and the United Farm Workers
“McFarland USA,” the new film about a small Kern County farm town’s celebrated cross-country team, has key parallels to the farm worker movement.
Team coach Jim White’s roots in McFarland, just south of Delano, date to 1964. He witnessed the Delano Grape Strike that played out in the surrounding vineyards starting in 1965. Many of the boys who Coach White got to run labored in the fields with their families. Many boys who are on the team today still do.
This September, the United Farm Workers celebrates the 50th anniversary of that historic strike by Filipino and Latino grape workers. The UFW is still nonviolently battling for farm worker rights, and still faces stern opposition.
Cesar Chavez organized generations of farm workers to courageously stand up for their rights and overcome great odds to make a better life for their families. His last, and longest, public fast of 36 days in 1988 was over the pesticide poisoning of farm workers and their children, including the cancer cluster that plagued kids in McFarland during that decade. The farm worker movement inspired millions of Latinos and people from all walks of life who never worked on a farm to social and civic activism.
Now through the movie “McFarland USA,” millions of Americans are learning about the McFarland High School Cross Country Team Coach White began decades ago. The team is still competing and still scoring successes both on and off the field. But in building champion track teams, Coach White also changed the lives of many boys who ran for him.
He taught successful running. But Coach White also taught these young men about what it takes to be successful in life off the field—about dedication, setting goals, discipline and hard work, and achieving success by controlling their attitude.
Support from the community in McFarland had much to do with the team’s success. So Coach White taught his kids that they owed a duty to give back to the community that supported them.
Many of them have. Coach White saw nothing wrong with farm labor; it is honorable and important work. But because of Coach White, many of his kids went to college, earned degrees and returned to give back to family and community. Boys who ran for Coach White have come back as teachers, principals, school administrators, police and correctional officers. One runner served in the George W. Bush administration in Washington, D.C. and is now superintendent of a school district in Texas.
There are parallels between Jim White and Cesar Chavez. Cesar quit school after the eighth grade to support his family, although he later became very well read and self-educated. He often had trouble keeping assistants or secretaries. If Cesar spotted young people with talent—especially if they were from a farm worker family—he would convince them that they could be accountants, negotiators or attorneys. He wanted results at work, but he saw the greater good of helping people fulfill their dreams—dreams some of them weren’t even aware of at the time.
He gave hundreds of young people opportunities no one would have offered Cesar when he was a young migrant farm worker with an eighth grade education.
Cesar strongly believed in education. But it had to be education that benefited more than the individual being educated. He said, “We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community…Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”
McFarland’s cross-country boys certainly learned and practiced the farm worker movement’s iconic slogan, “Si Se Puede!” (“Yes, it can be done”).