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Biography: Francisco Flores Martinez

Francisco Flores Martinez
 
 
Born on Jan. 17, 1911 in Poncitian, Jalisco, Mexico, Francisco Flores Martinez had nine brothers and sisters. He worked in the fields during his youth until moving to Mexicali at the age of 30. There he worked as a street vendor selling candy and popcorn.
 
After the birth of his second child, Martinez began working in the United States, migrating back and forth across the border to spend the off-season with his family in Mexico. His first job in the U.S. was during the 1940s in New York, where he worked laying down railroad tracks. Later he started laboring in agriculture, picking and hoeing in the fields and performing irrigation work.
 
Martinez took a job at California Coastal Farms, a large California vegetable company, in 1976. He met United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez in 1979, when Martinez and hundreds of other farm workers walked out on strike demanding better pay and benefits.
 
His first impression of Chavez was that the legendary farm labor leader was “a very good man with a lot of heart—that he was helping the people. He was fearless in a very hard line of work.”
 
After winning the strike, Martinez continued working at California Coastal Farms until 1986, when he retired to Mexicali to spend time with his family.
 
In June 2003, his daughter in Oxnard, Calif., Ana, saw a news story on Spanish-language television about another retired farm worker, Tolentino Martinez, who received a $42,000 retroactive pension check after discovering he had qualified for a pension while working under a UFW contract with the union’s Juan de la Cruz Farm Workers Pension Plan. Ana immediately called her father and suggested he check to see whether he too qualified for a pension.
 
The next time Martinez visited his daughter in Oxnard, they went to the local UFW office and inquired. They were shocked to discover he qualified for the largest back pension check in the history of the pension plan, the first, and only, functioning pension plan for farm workers, established by Chavez in the 1970s.
 
Martinez was overjoyed to hear the size of the retroactive and monthly payments. “I owe it all to my ‘jefecito,’ Cesar Chavez, because he helped us out a lot, and to ‘La Virgencita de Guadalupe,’” said Martinez. When asked about his plans for the money, the father of nine children and 25 grandchildren replied, “I have many children. I plan to help all of them out and I plan to help my daughter Ana buy a house.”