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cesar chavez
A May Day Letter to My Student Deportee
How the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and the wider community fought back against immigration injustice and won.
May 01, 2025
Dear “Cesar,”
This May Day, as I march with my union, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, I will thank them for their role in making Berkeley Unified a sanctuary school district and Berkeley, a sanctuary city, but above all, I would like to thank you.
It’s been over 18 years since your last day in our second grade class—a heartbreaking Valentine’s Day in 2007—just before your family succumbed to a deportation order forcing you to leave the country, despite your U.S. citizenship.
This year, convicted felon and twice-impeached President Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day present was to threaten all public schools and universities to desist in teaching about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or lose funding. He also issued executive orders illegally revoking visas, work permits, and even facilitating the arrest and detention of immigrants and their allies.
ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example.
Do you remember the now-censored “DEI” book about Cesar Chavez that I read to your class, Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull? She told the story of how the huge Chavez family lost their farm to the depression and drought that scourged Arizona in 1937. Some of you cried when you learned that the Chavez family was forced to trade their productive 80-acre finca for the life of migrant farm workers, developing lesions, blisters, knotted backs, and burning eyes and lungs.
But I reassured you: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is nothing so bad that good can’t come of it.” Were it not for the Cesar family’s displacement, he might not have co-founded the United Farm Workers, a union that has saved countless farm workers’ lives, improved working conditions, and inspired multitudes internationally. Similarly, your family’s suffering gave birth to change and hope in the city you were forced to abandon and beyond.
For years I’ve waited until you were old enough to understand my recounting of the resistance leading to the safeguards you inspired. After you left, your classmates and I would tear up looking at your name on your mailbox and your empty seat. I fought against tears every time we said the Rosa Parks Pledge: “to make this world a better place for ALL people to enjoy freedom,” because ALL didn’t include you.
Your mother wrote from Mexico that you had transformed from my cheerful, round-cheeked model student into a sullen malnourished child who refused to do his school work or eat. I could not stop crying.
Inspired by the ironic letters of my parents’ close friend Blacklist-breaking screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, I wrote an Open Letter to an Immigration Judge:
Dear Honorable Immigration Judge,
…how can I go on teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech and all the things our Constitution is supposed to defend, and that the very name of our school is supposed to represent, when the father of my students is deported simply because his skin is darker? Both my Latine and white students are U.S. citizens. So how do I explain to the class that one has the right to a family in the United States and the other citizen does not?
The letterwentviral. A community faith organization called BOCA helped my student teacher and me organize an informational event April 26 with cafeteria tables full of lawyers offering free advice. Rosa Parks’ families pressured the superintendent and police to protect immigrant students. With BOCA’s assistance, as a BFT union representative, I wrote and presented a resolution to the BFT executive board to make BUSD a sanctuary district and it passed overwhelmingly.
Meanwhile your classmates heroically transformed their grief into actions by writing their own “Without You” poems based on Los Panchos’ “Sin Ti” song and read them on an Univision TV special about you.
Next, my spouse and I pulled the best elements of sanctuary ordinances around the country together into a local ordinance and presented it to Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. It won unanimous support and was recommended to the City Council. On May 22, 2007 we organized a rally outside city hall in favor of our beefed up sanctuary ordinance. Aided by the BFT, many of BFT’s Spanish two-way immersion teachers, KPFA host Larry Bensky, LeConte’s principal, and the Berkeley community, the rally reverberated through the City Council chambers. Berkeley Resolution City of Refuge 63711-N.S. was adopted that night (5-22-07) giving a previously symbolic resolution the teeth of law. Berkeley’s spark of an example ignited other cities that adopted similar ordinances throughout the nation. Months later, BFT president Cathy Campbell got our School Board to adopt our sanctuary District resolution as board policy.
Over the years, this work has only gained strength.This January 21, Berkeley School Board Member Jen Corn submitted an even stronger resolution to the City Council reaffirming Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city and it passed overwhelmingly again. And in February, teachers, principals, office workers, and support staff received a two hour training on how to safeguard the rights of our immigrant students. This whole sequence of events began when you, “Cesar,” my polite, photogenic, straight-A, bilingual 7-year-old student, became the poster child of a renewed movement to protect immigrant rights in Berkeley.
So today, as Donald Trump outdoes predecessors in figuratively defiling our Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, thanks to you,“Cesar,” so many more of us are able to defend her call for our “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example. Fear feeds tyranny, but you and our union showed us how community and courage can construct democracy. And no matter what challenges we may face now, there is no going back.
As Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) said,
Once social change begins it cannot be reversed.
One cannot make illiterate those who have learned to read.
One cannot uneducate those who have learned to think.
One cannot humiliate those who feel pride.
One cannot oppress those who are no longer are afraid.
Thank you, to our Rosa Parks’ Cesar Chavez.
Love,
Maestra Margot
My student’s name has been changed to protect his privacy. He responded with a very moving note of gratitude, giving me permission to publish this letter.
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'Sign the Bill!': United Farm Workers Press Newsom on California Union Measure
"We will let Gov. Newsom know our desire and courage to stand up for what is right for farmworkers and the labor movement," said labor and civil rights icon Dolores Huerta.
Aug 29, 2022
Up against both the imminent close of California's two-year state legislative session and opposition from Gavin Newsom, Golden State farmworkers and their supporters on Monday implored the Democratic governor to sign a bill that would make it easier for agricultural laborers to vote in union elections.
"A.B. 2183 would give farmworkers the ability to make decisions at home, on their own, and on their own time."
In a 26-10 vote on Monday, California state senators approved A.B. 2183, a United Farm Workers (UFW) bill the union says will safeguard against supervisor intimidation during union elections.
The measure now goes back to the state Assembly. If passed before the end of the current legislative session--which expires at midnight Wednesday--the bill faces stiff opposition from Newsom, who, according to a spokesperson, "cannot support an untested mail-in election process that lacks critical provisions to protect the integrity of the election and is predicated on an assumption that government cannot effectively enforce laws."
Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year. The California Chamber of Commerce, as well as dozens of agriculture industry groups, also oppose A.B. 2183.
However, UFW president Teresa Romero--who last week finished leading a 335-mile march for A.B. 2183 through California's scorching Central Valley to the state Capitol in Sacramento--said Friday that "protection for farmworkers is key."
\u201cS\u00ed, se puede! #AB2183\nhttps://t.co/mQMFN5XGgF\u201d— United Farm Workers (@United Farm Workers) 1661805730
"They are mostly undocumented, family members work at the same farm, and the moment that they start saying that they want a union or asking for their rights, they are fired," she told KXTV at the completion of the 24-day march last week. "That cannot continue to happen."
Backers of the bill rallied and staged around-the-clock vigils in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fresno, and Sacramento, where demonstrators chanted, "Sign the bill" during a large gathering at the end of the march.
Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-29), who co-authored the bill, explained to KXTV that "A.B. 2183 would give farmworkers the ability to make decisions at home, on their own, and on their own time."
"Farmworkers typically vote on a grower's site, under the watchful eyes and influence of that grower or the labor contractor," he added, "so there's a real question of whether that vote is their own, absent of coercion or pressure."
Labor and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, who co-founded UFW with Cesar Chavez half a century ago, addressed the crowd at the end of the march Friday.
\u201cWith the great @DoloresHuerta from Friday's March with the @UFWupdates.\n\nHere is my speech: https://t.co/o4dfUqxw0v\u201d— Domingo Garcia (@Domingo Garcia) 1661724446
"Today we march in support of this important bill. We will let Gov. Newsom know our desire and courage to stand up for what is right for farmworkers and the labor movement," the 92-year-old said, according to People's World. "Let me say this: March today, but go back to your communities and march to get out the vote."
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Cesar Chavez's Legacy
Chavez became a national hero, a symbol of courage and fortitude, for leading a nonviolent revolution to organize farmworkers
Mar 31, 2019
Many people thought Cesar Chavez was crazy to think he could build a union among migrant farmworkers. Since the early 1900s, unions had been trying and failing to organize California's unskilled agricultural workers. Whether the workers were Anglos, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, or Mexican Americans, these efforts met the same fate. The organizing drives met fierce opposition and always flopped, vulnerable to growers' violent tactics and to competition from a seemingly endless supply of other migrant workers desperate for work. So when Chavez left his job as a community organizer in San Jose in 1962 and moved to rural Delano to try, once again, to bring a union to California's lettuce and grape fields, even his closest friends figured he was delusional.
Within a decade, however, the United Farm Workers (UFW) union had collective bargaining agreements with most of California's major growers. Pay, working conditions, and housing for migrant workers improved significantly. Millions of Americans boycotted lettuce and grapes to put economic pressure on the growers to sign a contract with the union. A young governor named Jerry Brown signed a bill giving California's farmworkers the right to unionize--something they lacked (and still lack) under federal labor laws.
Chavez - whose birthday, March 31, 1927, is an official holiday in California and a federal commemorative holiday -- became a national hero, a symbol of courage and fortitude, for leading a nonviolent revolution to organize farmworkers. His work fomented enormous pride and solidarity among Hispanics in California and across the nation. To those who ever doubted that Chavez could build an effective union among America's poorest and most vulnerable workers, in the face of a large, powerful, and conservative agribusiness industry, he responded, "Si se puede," "Yes, we can."
"Chavez experienced the daily humiliations of being a brown-skinned migrant worker: physical punishment from an Anglo teacher when he unthinkingly began speaking Spanish in class, police harassment, segregated seating at the local movie theater, denial of service at restaurants."
When Chavez was growing up, his family owned a small farm in Arizona, but they lost it to foreclosure when he was eleven years old. The sight of the Anglo grower, who bought the land at auction, bulldozing the family's farmhouse, trees, and crops left an indelible impression on the young Cesar. That early memory would later fuel a determination to help Mexican American farmworkers gain power and respect. "If I had stayed there," Chavez later said about his family's farm, "possibility I would have been a grower. God writes in exceedingly crooked lines."
Instead, the Chavez family joined the roughly 300,000 migrant workers who followed the crops to California every year. The family often slept by the side of the road, moving from farm to farm, from harvest to harvest, living in overcrowded migrant camps. Cesar attended thirty-eight different schools until he finally gave up after finishing the eighth grade.
Chavez experienced the daily humiliations of being a brown-skinned migrant worker: physical punishment from an Anglo teacher when he unthinkingly began speaking Spanish in class, police harassment, segregated seating at the local movie theater, denial of service at restaurants. These compounded the abuse Chavez and other migrants faced in the fields, where growers had dictatorial control and where workers toiled in the broiling sun for meager wages, living in shacks and lacking toilet facilities.
Chavez spent two years in the navy during World War II. Returning home, he married, moved to San Jose's Mexican barrio, and took whatever jobs he could find in the nearby fields or in a lumberyard.
His life changed when he met Father Donald McDonnell, a local priest who introduced him to the writings of Francis of Assisi and Mohandas Gandhi and discussed nonviolence as a strategy for change, and Fred Ross, a community organizer and colleague of Saul Alinsky. Ross recruited Chavez to the Community Service Organization (CSO), which helped Mexican Americans in urban barrios deal with immigration and tax problems, taught them how to organize against police brutality and discrimination, and ran voter registration drives. Chavez quickly became a leader, and in 1952 Ross hired the twenty-five-year-old as an organizer. Chavez was a successful organizer and eventually became the CSO's statewide director.
In 1962 after the CSO turned down his request to organize farmworkers, he resigned and returned to Delano. For the next three years, he crisscrossed the state, talking to farmworkers under the auspices of his new organization, the National Farmworkers Association. Many of them dismissed Chavez's ideas, saying that the growers were too powerful and that anyone caught talking about a union would immediately be fired. But drawing on his CSO experience, Chavez recruited workers by helping them with their legal, housing, and other problems.
A crucial turning point occurred in 1965. A small group of Filipino farmworkers, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor's struggling Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, went on strike when the Delano grape growers cut pay rates during the harvest. Chavez persuaded his own union's members to support the strike. Soon the two groups merged into what became the United Farm Workers union.
The plight of America's migrant farmworkers had entered public consciousness right after Thanksgiving in 1960, when TV journalist Edward R. Murrow broadcast a documentary, Harvest of Shame, on CBS. For the next decade, Chavez used a two-pronged approach to build the UFW. Because food is perishable and needs to be harvested quickly, the union used strikes to disrupt the harvest and put pressure on the growers. But Chavez recognized that growers could rely on an almost limitless supply of migrant workers--including new arrivals from Mexico under the Bracero Program--who were recruited as strikebreakers. So the second strategy was to win the support of the general public, asking them to boycott grapes, wine, and lettuce until specific growers agreed to a contract.
Chavez called on allies in the labor movement, among religious congregations, and on college campuses to help with the national boycotts by picketing outside grocery stores and educating consumers. The UFW sent farmworkers - many of whom had never been outside California -- to cities across the country to help organize the boycotts. At its height, over 13 million Americans supported the grape boycott. Many Americans had their first activist experiences picketing in front of grocery stores to support the boycott of grapes and lettuce.
In the fields, on picket lines, and in meetings, UFW members faced violence from growers and their hired thugs. Another threat came from the Teamsters union, which had signed friendly "sweetheart" contracts with growers to represent the workers without the consent of the workers themselves--a maneuver that enriched Teamsters officials.
To keep their plight in the public eye and to raise the farmworkers' morale during these difficult times, Chavez used marches, civil disobedience, and prayer vigils to transform each strike into a protest movement. The grape strike became a cause celebre among liberals and gained enormous media attention.
Chavez attracted a loyal cadre of organizers, lawyers, and others, who were paid less-than-poverty wages, as was Chavez and his close colleague and UFW cofounder, Dolores Huerta. Humble and self-effacing, Chavez became the UFW's public face and the country's most famous Mexican American. In 1969 Time magazine put him on its cover.
"To keep their plight in the public eye and to raise the farmworkers' morale during these difficult times, Chavez used marches, civil disobedience, and prayer vigils to transform each strike into a protest movement."
One of Chavez's key insights was that the union had to stake out the moral high ground--as the civil rights movement had done--in order to win public support. The backing of key clergy, including Catholic bishops and priests, was critical to its image. At one point, when a court prevented the union from picketing during a strike, the union held a religious vigil instead.
Maintaining a nonviolent approach was also central to winning public support. As local police and Teamster thugs resorted to physical violence against union members, some of them understandably wanted to strike back. Chavez was deeply influenced by Gandhian thought. When it appeared that union members might respond to violence with violence, Chavez sought to restore calm and discipline by engaging in a hunger strike, risking his health in the process. Chavez's fasts drew media attention that helped strengthen public sympathy for the strike and for the boycott.
Chavez and the UFW also gained attention was by attracting the support of high-profile politicians. The UFW's most important political ally was Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. In 1966 United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, who had joined Chavez on picket lines and donated money to the UFW, asked Kennedy to visit Chavez. After meeting Chavez, observing the conditions in which farmworkers toiled, and recognizing the spirit of the organizing effort, Kennedy became a close ally of Chavez and the UFW. He arranged to hold a Senate hearing about farmworkers' conditions in Delano. When the local sheriff told Kennedy that his deputies arrested strikers who looked "ready to violate the law," Kennedy shot back, "May I suggest that during the luncheon, the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?"
Kennedy made several other pilgrimages to visit Chavez--each time bolstering the union's image. The UFW repaid the favor. In 1968, when Kennedy announced he was running for president as an antiwar candidate against the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, the union endorsed him, registered Mexican American voters, and helped secure a Kennedy victory in the California Democratic primary. UFW cofounder Dolores Huerta was at Kennedy's side when he was assassinated the night of his California victory.
Another key political ally was California's governor, Jerry Brown. As a young Catholic seminarian, Brown had supported the UFW boycott. Once in office, Brown engineered passage of the nation's first law giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights and protection from unfair labor practices. The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (1975) led to an overwhelming series of UFW election victories and contracts with growers.
By the late 1970s the UFW had close to 50,000 members (about one-quarter of the state's farmworkers) and contracts with most of the major table grape and lettuce growers. Pay and working conditions had significantly improved. Growers were required to stop spraying the fields with toxic pesticides that endangered workers' health. The Teamsters, under pressure from public opinion and other unions, withdrew from competing with the UFW. Migrant workers became eligible for medical insurance, employer-paid pensions, unemployment insurance, and other benefits. They had a grievance procedure to challenge employer abuses. Moreover, the threat of unionization led growers to improve agricultural wages for nonunion workers.
But within a few years the UFW had spiraled into chaos. This was partly due to the election of Republican George Deukmejian, who defeated Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to become California's governor in 1982. Deukmejian had close ties to growers and he failed to implement the new labor law. That failure made it harder for the UFW to win new elections and made it easier for growers to decertify the union.
Equally important was Chavez's own weaknesses as a leader. He was not a good administrator, failed to delegate authority, and was suspicious of people who disagreed with him. Key staffers left. The union put fewer resources into organizing workers in the fields, especially the increasing number of Central American immigrants who were joining the ranks of America's farmworkers in the 1980s. Growers did not renew contracts and wages and conditions worsened.
By the time of Chavez's death in 1993, membership in the UFW had declined to just a few thousand. Today, less than 10,000 of the nation's approximately three million farmworkers are unionized. In California, the agricultural industry's is flourishing, but its profits and prosperity are not shared with its workers, many of whom are now undocumented and fearful of organizing.
Last year, Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona sponsored the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would amend federal labor laws to remove the discriminatory denial of overtime pay to agricultural workers as well as end most exclusions from the minimum wage still applicable to some farmworkers. The bill is unlikely to pass unless Democrats control both houses of Congress as well as the White House.
Despite this, conditions for farmworkers - in terms of pay, housing, and exposure to dangerous chemicals -- are better than they were before Chavez and Huerta became their organizing efforts.
While the UFW has fallen on hard times, other groups have had some success mobilizing farmworkers, even if they aren't union members. The most successful is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has organized Florida's tomato pickers. With the support of consumers - including college students and faith-based groups - it has pressured employers and corporate buyers of tomatoes (including Walmart, Taco Bell and Trader Joe's) to join its Fair Food Program that requires growers to improve farmworkers' pay and condition.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2008, Barack Obama adopted the UFW's chant - "yes, we can" - as his campaign slogan.
Chavez's long-term impact is not simply improved condition for farmworkers and the upsurge of pride and political action by Latinos, most of whom are not farmworkers. The UFW served as an incubator of movements, and activists on a wide variety of issues have embraced its strategies. In the 1960s and 1970s, the UFW trained thousands of organizers and activists--boycott volunteers as well as paid staff. Many became key activists in the labor, immigrant rights, antiwar, consumer, women's rights, and environmental movements. They, in turn, trained tens of thousands of young activists who are in the forefront of today's progressives movements. Their work to make America a more humane society is Chavez's most important legacy.
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