Every year around Cesar Chavez day I look for traces of my involve­ment with him. In the spring of 1987 he came to my col­lege cam­pus to recruit an annu­al mini-army of col­lege interns to work on what­ev­er cam­paign the Unit­ed Farm Work­ers were orga­niz­ing that sum­mer. I was back from a two-week, semi-authorized drop-out for a peace march and was intrigued with its glimpse into alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ties. Now here was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with a liv­ing non­vi­o­lence leg­end: yes please!

Much of the actu­al work turned out to be pret­ty mean­ing­less, I must admit. I did a lot of cold call­ing to church answer­ing machines to tell them about a video we were going to mail out to them (“nar­rat­ed by Mike Far­rell!”). But the con­text of the expe­ri­ence was great: liv­ing in a rent­ed house with oth­er UFW interns in East Brunswick, N.J. (one of whom became a seri­ous rela­tion­ship); work­ing in New York at a revolv­ing num­ber of desks at what­ev­er union would lend us a room; dis­cov­er­ing cheese enchi­ladas via Cesar’s always kind daugh­ter Lin­da; com­mut­ing into pre-gentrification Tribeca lis­ten­ing to some atro­cious 1980s bub­blegum pop sta­tion because that’s what Lin­da’s tween daugh­ters Olivia and Julia liked.

In July, we orga­nized an event back in Philly for Cesar: a protest out­side the A&P stock­hold­er meet­ing pres­sur­ing them to stop sell­ing grapes treat­ed with pes­ti­cides. I did a lot of orga­niz­ing around this: writ­ing first drafts of press releas­es, help­ing to get local labor unions out to the event to boost num­bers. Googling this morn­ing I found the pho­to above, tak­en at the event. That’s Cesar’s son-in-law and my boss Artie Rodriguez behind him to the right. I would have been some­where near­by just out of cam­era reach. The cap­tion reads:

Farm leader Cesar Chavez speaks to a group of sup­port­ers in Philadel­phia 7/9 out­side the hotel where the A&P stock­hold­ers were hold­ing their annu­al meet­ing. Chavez sup­port­ers were demand­ing that the super­mar­ket chain stop sell­ing Cal­i­for­nia grapes that are con­tact­ed with pes­ti­cides that cause cancer. 

It would prob­a­bly stun kids today that before cell phones many of us just did­n’t take pic­tures. Despite work­ing with him for an extend­ed sum­mer, and walk­ing with him in the 1987 March on Wash­ing­ton for Les­bian and Gay Rights, I have no pic­tures of myself with Cesar (I do have a card­board poster I prob­a­bly drew in ten min­utes, which he signed). But I have mem­o­ries of that sum­mer 35 (!) years ago. He was always kind and fun­ny and sur­pris­ing­ly down to earth. His charis­ma brought togeth­er an inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of fol­low­ers and I was glad to be one.