César Chávez Day

César Chávez Day, created to recognize the legacy of one of the founders of the United Farm Workers of America, has been proposed as a federal holiday and is currently celebrated in some states. It is the first holiday to recognize the civil rights work of a specific U.S. labor leader. The holiday has met with resistance from antiunion activists, and has also been caught in a dispute over paid and unpaid workers’ holidays and pitted against Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Presidents Day.

César Estrada Chávez was a first-generation American of Mexican descent born in Yuma, Arizona, on March 31, 1927. Like many Dust Bowl families who lost their farms during the Great Depression, the Chávez family moved to California to join the agricultural migrant stream. Chávez left school before graduation so he could go to work with his family, and he joined the U.S. Navy in 1946. He and his wife Helen moved to the Sal Si Puedes (Get Out If You Can) neighborhood in San Jose, California, where he worked for the Community Service Organization, as did the eventual cofounder of his union, Dolores Huerta. In 1962, Chávez cofounded the most successful and publicly recognized agricultural union in the United States: the United Farm Workers of America.

Chávez sacrificed personally to build the union and change agricultural labor law in the country. His speeches and actions promoted nonviolent organizing and public education as the means to [Page 462]further justice for hard-working laborers. Chávez found strength in the words and strategies of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom he is often compared. Chávez fasted on three occasions to publicize the plight of migrant farmworkers, and engaged in frequent peregrinaciones (pilgrimages or marches) to the California capital in Sacramento to change labor law. He also called on consumers to boycott table and wine grapes, later followed by campaigns to boycott other crops, arguing that consumers, like farmworkers, were victimized by the environmental risks of pesticides. After a lifetime of dedication to and success in his efforts, Chávez died near his childhood home in Arizona in 1993. He took a vow of poverty throughout his work, never earning more than $6,000 a year. He did not own a home and left nothing to his family after his death. In 1994, President Bill Clinton posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Chávez.

In California, Senate Bill 984 passed both houses and was signed into law by Governor Gray Davis in 2000, making March 31, the date of Chávez's birth, César Chávez Day, an official holiday for state government and university employees. The law also created the César Chávez Day of Service and Learning Program, held each year on March 31, to promote and facilitate community service. On this day, state schools include instruction about Chávez in their kindergarten-through-12th-grade curriculum. The law provided money to enable the California Department of Education to create a model K–12 curriculum about Chávez. This mandated, annual standards-based curriculum has increased public awareness about Chávez, the United Farm Workers, food production, and working conditions. Following the passage of California's law, nine additional states (Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Utah, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island) enacted laws making César Chávez Day a commemorative or optional holiday, which may be requested and substituted for a different holiday in the same fiscal year.

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