Hundreds brave rain to march for Cesar Chavez
By Dixie Reid
dreid@sacbee.com
At the end of Saturday’s three-mile Cesar E. Chavez March, from West Sacramento to the late farm-labor leader’s namesake park in downtown Sacramento, 78-year-old Oscar Garcia stood alone in the rain, taking it all in.
In his hands was "el cortito," the actual short-handled hoe he once used to thin tomato plants and weed sugar beets in California’s fields. He had taped to it a small American flag.
"My grandkids found it," he said of the hoe. "I had it put away."
Chavez, who founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 – later to become the United Farm Workers, or UFW – was instrumental in getting the insidious short hoe, which forced suffering farmworkers to bend and stoop all day, banned from California’s fields in 1975.
On Saturday morning, more than 400 union workers, families and troupes of costumed Aztec dancers walked in the wind and rain from West Sacramento, across the Tower Bridge, past the Capitol and into Cesar Chavez Park to celebrate what would have been Chavez’s 84th birthday on Thursday. Along the way they chanted "Si, se puede (Yes, we can)" and "1,2,3,4, no one should be working poor."
The 11th annual event honored Chavez’s work on behalf of farmworkers, but with labor unions across the country under siege – from efforts in Wisconsin to eliminate collective bargaining to general attacks on pensions for public employees – the Sacramento march and subsequent rally took on even more urgency.
"It’s important to remember the work that was done," said march organizer Al Rojas, 74, who first worked alongside Chavez in fields near Oxnard in 1961. "The issues of the 1960s are the same, but even worse, today. Right now, workers are feeling the loss of jobs, loss of homes, loss of benefits and the loss of the education of their children.
"Cesar’s legacy is about not just remembering what he did in the past but continuing his work. If he were here, he would be marching today with us for issues that affect working people," Rojas said.
Tommy Meredith, president of Sacramento’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 340, was a first-time participant in the event that drew everyone from schoolteachers and schoolchildren to lowrider groups and the homeless.
"Farmworkers’ conditions have come a long way because men stood up and organized, even though it cost them," Meredith said. "I came to support this cause, to bring good jobs back to California."
Among those who joined the march already under way was Sacramento Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, who caught up with the crowd at the Tower Bridge.
"It’s important to demonstrate that we’re committed to civil rights, to civil justice, to prosperity for all, to equal opportunity. This is a way of making a statement, and it’s in support of the people who are the backbone of California."