San Jose honors Cesar Chavez
Rudy Chavez Medina was only a kid when his famous uncle, Cesar Chavez, began contentious grape boycotts and fasted for peace and justice until the rituals almost killed him. But on Wednesday, when San Jose unveiled signs for a memorial walkway in honor of the late civil rights leader, Medina remembered a more intimate uncle.
"He was just so mellow and humorous," Medina said at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in East San Jose. The arts complex sits on the site of a supermarket where Chavez launched his grape boycott. So when it came time choose a picture for the city signs, the family favored one showing Chavez with a breezy shirt, black hair with hints of gray and sparkling eyes looking to his left.
City officials helped Medina dedicate seven signs for city sites that either honor Chavez or figured prominently in his life and work. Before founding the United Farm Workers union and becoming a leading figure in the 1960s civil rights movement, Chavez was a community organizer in East San Jose.
The greenish, newspaper-size signs will mark spots along a five-mile route that begins at Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park downtown and heads east, stopping at a memorial arch at San Jose State University, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church where Chavez attended Mass and held community meetings, and the site of a tiny bungalow, since removed, where his family once lived. Councilwoman Nora Campos, whose family knew the Chavezes when she was growing up, said other towns
are competing with San Jose to claim Chavez as a native son. While he was born in Tucson, Ariz., and based the United Farm Workers in the Central Valley, Chavez honed his organizing skills and launched the grape boycotts here.
"It gives us great joy to remember he lived in this community, he organized in this community," Campos said. "He’s a leader who goes beyond four walls, a leader recognized around the world."
Mayor Chuck Reed, who worked on farms in Kansas as a young boy, appreciated one of Chavez’s lesser-known victories: the abolition of the short-handled hoe. About 24-inches long, the tool forced farmworkers to bend and stoop all day long to tend strawberries, lettuce and other delicate crops. Chavez used one as a migrant worker in his youth.
"Growers look at human beings as implements," Chavez said in 1969. "But if they had any consideration for the torture that people go through, they would give up the short-handled hoe."
California banned the tool from the fields six years later.
"Getting rid of the short-handled hoe is in itself worthy of a sign," Reed said.
The signs cost taxpayers $1,583, paid from the mayor’s office budget.
As the politicians took their turns at the podium, 69-year-old Sal Alvarez stood quietly by them and did not give a speech. He was a political officer for Chavez and UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta for 12 years.
"Cesar talked me into leaving a teaching job at UC-Santa Cruz," Alvarez recalled with a smile.
Alvarez privately shared some war stories, like the time he and Hollywood star Martin Sheen and the Rev. Eugene Boyle of Stanford were thrown into jail during a strike in Watsonville in 1973. If Chavez were alive today, Alvarez believes he would be fighting for the legalization of undocumented farmworkers.
"We legalized 1.4 million in 1986," Alvarez said. "The most important thing now is legalizing another 2 million farmworkers. That’s where the movement is."
When the
ceremony ended, city carpenter John Rodriguez, 51, nailed the plaza’s Chavez sign high on the entrance at Alum Rock Avenue and King Road. He picked crops in Watsonville as a boy and now fears a new generation of Latino children know little or nothing of Chavez.
"My own kids don’t know that much about him," Rodriguez said, "but they will now."
Contact Joe Rodriguez at 408-920-5767.