March 16, 2000
UFW expresses gratitude for Mayor Serna’s $120,000 gift
United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez issued the following statement today from the union’s Keene, Calif. headquarters after it was revealed the late Sacramento mayor asked that $120,000 remaining in his campaign account be donated to the UFW’s political action committee:
We were deeply moved to learn that Mayor Joe Serna Jr. chose to contribute his remaining campaign funds to help the farm workers take part in the political process. Over the achievements of a lifetime, Joe Serna never forgot where he came from. To his dying day, Joe never stopped caring for the people whose plight he had shared. So it is fitting that his political money go to help the farm workers more fully participate in the democratic process he cherished.
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Background on Mayor Joe Serna Jr.
and the United Farm Workers
€ The son of farm workers, Joe Serna Jr., his brothers Reuben and Jesse, and his sister Maria Elena were raised in impoverished farm labor camps near Lodi, Calif. All of them worked in the fields from a young age‹from picking wine grapes to harvesting beets with the short-handled hoe.
€ For more than 30 years, Joe Serna championed the United Farm Workers in Sacramento. He organized car caravans to Delano with food and clothing for the 1965 grape strikers. It seemed he spent much of the ’60s and ’70s organizing and picketing for the UFW.
€ When Chavez died in April 1993, then-Mayor Serna led a final caravan of dozens of cars from Sacramento to services for the farm labor leader in Delano. Serna marched with tens of thousands of other mourners behind Chavez’s casket.
€ In July 1993, the mayor pushed through the City Council a measure making Sacramento the first major city in America to create a paid municipal holiday on Chavez’s March 31 birthday. On that day each year, City Hall and most city offices are closed.
€ In April 1997, the mayor convinced the City Council to rename the park in front of City Hall Cesar Chavez Plaza. Serna also got the Wilson administration to provide $1.5 million to renovate Cesar Chavez Plaza from funds being used to build the new Cal-EPA state office building across from the park.
€ More than 400 farm workers from as far away as Delano and Salinas joined thousands of other mourners marching behind the mayor’s flag-draped casket during his funeral services on Nov. 10.