These are fitting tributes for the labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW). The union used nonviolent strikes and consumer boycotts to improve working and living conditions for Mexican American and other farm workers beginning in the 1960s.
But 32 years after Chavez’s death, commemorations will downplay how his public and private lives were rooted in his Catholic faith. That’s not surprising in an increasingly de-Christianized America, where violence and mayhem have become the hallmarks of the leftist movement for social justice.
Cesario Estrada Chavez was born near Yuma, Arizona, in 1927 to parents from Mexico who had acquired a 160-acre ranch through the Homestead Act. He credited his mother and grandmother, an orphan raised in a convent, with being the “functional theologians” for his early religious formation.
The family lost the ranch in 1937 in the aftermath of the Depression and moved to California as itinerant laborers in 1938. Chavez attended some 30 elementary and middle schools before ending his formal education after the eighth grade, when he began toiling in sunbaked farm fields from dawn to dusk. Anti-Mexican racism compounded the extreme poverty and loss of dignity faced by white Dust Bowl refugees in the state’s agricultural heartland.
Chavez served in the U.S. Navy from 1946-48, voluntarily enlisting to escape the backbreaking farm work. He experienced the era’s prevalent discrimination as a deck hand on ships stationed in Guam and Saipan. He married his wife, Helen, after being honorably discharged and they would have eight children together.
Chavez’s life trajectory changed in 1952, when he met Fred Ross while working at a lumber mill in San Jose. Ross was the founder of the Community Service Organization, the period’s most effective grassroots group for helping Latinos become citizens and registered voters. Ross and Chavez would organize 22 CSO chapters across California over the next decade.
That same year he met Father Donald McDonnell in the dusty San Jose barrio known as Sal Si Puedes, meaning “get out if you can.” Deeply committed to the labor movement, the Irish-American priest modeled the ideal of Christian servanthood for the 25-year-old Chavez.
McDonnell lent Chavez biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, helping to shape his core philosophy of nonviolence. The New Testament and the writings of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were other key sources. He also supplied copies of nineteenth-century papal encyclicals affirming the rights of workers to form unions for collective bargaining.
Chavez visited overcrowded labor camps with McDonnell to address the material and spiritual needs of the mistreated workers and their families, while assisting his mentor in saying Mass. The future labor leader helped nail the roof on the community’s first real church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, named for the pillar of Mexican cultural identity. Her image, along with crucifixes and other Catholic icons, would become ubiquitous as the farm workers’ rights movement ramped up in the 1960s.
Chavez’s mostly Latino union joined the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, soon after it was started by a union led by Filipino Americans. The two groups later merged to form the United Farm Workers. The five-year strike would include peaceful picketing and an international boycott of California table grapes.
To publicize the labor action and pressure farm owners, Chavez led a group of striking workers on a 300-mile march from the Central Valley town of Delano to Sacramento in 1966. He styled the 25-day journey as a penitential pilgrimage to help workers “set themselves at peace with the Lord, so that the justice of their cause will be purified of all lesser motivation.”
Thousands of supporters welcomed the marchers upon their arrival in Sacramento on Easter Sunday. Mass was held on the steps of the state capitol building, where the Plan of Delano was read aloud.
“This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings,” declared the manifesto written by Chavez and others. “History is on our side. May the strike go on! Viva La Causa!”
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy sat beside Chavez at that Mass in March 1968 to show support for his goals and methods. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency less than a week later. He was assassinated in Los Angeles that June.
The UFW had negotiated contracts with nearly every grape grower when the strike ended in 1970, winning 40-percent wage increases and better working conditions such as protection against toxic pesticides. Chavez was arrested at the end of that year after the UFW boycotted a lettuce grower in violation of a court injunction. The widows of MLK and RFK visited him in jail.
Chavez died in his sleep in 1993 at age 66. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral in Delano. The plain pine coffin was built by Chavez’s brother.
The current social justice landscape is very different than during Chavez’s activist heyday. The Sixties were far from a peaceful and orderly decade, but today’s woke protesters embrace violence with unrestrained gusto. Progressives are now driven by identity politics and a sense of grievance and entitlement—not religious conviction.
RELATED: Democrat congresswoman calls for Elon Musk to be ‘taken down’
Leftist aggression has included Antifa firebombings, BLM urban riots, pro-Hamas takeovers of elite universities, destruction of Catholic churches, and attacks on Tesla dealerships.
President Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Chavez the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 1994. “Sí, se puede,” the rallying cry coined by UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta, was appropriated by Barack Obama as “Yes, we can!” for his 2008 presidential campaign. President Obama proclaimed March 31 to be Cesar Chavez Day in 2014, though it is not a federal holiday.
Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles recalled in 2011 that Chavez lived simply, attended Mass nearly every day, and spent an hour each day praying. “His absolute commitment to non-violence was rooted in the spirit of the Beatitudes,” Gomez wrote. “Cesar Chavez was striving not only for social justice, but also for the holiness of the saints.”
Yet Chavez has also been criticized for an autocratic leadership style that somewhat tarnished his legacy and ultimately weakened the UFW. Membership rolls plummeted from a peak of 80,000 in the 1970s to 5,000 at the time of Chavez’s death.
When asked later in life what motivated his decades of labor activism, Chavez replied that he could not “base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. I don’t think there would be enough to sustain me. For me the base must be faith.”
Today’s social justice warriors should remember that about Cesar Chavez, a peaceful Christian man.
Robert Jenkins is a pseudonym for a Catholic writer living in Sacramento, California.
