The birth of a student
March 31, 2023
Back to blogging! After a two week break, the next 30-day Gandhi challenge starts April 1. I’m looking forward to a new page in the calendar and a new set of challenges. I’m going to do better with the walking this time around, and there are three 3-day fasts on my personal calendar for the month. Here’s the free registration link, if you’d like to join a community channeling self-improvement into larger social change.
On March 31, 1927, Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona. In his later years, he would become an student of Gandhi’s techniques in his work building the United Farm Workers, including by the use of fasting to keep the group committed to nonviolence.
Chavez had humble roots. After the family lost their ranch, they traveled around California picking crops with the seasons. It was an unstable life; before high school, he and his siblings attended more than three dozen schools around the state. The pre-teen boy also spent many hours working in the fields alongside his family. The hard, back-breaking work didn’t pay well either; agricultural workers had been exempted from the minimum wage laws and many other protections adopted in the 1930s under the New Deal.
The problems of poverty were exacerbated by the poor living conditions provided to the itinerant farm workers. Housing was shacks or tents, running water was often a faucet for the dozens and dozens of families to share, and sanitary facilities were anything but. The toilets “were always horrible, so miserable that you couldn’t go there,” Chavez would tell biographer Jacques Levy decades later.
At 17, Chavez joined the US Navy in the closing days of World War Two; after completing two years he returned to California in 1946, where he began to get involved in efforts to unionize farm workers. During this time, he was introduced to Gandhi’s life and ideas of nonviolent organizing.
In The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, Miriam Pawel explains
[T]he man Chavez had adopted as his role model was Gandhi. Chavez's admiration for Gandhi went beyond his steadfast adherence to nonviolence. Chavez was fascinated by Gandhi's personality and ability to wield power. His embrace of voluntary poverty, his ideas about community, and his penchant for fasting intrigued Chavez and spurred him to emulate the Indian leader.
In the following decades, Chavez and co-founder Delores Huerta grew the United Farm Workers into a thriving labor union. Some of his efforts drew on Gandhi’s experiences; including a 300 mile march and several extended fasts. I’ll write more about these in upcoming posts.
April’s 30-day challenge also recognizes the end of his life. Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, 1993; this year I’m planning a 3-day fast to commemorate his success as a student of Gandhi.
Today’s discussion question is inspired by one of Chavez’s fasts, which was to protest a new state law that restricted the use of boycotts and strikes by farm workers. What are your thoughts on such laws; is the right to stop working absolute, or can the public good require compulsion in some cases?