The birth of a student
March 31, 2024
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. 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. He 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. He called those two years “the worst of my life…. worse than being in prison. And there was lots of discriminiation.”1 Perhaps this prompted Chavez to commit his first of civil disobedience at a segergated movie theater while he was home on leave. Chavez willfully chose a seat in the white section and refused to move. The police took him to jail, but released him with a lecture after they couldn’t find anything to charge him with.
In 1946, he returned to California and 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 the use of fasting to keep the group committed to nonviolence. More of his story on April 23.
Today’s discussion question is inspired by Chavez’s 1972 “fast for love,” which was to protest an Arizona law that restricted the use of boycotts and strikes by farm workers. Is the right to stop working absolute, or can the public good require compulsion in some cases?
Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (Jacques Levy, 2007 edition) pp. 84-85