Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 2

The coming years would bring much more adversity: Strikes and boycotts, marches and fasts, victories and defeats.

But through it all, Cesar learned and taught others how commitment and sacrifice can set you free from the constraints imposed by depending entirely on money and material things.

Under Cesar, the UFW achieved unprecedented gains for farm workers, establishing it as the first successful farm workers union in American history.

Because of Cesar and millions of Americans who supported farm workers by boycotting grapes and other products, under then-Gov. Jerry Brown California passed the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the nation’s first, and still the only, law guaranteeing farm workers the right to organize, choose their own union representative and negotiate with their employers.

The significance of Cesar’s life transcends any one cause or struggle.

Cesar forged a national and extraordinarily diverse coalition for farm worker boycotts, which included students, middle class consumers, trade unionists, religious activists and minorities.

César is dead,
And we have wept for him until our eyes are dry.
Dry as the fields of California that
He loved so well and now lie fallow.

His name was a soft breeze to cool the campesino’s sweat
A scourge on the oppressors of the poor.

Campesinos gather by roadside ditches to sleep,
Shrouded by pesticides, unsure of tomorrow,
Hounded by propositions that keep their children
Uneducated in a land grown fat with greed.

Yes, the arrogant hounds of hate
Are loose upon this land again

He is the rain that renews parched fields.