“Non-violence really rest on the reservoir that you have to create in yourself of patience, not of being patient with the problems, but being patient with yourself to do the hard work. ” Cesar Chavez EssayWhat makes society look at a man as a leader? Is it the work that he does to help his community or is it the struggle they endure during their lifetime? Cesar Chavez was born into a migrant family and became one of the most recognized leaders for migrant workers.
From his early days of working in the fields to his days in the US Navy and to his early days as a rights activist, Cesar Chavez has fought to have equal rights for Mexican-American migrant field workers. One night in the 1880’s, a man named Cesario Chavez crossed the border from Chihuahua, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. He was fleeing the hardships of his homeland to make a better life in the United States for his family. Decades later, his grandson, Cesar Chavez, would make a stand in the fields of California to fight for a better life for all farmworkers.
Cesario and his wife Dorotea worked very hard. Their children married and had children. The whole family lived in the Arizona desert near the town of Yuma and worked as farmers. One of Cesario’s sons, Librado, married Juana Estrada, a woman who had also come from Chihuahua.
Together they had six children. Cesar was born in 1927, he was their second child and the eldest son. Librado Chavez was a hardworking man, and he prospered. In addition to farming, he operated a general store and was elected the local postmaster. “I had more happy moments as a child than unhappy moments,” Chavez later recalled. Librado was good to his children, he even made their toys, but he was too busy to spend much time with them.
“My mom kept the family together,” Chavez had said. When Cesar was ten years old, disaster struck. Librado made a business deal with a neighbor who did not keep his part of the bargain. In the end, the Chavez family lost their farm and all their belongings. It was 1937, the period following the Stock Market crash, the country had not yet recovered from the Great Depression. There were very few jobs, and many people were homeless.
To make matters worse, the Southwest was experiencing severe droughts at this time. By 1938, the Chavez family had joined some 300,000 migrant workers who followed the crops to California. Migrant workers would travel all over the state, picking whatever was in season for the farm owners. The migrant workers had no permanent homes. They lived in dingy overcrowded family, most of them were of Mexican descent. quarters, without bathrooms, electricity, or running water.
Sometimes, they lived in the pickup trucks in which they traveled. Like Chavez, going to school wasn’t easy for the children of the migrant workers, since they were always on the move. Cesar and his siblings attended more than thirty schools. Many times, their teachers were neither friendly or helpful. The teachers of migrant children often felt that since these children would soon move on to other farms in other towns, teaching them wasn’t worth the effort. Some of these teachers were even prejudiced against Spanish-speaking students.
“When we spoke Spanish,” Chavez remembers, “the teacher swooped down on us. I remember the ruler whistling through the air as its edge came down sharply across my knuckles. It really hurt. Even out in the playground, speaking Spanish brought punishment. ” He remembers hating school. “It wasn’t the learning I hated, but the conflicts,; he recalls.
Despite all his difficulties in school, Cesar managed to graduate from the eighth grade. For migrant children in those days, graduation was an unusual occurrence. Chavez had worked part-time in the fields while he was in school. After graduation he began to work full-time. He preferred working in the vineyards because grape pickers generally stayed in the same place for a longer time. He kept noticing that the labor contractors and the landowners exploited the workers.
He tried reasoning with the farm owners about higher pay and better working conditions. .
