Cesar Chavez Legacy: A Dark Side in Latino Icon's Opposition to Undocumented Immigrants David Iaconangelo - Latin Times
go to original March 31, 2014

A worker holds a portrait of Cesar Chavez. (Reuters)

If you’re going by Diego Luna’s new film about Cesar Chavez, which was released on Friday to coincide with the Latino and labor-rights hero’s birthday on Monday, the one knock against Chavez might be that he was just too noble. The image is easy enough to puncture in the ordinary ways (he was a less-than-stellar strategist and a bit of a philanderer). But his enmity toward undocumented workers, whom he often equated simply and unreservedly with strikebreakers, might deserve to be treated more extensively.

Dolores Huertas, co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, has disputed the idea that Chavez reserved scant pity for those without papers. “That’s totally not true,” she told Fusion last week, pointing to Chavez’s work to end the bracero program in the early ‘60s.  “A lot of the braceros were being exploited. In my hometown of Stockton, California, I saw paychecks for people who had worked two weeks, and they got $16.”

“A lot of people in our organization were undocumented. The one thing that Cesar was against - and he would say this - ‘if my mother would break the strike, I would be against my mother’ … Even in today’s world, the agricultural farmworkers who are under union contract get the same benefits whether they’ve got papers or not.”

But two UFW projects cast doubt on Huertas’ claim that Chavez’s disdain for undocumented workers was limited to strikebreakers.

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