Farm workers mourn Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna Jr.

Details on services for Mayor Joe Serna Jr.:

9 a.m., Wednesday, Nov. 10: a farm worker-style march behind Mayor Serna’s
casket begins at Cesar Chavez Plaza outside City Hall, 9th & "I" Streets,
downtown Sacramento. Speaking is UFW President Arturo Rodriguez. The march
will proceed to the Cathedral at 11th & K Streets for the Mass. 

Farm Workers Mourn Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna Jr.

•  The son of farm workers, Joe, his two brothers and sister 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.
  
•  Joe Serna worked his way through college and served in the Peace Corps, organizing campesinos in isolated villages in the mountains of Guatemala.
  
• For more than 30 years, he championed the United Farm Workers in Sacramento. He organized car caravans to Delano with food and clothing for the grape strikers. He spent much of the 1960s and 1970s organizing UFW boycotts and picketing area stores. Cesar Chavez often called on Joe for help and support; Serna never turned him down.
  
• He was elected to the Sacramento City Council in 1981. In 1992, he became the city’s first Latino mayor. He was considered the most activist and influential mayor the city has ever had. 
  
• His greatest achievement as mayor was reforming the city’s poorly performing public schools, which mostly serve Latino and minority children. Serna made better quality schools his biggest priority. He recruited and elected a new reform school board.

  Today, test scores are up and the Sacramento City schools are a national model of how an urban school district with poor and minority kids can turn itself around. Everyone says Mayor Serna deserves the credit.
  

• After Cesar died in 1993, Joe got the City Council to pass a law making Sacramento the first major city in American to create a paid municipal holiday on Cesar’s March 31 birthday.
  
• In 1997, the major got the City Council to rename the park in front of City Hall Cesar Chavez Plaza. It is the most important park in the city, after nearby Capital Park that houses the state Capitol. Joe also got Gov. Pete Wilson’s administration to give $1.5 million to renovate Cesar Chavez Plaza from money being used to build the new Cal-EPA state office building across from the park.
  
• As he was dying from kidney cancer late last week, the mayor’s family asked UFW President Arturo Rodriguez to hang a framed photo of Cesar Chavez on the wall at the foot of the mayor’s hospital bed in his home so he could look upon his hero. Joe also wore a button with Cesar’s face that read, "Nonviolence is our strength."
  
• After an heroic battle with cancer, he died at home on Sunday, Nov. 6, 1999. Thousands of people in Sacramento–Latino and non-Latino alike–are mourning their mayor.
  
• The Serna family has asked that instead of flowers, people remember Joe by making contributions to the UFW. The mayor also asked that the union’s black-eagle flags be prominently displayed at his funeral.