University of California Office of the President

Some Thoughts on the Life of Cesar Chavez: Leadership as Service

by Manuel Gomez, vice chancellor, student affairs, UC Irvine

Delivered at the fourth annual celebration of the birthday of Cesar E. Chavez at the UC Office of the President, March 22, 2005

It came as quite a shock to me when I realized that I was not cut out for nonviolent protest in the same way that men like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Cesar Chavez advocated and practiced it. I was part of a protest at a Safeway store in Sacramento, California, and when people came out of the store, they began to throw things and spit at those of us who were picketing and protesting. It didn’t take long at all for me to feel angry and undignified in meekly submitting to such dismissive treatment, even though it was from strangers. I think the fact that it was strangers treating us this way actually made it worse, because the rejection felt so personal, and it reminded me of all the ways I was questioned and snubbed as a Mexican kid growing up in Orange County. All the sleights I had suffered over the years – from being punished for speaking Spanish in school to being followed by the police as a teenager in Santa Ana – were borne anew at that protest. And at that very moment, it astonished me that anyone who had grown up impoverished and disempowered could ever practice non-violence. As Cesar Chavez said on numerous occasions, nonviolence is not the absence or opposite of action. As I learned that day in the Safeway parking lot, NOT engaging in violence, answering aggression with non-aggression, requires a lot more strength than simply giving in to some of our basic instincts.

Of course, you could say that Cesar Chavez did resort to violence, if not to others, most definitely to himself through his many tenacious fasts. This was a man who was so pure about sticking to a “clean fast” that he wouldn’t take the diet soda offered by a friend who came to support him while he was fasting. I know that people have speculated that one of the reasons Cesar died relatively young and in his sleep like he did was because of the long-term toll fasting took on his body. But regardless of the physical costs of fasting, Cesar didn’t see his actions as destructive or dangerous – he saw what he did as a necessary sacrifice. For Cesar was one of those leaders who didn’t fool himself or anyone else into believing that change – true, radical, fundamental change – could come without a heavy cost, without individual and collective sacrifices, and without paying what might be a dear price. For Cesar, such sacrifices, the willingness to give all one had for social justice, was nothing less than the expression of human dignity – that is, of the whole gift of being human and offering one’s humanity in the cause of true justice…which, in essence was his definition of leadership.

While I was still a relatively young administrator at UCI, working to increase achievement and college entrance rates for minority students, I was fortunate to hear Cesar Chavez speak during the handful of times we brought him to the campus. Each time, I was struck by the difference between the way people who listened to him regarded him – with reverence and nothing short of awe in some cases – and the way he regarded himself – as a man struggling for justice. For in the same way that Cesar recognized that migrant agricultural workers were viewed as nothing more than “implements” to the growers and consumers of affordable fruits and vegetables, he saw himself as an implement of social justice, his life and voice and energy a tool he used relentlessly for La Causa. But unlike the insignificance with which the growers viewed the field workers, Cesar understood that there could be tremendous strength in marshalling the energies and efforts of most socially disenfranchised individuals in a collective effort to empower those who had the least social and economic influence. Rather than focusing on the educated and upwardly mobile members of society – those who attended college, for example, thanks to the back breaking sacrifices their parents made – Cesar kept his focus on the workers themselves, those who were often so caught up in a bitter cycle of poverty that to expect them to sacrifice more in the cause of their own justice than they were already sacrificing for almost inhuman living conditions and economic prospects, was extraordinary in itself.

But Cesar didn’t think like that – he understood that those who worked in the fields were the backbone of the agricultural system in states like California, and that the backbone must be strong to support everything it must bear. So he focused on that strength, on the innate dignity and humanity of the sacrifices inherent in working so close to the land bringing to life one of one of our most basic human needs, and placed his faith in the power of that dignity, those sacrifices, to revolutionize the very system that exploited them. He endeavored to undertake his own sacrifice – in the form of many fasts – to draw attention to the extent to which we all take for granted the availability of fresh food. And he would not compromise his vision of social justice and nonviolence no matter what the cost to himself. He used whatever systems he could to bring awareness and mobility to La Causa, from alliances with influential politicians to the support of the Catholic Church, which has always held a central place in many of the communities from which farm workers come. His own faith in the power of the workers, in their dignity, and in the influence they could wield if they simply organized and unionized provided an inspiration that was unheard of in our communities. These were individuals and families who did not even have a permanent residence, who were tied to the land in the most basic and profound of ways, completely anchored to the seasons and yet unable to profit from the bounty they helped produce. Whatever Cesar Chavez suffered himself, whatever anger he had over the things that had happened to him and to those he was organizing, he was able to channel all his experience into productive action. He pointed out the hypocrisy in decrying the violence in Vietnam and then advocating violence for political causes at home. In essence, he made himself an agent of sacrifice and change, and through his own faith, his own belief in justice, and his own willingness to be a tool of change, he created the circumstance for change and helped effect a level of organization and an awareness of the plight of agricultural workers that was unprecedented. I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the extent to which Cesar Chavez succeeded – from reform in the use of dangerous pesticides to the organization of an enormous boycott against the grape growers who had no stake in the welfare of those responsible for bringing those grapes to the American table.

One of the things I always walked away with after listening to Cesar talk was the way in which he never bought into the idea that those with the least social power were weak. He didn’t believe that exploitation created essential victimization, the kind of personal degradation we equate with total erosion of the human condition, the human soul. As long as the dignity of the most humble and meek individual was intact, as long as the sacrifice was aimed at the right cause, change is possible, and justice is in our hands.

There are so many things about what Cesar Chavez represented that have had an impact on my work as an educator and my belief that what we do in our schools and universities is also integral to the kind of personal dignity Cesar embraced in himself and fostered in others. For while he never made it past the 8 th grade, and never believed that college was necessary for everyone for social change to occur, Cesar understood that social power requires a base of economic strength and stability, and education is a path to economic mobility and social capital. And in the same way that Cesar Chavez brought everything he did, everything he believed, and everything he taught back to the core of human dignity, I think this is also a key to what we can be doing as educators to inspire students to aspire and achieve, both for themselves and for the welfare of their communities and society as a whole.

Because Cesar Chavez was a man who believed in morality and ethics and who understood that he was as much a symbol as a tool of justice, I think he would approve of having his life serve as an example, not of what it means to be extraordinary, but rather what it means to make a difference by focusing on what’s most basic, what’s closest to the ground, to the foundation of ourselves individually and collectively. And for those of us who have chosen to give our energies to the University, and to La Causa of education in general, I think that lesson is easy to forget as we get caught up in SAT rankings, in choosing among the best of the best students, in chasing after funding for programs and groundbreaking research, and in the day to day struggles we all feel it takes a little bit away from the ideals that brought us to education in the first place. I know that at this time of year, when everything is beginning to grow again, and when the seasons are changing again, and we pause to remember the life and passing of Cesar Chavez, that one of the most profound ways we can honor his life’s work is to offer our students the gift of their own dignity, the recognition of their innate power as human beings, not only by offering them the best education we can, but by offering them the best of ourselves, as tools of the kind of change we want for them. Si se Puede!

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