Nearly 100 people marched a mile in North Lubbock for a civil rights leader who died before many of them were even out of diapers.

And that youthful display was exactly what organizers said they wanted to see Saturday afternoon in the 12th annual Cesar E. Chavez People’s March.

“Ain’t no sense in trying to educate our 70-year-olds — we’re trying to educate our younger generation,” 68-year-old Manuel Aguilar said Saturday afternoon as he led the march south along North University Avenue.

Aguilar, holding a golden statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, marched at the head of the rally aimed at honoring Chavez, a civil rights leader who died in 1993. The rally also was designed to be a peaceful protest in the spirit of rallies Chavez led in his decades of promoting farm laborers’ rights, organizers said.

Aguilar said the 50-plus college students who participated in the march represented, through their pursuit of education and remembering their Hispanic culture, the future of Hispanics in the United States.

“But the education comes first,” Aguilar said. “Without that, we’re never going to progress unless we educate our kids.”

Krystal Carranza, president of the South Plains College Hispanic Student Organization, said the group has participated in the march for several years as a way to raise awareness within the Lubbock community and among fellow students about Chavez’s mission.

Carranza, 21, said she wanted to make sure others in her generation remember Chavez and take on his plight for workers’ rights.

“It’s not only for those who lived it, but it’s keeping the memory going strong in support of Cesar Chavez,” she said.

The marching route, which began at Canyon Lakes Park and ended at Cavazos Middle School, was a reversal of the route in the past 11 years, said Christy Martinez-Garcia, a chairwoman of the Cesar Chavez Celebration Committee that organized the event.

She said ending the route at the school was a symbolic gesture recognizing Chavez’s support of education for Hispanics.

Martinez-Garcia described Chavez as a well-read man who was passionate about stressing education as a means to empower people.

“Education meant everything to him, and that’s why it’s so important that our college students are involved in this event,” she said.

Chavez, an Arizona native who worked as a farmworker, was influential in the latter half of the 20th century organizing Mexican-American farm laborers for equal rights, higher wages and safer conditions in their fields.

President Bill Clinton awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom posthumously to Chavez in 1994.

Miguel Segovia, a 19-year-old Texas Tech student from Houston, was among more than a dozen members of the university’s Sigma Lambda Beta chapter who marched in the event.

“It’s good to come out here and join in with the Lubbock community,” he said. “It boosts up the Latino population and we come together and say ‘yes we can’ and we can be non-violent.”

Segovia, who marched in the rally for the second year in a row, said he was encouraged by hearing honking car horns and seeing waving hands from passers-by as the marchers made their way down the thoroughfare.

“The people of Lubbock have always been very supportive of us,” he said.

The Cesar Chavez Celebration Committee presented awards to about a half-dozen student organizations from Tech and South Plains College who have been regular participants in the annual rally.

     
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