre plot amid open fields west of Delano for $2,700 over Cesar’s veto.
"I said, ‘He’s nonviolent and all that, but he’s going to kill us,’" Richard Chavez joked during the ceremony.
Cesar didn’t kill his brother.
Instead Richard is credited, in an online UFW history of Forty Acres, with spending every Sunday over the next six to eight months on a borrowed tractor clearing the land for construction and digging a well for the complex.
He also helped plan and construct most of the structures on the historic property.
It was that work, his longtime companion Dolores Huerta told their daughter Camila Chavez Wednesday, that Richard Chavez would be most proud of.
"One of his last wishes was that they name it after him," Camila Chavez said.
She said one of her father’s other great achievements was his family.
He and Huerta "have been partners for over 40 years and they have four children together," Chavez said.
Together they had 13 other children from previous marriages — six his and seven hers — but her father treated everyone as blood, she said.
He was also very intrigued with his family’s tree, hunting out distant relations and dragging them out to visit.
At a massive family reunion in 2010, Camila Chavez said, "We met cousins we have never met before."
"He is the one who is the thread of this family," she said.
Current UFW President Arturo Rodriguez called Chavez’s passing a blow to those who knew him and the organization he helped build.
"We were all in shock. We were with Richard in the last two days," said Rodriguez, who was heading back to Bakersfield from Salinas Wednesday to be with the family. "He didn’t have any fear of what the surgery might be."
Camila Chavez said her father was undergoing an arterial bypass in his leg. The surgery went well, she said, but the blood medication he was given suppressed his heart rate and doctors could not bring it back up in time to save him.
"Richard was one of those little-known giants in our organization," Rodriguez said. "Those of us who have been a part of the organization know and understand the effectiveness of his leadership."
Richard and Cesar Chavez grew up in Arizona in the 1930s and, when their family lost the farm they owned, they moved to California where they worked in fields, orchards and vineyards up and down the state.
In 1949, according to a biography of Richard Chavez released by the UFW Wednesday, the two brothers left farm labor to work in lumber mills. In 1951, Richard Chavez started a carpenter’s union apprenticeship program in San Jose and got work framing suburban homes.
By 1952 he had moved to Delano and was president of the Delano chapter of the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group.
He continued to work as a carpenter, building schools, homes and other structures as his brother Cesar began to build the organization that would become the United Farm Workers union.
By the early 1960s, Chavez was donating all of his free time to his brother’s cause, the UFW biography states, and in 1966 he quit his job to commit himself full-time to the farmworker movement.
Richard Chavez worked as a union organizer, planning grape boycotts in New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s and also negotiated and administered union contracts.
Chavez retired from the union in 1983, his biography said, but stayed active in the Cesar Chavez Foundation and the Dolores Huerta Foundation as well as building a tract of homes in Tehachapi and custom homes in Los Angeles.
It was Richard Chavez, Rodriguez said, who brought him into the union and became his mentor.
"He taught me how to be strong and, at the same time, caring," Rodriguez said. "I’ve got to tell you that, when I came into the organization, I had no intention of this being my lifetime work. But Richard had a way" of changing minds.
Camila Chavez, executive director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, said her father taught her about activism and social justice.
But he didn’t do it by sitting around a table talking about the theory of how to care for other people.
"It wasn’t that he told us that. It was that he showed us that," she said. "If you see homeless people, and you have take-out with you, you give it to them. Or maybe he would invite them into our home for dinner."
Rev. Chris Hartmire, who helped rally the religious community behind the UFW during the early years of the union, remembered Richard Chavez as having a heart for people.
"He’s just a totally good human being. Caring. Open. Willing to speak up on issues in the union when other people weren’t," Hartmire said. "He and Cesar were very close but they were very different. (Richard) wasn’t as driven. He cared a lot about justice for farmworkers and making life better for people. But it wasn’t a fire in his belly."
After Cesar’s death in 1993, Richard Chavez crafted the simple wooden coffin that carried his brother to rest in the La Paz compound in Keene — the UFW’s current headquarters, said Rodriguez.
"He made Cesar’s coffin from scratch. He was a great carpenter," Hartmire said. "That was what his gift was.