Having spent so much time in California in recent years, I’ve seen how
important a role the state’s agricultural workers play in daily life.
So many of those farm workers are Latino that their numbers sometimes are the
subject of jokes. In the satirical film released earlier this year,
A
Day Without a Mexican, a mysterious cloud over California somehow makes all Latinos vanish.
Then, panicked shoppers immediately jam the stores to grab the last of the
fresh produce.
Seriously, though, agriculture is one of the largest industries in the
Golden State. So it was no surprise that the struggles of agricultural laborers
were spotlighted today in Modesto, which sits on the edge of the Central
Valley farmlands.
Dolores Huerta, arguably the most prominent Chicana labor leader nationally,
emphasized how farm workers have been marginalized in much the same sense
as ethnic and racial groups. “Farm workers don’t earn the same
wages as everyone else even though they work hard, they put food on everybody’s
table,” said Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers of America along
with Cesar Chavez.
“People ask why farm workers are so far behind,” she said at
the King-Kennedy Memorial Center. “It’s because they were left
out of the 1934 National Labor Relations law. When a reporter asked why they
were left out, the answer was, ‘Because they are colored and Mexican.’ ”
Huerta’s husband and Cesar Chavez’s brother, Richard Chavez,
also appeared in Modesto today and recalled how the UFW credit union was
conceived. Cesar had wanted laborers to have the opportunity to take out
loans because banks were turning them down unless they had collateral or
jobs. Richard Chavez had recently built a little house on his own. A bank
appraised it and offered $3,700 in cash as a loan, which in turn gave the
brothers the funds for their first credit union loans for farm workers.
And California Latinos have had their share of fights not well known to
the general public, Huerta and Chavez said. While Brown
vs. Board of Education is known as the court case leading to school desegregation, other litigants
had been fighting for equal opportunity before that decision was handed down.
In Orange County in southern California, the Mendez
vs. City of Westminster case was an effort to allow Mexicans to attend schools with whites. “A
lot of people don’t know that history,” Huerta said.
