Cesar Chavez Day in Minnesota (March 31)

Representative Carlos Mariani (65B) gives speech on the Minnesota House floor on the impact Cesar Chavez had on the Latino and greater community. 

March 31 is Cesar Chavez Day in Minnesota.

Click image to view video of Rep. Mariani's speech 

Read statement presented to the House of Representatives below

On Wednesday, Bloomington Minnesota will become the host of the 2018 National Association For Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference (NACCS). 

Registration is still open and there are several events planned during the week that are open to the public.

Click on the image above for more information

Reads statement presented by Rep. Mariani to the House of Representatives: 

Minnesota Cesar Chavez Day

March 31

In 2014, the Minnesota Legislature passed HF 1631/SF1509 designating March 31 as Cesar Chavez Day. It is now coded as MN statute 10.555.

The law seeks to provide the citizens of Minnesota the opportunity to learn about and appreciate the Latino community and their contributions to our state. Furthermore, it focuses on our state’s history of migrant farmworkers– the very people Cesar Chavez committed his life to achieve social justice.

Each year, tens of thousands of migrant agricultural workers are recruited to Minnesota for work in farm fields and food processing plants. Most are permanent legal residents of the United States from the border region of southern Texas and many are recruited from Mexico and Central America.  

Various Minnesota state laws have been enacted to cover farmworker employment terms, work conditions, health, education, housing, access and human rights. All are necessary to ensure the dignity of farmworkers and the prosperity of our state’s agricultural sector.

U.S. and Minnesota Farmworker History

Since its inception, the United States’ economy has relied on migrant labor. Whether it was the forced enslavement of Africans or the recruitment of Mexicans and Chinese, the country depended on low-wage workers to bolster its agricultural and industrial systems. During the early twentieth century, Mexican nationals and US citizens of Mexican descent served as the foundation for migratory labor in the Midwest.

Mexican migrant labor to the Midwest was fueled by the railroad, sugar beet and meat packing industries. The first to initiate hiring Mexicans in Minnesota, railroad companies often went into Mexico or Texas to recruit workers. The housing arrangements provided by the railroad companies were atrocious. According to a 1927 national housing survey, boxcars provided by the Burlington Railroad Company in Inver Grove Heights, a St. Paul suburb, were the worst in the entire nation. Even decades later, in 1946, a survey conducted by the International Institute reported that of all St. Paul residents, Mexicans lived in the poorest conditions.

The largest industry to hire Mexican migrants was the sugar beet companies. The most prominent company, American Beet Sugar, was founded in 1899 and changed its name to American Crystal Sugar in 1934. American Beet Sugar recruited Mexican workers, known as “betabeleros,” from neighboring states and along the US–Mexico border with the promise of housing and credit at neighborhood stores.

Compared to other Midwestern states, whose migrants were mainly single men, Minnesota early on had a high concentration of women and child migrants. This changed the social fabric of the state. Mexican women contributed to the economy by working outside of the home and becoming positive role models for their children.

Migrant workers most often experience racial and class discrimination. Even if migrant workers are US citizens, they are stereotyped as foreign because of their racial identity. Workers’ families are also subject to discrimination. Children of migrant workers who attend schools and participate in youth activities are not always welcomed by their peers. Often, these experiences create feelings of isolation, especially if families only stay in the area for the short growing season.

Like farm labor, factory work bolstered migration. Urban Midwest cities saw migration growth due to the expansion of the meat packing industry. After World War I, meatpacking plants dominated employment of Mexicans in St. Paul. This trend increased migration to urban areas, moving families away from farms to the West Side neighborhood. Meatpacking industry jobs were considered the most stable and sought after because they were year-round. In the twenty-first century, these positions continue to flourish and attract numerous migrant workers to maintain the factories.

As a community organizer and as an inspiration to workers in Minnesota, Cesar Chavez improved the lives and working conditions of millions of Latinos nationwide. He dedicated his life to advocating for labor rights, political representation for ethnic minorities, environmental justice and registering voters.

Cesar Chavez

“The love for justice that is in us is not only the best part of our being but it is also the most true to our nature.”

Born in Yuma, Arizona, to immigrant parents, Chavez moved to California with his family in 1939. For the next ten years they moved up and down the state working in the fields. During this period Chavez encountered the conditions that he would dedicate his life to changing: wretched migrant camps, corrupt labor contractors, meager wages for backbreaking work and bitter racism.

As a student, Chavez attended schools where Spanish was forbidden. He remembers being punished with a ruler to his knuckles for violating the rule. He also remembers that some schools were segregated.

He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1946 and upon leaving the service he became a migrant farm worker.

Cesar’s introduction to labor organizing began in 1952 when he met Father Donald McDonnell, an activist Catholic priest. He read about St. Francis and Gandhi and was introduced to the action of nonviolence as an instrument to drive social change.

In 1962, Cesar founded the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Worker (UFW) and was joined by the dynamic organizer, Dolores Huerta.

In designing the UFW Eagle symbol, Cesar chose an Aztec eagle to evoke the cultural historical identity of Mexicans as a way to animate action: “It gives pride . . . When people see it they know it means dignity.”

A major turning point came in September 1965, when the fledgling Farm Workers Association voted to join a strike that had been initiated by Filipino farm workers in Delano’s grape fields. Within months Chavez and his union became nationally known. Chavez’s drawing on the imagery of the civil rights movement, his insistence on nonviolence, his reliance on volunteers from urban universities and religious organizations, his alliance with organized labor and his use of mass mobilizing techniques (such as a famous march on Sacramento in 1966) brought the grape strike and consumer boycott into the national consciousness. The boycott, in particular, was responsible for pressuring the growers to recognize the United Farm Workers.

The first contracts were signed in 1966 but were followed by more years of strife. In 1968 Chavez went on a fast for twenty-five days to protest the increasing advocacy of violence within the union. Victory came finally on July 29, 1970, when twenty-six Delano growers formally signed contracts recognizing the UFW and bringing peace to the vineyards.

Cesar made people aware of the struggles of farm workers for better pay and safer working conditions and succeeded through nonviolent tactics (boycotts, pickets and strikes). His work centered on the importance and human dignity of all farm workers – and of Latinos in general given their historical and heavy presence as workers in the U.S. agricultural sector. As such, Cesar Chavez will be remembered as a major American leader of the 20th century. 

Sources:

https://www.history.com/topics/cesar-chavez

http://www.mnopedia.org/group/migrant-workers