A "March for Justice" brought Cesar Chavez Day to the San Fernando Valley, which students from local high schools, members of social organizations, folkloric groups and charro schools joining on the route from Brand Park to Ritchie Valens Park.
The annual state holiday honoring Chavez is a day of dignity for Latinos who work in fields or in restaurants, according to Delores Huerta, who worked alongside the late labor and civil rights leader to found the United Farm Workers union and was a guest speaker at the March 29 event.
"For us Latino people it is a very important day because it is a day of dignity when we respect people who work with their hands, especially farm workers and people without papers who are working to bring us our food whether in a restaurant or picking in the fields," Huerta said.
Huerta also called on the crowd to honor Chavez by remaining actively engaged in civic and political life.
"Right now our President Obama is proposing a national budget that includes healthcare for everyone, that includes green jobs and improvements in education, but it's going to be important for us to give him this support so that those important things can happen," Huerta said.
Huerta proposed that community members "call our congresspeople and senators so that they support the president and vote for him," adding that "if we can take those matters, and if the president can resolve them, then we can keep asking for and supporting a law to legalize our people who don't have documents"
Carmen Camargo said she and a number of her classmates at a local high school came to the march at the urging of their history teacher. Camargo said that she knew that "Chavez fought for workers' rights, and as a Latina I am very happy to have heroes like Cesar Chavez who is the child of Mexican parents like I am."
Daysi Miranda helped organize the event as a way to remind the community that "Chavez was a country laborer who fought for the rights of farm workers so that they would have better living conditions, so that they wouldn't be kept in the sun, so that they would have water, bathrooms, simply so they would be more human."
Miranda said that she was one of more than 200 area high school students who helped plan the event after learning the history of Cesar Chavez and the farm workers' movement, as well as about other Latino leaders like Dolores Huerta and Rigoberta Menchu.
Mireya Olivera is editor of Impulso.
Photos by Impulso
Leave a comment