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March 31st has an interesting collection of anniversaries. On March 31st in 1732 composer Franz Joseph Haydn was born. I remember going to visit his birthplace when I was ten years old and then hearing some of his music performed in Vienna. It was a wonderful opportunity to get a sense of what Haydn's world was like. To this day I still love his music, in particular the The Farewell Symphony. I have reviewed a wonderful book about this piece of music here on Through the Looking Glass Book Review. You can hear part of the symphony below as performed in 2009 by the Youth Artists Symphony.




The next anniversary of note is the birthday of Cesar Chavez, the labor leader who changed the lives of countless farm workers in America. You can see the books I have reviewed about Chavez here.

Last but by no means least, on this day in 1889 the Eiffel Tower was completed. I have reviewed an excellent book about this much loved piece of architecture here on the Through the Looking Glass Website. This wonderful has come to epitomize France and many people cannot think of France or Paris without thinking almost immediately of the Eiffel Tower.

www.lookingglassreview.com

In 1965, Marshall Ganz joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, where he worked for 16 years and ultimately became Director of Organizing.  Most recently, he advised Barack Obama’s campaign on organizing, training, and leadership development.  He is now Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  His most recent book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, tells the story of the UFW’s groundbreaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this dramatic tale.  In the excerpt below we learn quickly about the UFW’s victory.  Pick up a copy of Why David Sometimes Wins to find how this miraculous feat was accomplished.

On Easter Sunday morning, April 10, 1966, Roberto Roman, walking barefoot, bore his heavy wooden cross triumphantly over the Sacramento River Bridge, down the Capitol Mall, and up the steps of the state capitol of California.  Roman, an immigrant Mexican farm worker, was accompanied by 51 other originales- striking grape workers who had walked 300 miles in their perigrinación, or pilgrimage, from Delano to Sacramento.  They were met by a crowd of 10,000 people who had come from throughout the state to share in their unexpected victory.

For seven months, striking grape workers organized by the fledgling National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) had endured picket lines, strike breakers, arrests, economic uncertainty, and, at times, despair.  But they had also been buoyed by the support of religious leaders, students, civil rights groups, and trade unionists.  Many supporters had traveled to Delano to bring food, clothing, money, and messages of solidarity, and they had begun to respond to the farm workers’ call for a nationwide consumer boycott of Schenley Industries, a national liquor distributor and major Delano grape grower.  In this winter of 1966, as the new grape season approached, NFWA leaders decided to conduct the 300-mile perigrinación from Delano to Sacramento in order to mobilize fresh support for the strike among farm workers, to call attention to the boycott among the public, and to observe Lent.

The farm workers began the perigrinación on March 17, carrying banners of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, portraits of the Mexican campesino leader Emiliano Zapata, and placards proclaiming peregrinación, penitencia, revolución- pilgrimage, penance, revolution.  They also carried signs calling on supporters to boycott Schenley.  Roberto Roman carried his six-foot-tall wooden cross, constructed with two-by-fours and draped in black cloth.  Of the strikers selected to march the full distance, William King, the oldest, was 63, and Augustine Hernandex, the youngest, was 17.  Nearly one-quarter were women.

Launched the day after Senator Robert Kennedy had visited Delano to take part in hearings being conducted by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, the march attracted wide public attention from the start.  Televised images of a line of helmeted police blocking the marchers’ departure-calling it a “parade without a permit”- evoked images of police lines in Selma, Alabama, just the year before.  As the marchers progressed up the valley from town to town, public interest grew.  A crowd of more than 1,000 welcomed the marchers to Fresno at the end of the first week.  Daily bulletins began to appear in the San Francisco Bay Area press, chronicling the progress of the march.  Reporters profiled the strikers, discussed why they would walk 300 miles, and analyzed what the strike was all about.  Roman Catholic and Episcopal bishops urged the faithful to join the pilgrimage, and the Northern California Board of Rabbis came to share Passover matzo.  The march powerfully expressed not only the farm workers’ call for justice, but also the Mexican-American community’s claims for a voice in public life.  As Cesar Chavez, the NFWA’s leader, later described it, the march was also a way, at an individual level, of “training ourselves to endure the long, long struggle, which by this time had become evident..would be required.  We wanted to be fit not only physically but also spiritually.”

On the afternoon of April 3, as the marchers arrived in Stockton, still a week’s march south of Sacramento, Schenley’s lawyer reached Chavez on the phone.  Schenley had little interest in remaining the object of a boycott, especially as the marchers’ arrival in Sacramento promised to become a national anti-Schenley rally.  Schenley wanted to settle.  Three days of hurried negotiations followed.  The result was the first real union contract in California farm labor history- a multi-year agreement providing immediate improvements in wages, hours, and working conditions and, perhaps most important, formal recognition of the NFWA.  Chavez announced the breakthrough on the Thursday.  By Saturday afternoon, some 2,000 marchers had gathered on the grounds of Our Lady of Grace School in West Sacramento, which was on a hill looking across the Sacramento River to the capital city that they would enter the next morning.  During the prayer service that evening, more than one speaker compared them to the ancient Israelites camped across the River Jordan from the Promised Land.  That night, Roberto Roman carefully redraped his cross in white and decorated it with spring flowers.  The next morning, barefoot, he carried it triumphantly into the city.

How did California farm workers achieve this remarkable breakthrough?  And why did a fledgling association of farm workers achieve it rather than the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters, its far more powerful rivals?

Since 1900, repeated attempts to organize a farm workers’ union in California had faled because the farm owners-or “growers”-had vigorously resisted farm labor organizing, often violently.  Their large-scale, specialized, and integrated agricultural enterprises required large numbers of seasonal workers to be available whenever and wherever they were needed.  At harvest time, these workers held the economic well-being of these enterprises literally in their hands.  So the growers protected themselves-and held labor costs down-by recruiting a particularly powerless workforce of impoverished new immigrants who lacked the political rights of other Americans and who, as peopel of color, faced racial barriers in all spheres of life.  For farm workers, the result was low wages, poor living and working conditions, and a lack of security for themselves and their families…

I'll be there, will you? Register here.

Join thousands in continuing the call for social justice by participating in the 10th Annual CESAR CHAVEZ WALK



Walk alongside Chavez family members, students, elected officials, celebrities, and community members and celebrate Cesar Chavez Day 2008. Walk sponsors include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and Councilmember Jose Huizar, 14th District.



SATURDAY, March 29, 2008
10:00am
at Historic Olvera Street
125 Paseo de la Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(Main Street between Arcadia and Cesar Chavez Avenue)

By René Colato Laínez

March is the month of “la primavera” spring, and the birthday of César Chávez, March 31st. Before presenting the books for this month, let me share two of my poems about March.

El mes de marzo llegó
con un abrigo de invierno.
Cuando vió las lindas flores
Lo cambió por mil colores.

and

En el lindo mes de marzo
sembraré semillitas de amistad
para llenar de felicidad
al que este triste de verdad.

En el lindo mes de marzo
seré como Cesar Chávez que quiero tanto
defenderé a mis amigos de la tristeza y el llanto
los llenaré de colores, de alegría y de canto.

In the beautiful month of March
I will plant friendly seeds
to fill with laughter and happiness
those who are suffering with sadness.

In the beautiful month of March
I will be like Cesar Chávez that I admire so much
I will defend my friends from sadness and crying
I will fill them with colors, joy and songs of spring.

René Colato Laínez


Here is a list of César Chávez books. Enjoy,

Cesar Chavez: A Struggle for Justice / Cesar Chavez: La lucha por la justicia by Richard Griswold del Castillo. Illustrated by Anthony Accardo.

Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez by Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Yuyi Morales.

Cesar: Si, Se Puede!/ Yes, We Can! by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand. Illustrated by David Diaz

Cesar Chavez: A Hero for Everyone by Gary Soto. Illustrated by Lori Lohstoeter.

Cesar Chavez and La Causa by Dan LaBotz

Cosechando esperanza: La historia de Cesar Chavez by Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Yuyi Morales. Translated by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy.

Cesar Chavez: A Voice For Farmworkers by Barbara C. Cruz.

Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chavez by Rudolfo A. Anaya and Gaspar Enriquez

Cesar Chavez (Hispanics of Achievement) by Consuelo Rodriguez.