Cesar Chavez Quotes (1927-1993)

“We Mexicans here in the United States, as well as all other farm workers, are engaged in another struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us. But it must not be a violent struggle, even if violence is used against us.”

“Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations.”

“The boycott, as Gandhi taught, is the most nearly perfect instrument for nonviolent change, allowing masses of people to participate actively in a cause.”

“This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings. Because we have suffered — and are not afraid to suffer — in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything, even our lives, in our fight for social justice. We shall do it without violence because that is our destiny. To the ranchers, and to all those who opposes, we say, in the words of Benito Juárez: "El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz." [Respect for another's right is the meaning of peace.]”

“We seek, and have, the support of the Church in what we do. At the head of the pilgrimage we carry La virgen de la Guadalupe because she is ours, all ours, Patroness of the Mexican people. We also carry the Sacred Cross and the Star of David because we are not sectarians, and because we ask the help and prayers of all religions.”

“We shall Strike. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking, bread and justice. Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order. We are poor, we are humble, and our only choices is to Strike in those ranchers where we are not treated with the respect we deserve as working men, where our rights as free and sovereign men are not recognized. We do not want the paternalism of the rancher; we do not want the contractor; we do not want charity at the price of our dignity. We want to be equal with all the working men in the nation; we want just wage, better working conditions, a decent future for our children. To those who oppose us, be they ranchers, police, politicians, or speculators, we say that we are going to continue fighting until we die, or we win. We shall overcome.”

“Public employee unions were greatly helped, it is true, by the executive order of the late President John F. Kennedy and by similar policies adopted by certain state and local governments.”

“We should all express our thanks to Senator Robert Kennedy for his constant work on behalf of the poor, for his personal encouragement to me, and for taking time to break bread with us today.”

“President Reagan is a man with a very special sense of religion. Reagan sees a proper role for government and a proper role for God. It's very simple: Reagan's government helps the rich, and God helps the rest of us.”

“Economic power has to precede political power. Gandhi understood this when, in 1930, he and his followers resolved to defy the British government's salt monopoly by making their own salt from the sea; this boycott was one of the crucial steps in the Indian fight for independence.”

“The visitors were a tremendous support. I talked to about 150 the 1st Saturday and about 300 the 2nd Saturday. A lot were women. It gives you a tremendous feeling. I was very happy that Coretta King, Ethel Kennedy and Bishop Flores came. They did a lot of good for me spiritually and an awful lot of good to the people.”

“We sometimes refer to those who oppose the struggles of minorities and people in the Third World as the "super-Americans." They claim the melting-pot theory still applies. They would like all of us to be melted, poured, and cast... and cloned into the all-American boy and girl. So we will all come out looking like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant. They would like all of us to buy their argument that the strength of our country is in its conformity to one ethnic and cultural heritage.”

“The civil rights movement's biggest drawback is that they don't have a group that pays its own way. They don't have a membership group. This is the kind of power that is needed. Malcolm X was an organizer, but Stokely Carmichael is entirely different. I don't see any building. The approach that Malcolm X used was the house meeting. He was doing those things that we know pay: being patient and just accumulating, committing people and so forth. He's gone, but his spirit continues.”

“Most Americans realize that the black civil rights revolution of the late Fifties and early Sixties effectively began with Dr. Martin Luther King's successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. This tool is being perfected, for blacks, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in Chicago. Our own nationwide grape boycott is hurting corporate agriculture so much that the growers are eventually going to have to deal with us, no matter how hard the power class tries to weaken the boycott's effectiveness.”

“This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings. Because we have suffered — and are not afraid to suffer — in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything, even our lives, in our fight for social justice. We shall do it without violence because that is our destiny. To the ranchers, and to all those who opposes, we say, in the words of Benito Juárez: "El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz." [Respect for another's right is the meaning of peace.]”

“How can we narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country? What concrete steps can be taken now to abolish poverty in America? There are a number of things that President Nixon could do immediately, if he wanted to. In terms of our own grape pickers' strike, he could tell the Pentagon to stop shipping extraordinary amounts of grapes to Vietnam-the Government's most obvious tool in its attempt to break our strike. And he could improve the lot of all the farmworkers in the Southwest-easily, under existing legislation-by putting an end to the importing and exploitation of cheap foreign labor.”

“We see these insane practices reflected in the buy-outs and takeovers on Wall Street. It's the same thing: exchanging long-term security for short-term gain. You sacrifice a company for the immediate rewards. But you destroy what produces jobs and livelihoods and economic health. If you eat the seed corn, you won't have a crop to plant. Oscar Wilde once said, "A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." We look at the price, but we don't look at the value. Economics and profit drive everything. People forget that the soil is our sustenance. It is a sacred trust. It is what has worked for us for centuries, It is what we pass on to future generations.”

“My friends, the time for action is upon us. The enemies of justice wants you to think of Dr. King as only a civil rights leader, but he had a much broader agenda. He was a tireless crusader for the rights of the poor, for an end to the war in Vietnam long before it was popular to take that stand, and for the rights of workers everywhere. Many people find it convenient to forget that Martin was murdered while supporting a desperate strike on that tragic day in Memphis, Tennessee. He died while fighting for the rights of sanitation workers. Dr. King's dedication to the rights of the workers who are so often exploited by the forces of greed has profoundly touched my life and guided my struggle.”

“Thirty-four years ago a nation groping its uncharted course through the seas of the Great Depression faced the threatening storms of social and economic revolution. The late President Franklin D. Roosevelt met the challenge with the Wagner Act and with other New Deal measures, then considered quite revolutionary, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. While these measures modified the existing capitalistic system somewhat, they also saved the nation for free enterprise. They did not save the farm worker. He was left out of every one of them. The social revolution of the New Deal passed him by. To make our union possible with its larger hope that the farm worker will have his day at last, there was required a new social revolution.”

“If we criticize ourselves, then that begins to change things. I think groups that deal in power become impatient with groups who are strangers to power. I think even in individuals you can see this. A good example is Malcolm X. (I am reading his autobiography now.) When he talks about Uncle Toms, he puts it clearly. He's saying that these guys will go to work for the devil white man. He's saying a lot more (he doesn't make it clear but I'm sure this is his thinking), that the Negro thinks that if he gets ahead he is going to be getting his people ahead. Malcolm X knew about power although he didn't put it in those words. (Interviewer: Malcolm X had a tremendous effect on black organizers.) He knew what he was doing. They understood him, and they didn't understand the others. But he had a good base; he came right from the gutter so he wasn't compromised. The guys who don't come from the gutter have to compromise because they're going to school, they're getting a job, they're working for the government, all these little compromises which, by the time you get to be a leader, have got your hands tied up. You organize for power so that you can get something. You organize so that you can build power to do something with it, and so, when you look back, you've got to see some people out there doing something. What I'm trying to say is you can't organize by just speaking. The civil rights movement's biggest drawback is that they don't have a group that pays its own way. They don't have a membership group. This is the kind of power that is needed. Malcolm X was an organizer, but Stokely Carmichael is entirely different. I don't see any building. The approach that Malcolm X used was the house meeting. He was doing those things that we know pay: being patient and just accumulating, committing people and so forth. He's gone, but his spirit continues.”

“In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups.”

“(How has the city changed over the decades?) In the 70's we were so engaged - that's a hard one for me, to try not to discount the losses, to see what is hopeful. I feel a lot of times that we've lost leadership. There's no Cesar Chavez or Robert Kennedy. We've lost the great inspiring role models that gave us ideas about a bigger self. We started to value the celebrity, the person who got his.”

“The farm-worker movement of the 1960s, led by Cesar Chavez, was perhaps the first nationally known effort by people of color to address an environmental issue.”

“From the beginning in 1962, Chávez, like Galarza before him, lobbied for strict control of the US-México border, arguing that a mass of noncitizen and politically powerless workers would make it difficult to recruit US citizens to the union. They also viewed undocumented Mexican workers as strikebreakers. The UFW maintained that stance in its early years, even reporting undocumented workers to the immigration service. But by 1974, important Chicano support organizations were openly criticizing the stance, making newspaper headlines. It came to a crisis when Attorney General William B. Saxbe announced that the Justice Department would deport a million "illegal aliens" and claimed to have the full support of the UFW. The UFW backed off the stance, and Chávez wrote a letter, published in the San Francisco Examiner, denying Saxbe's claim, writing that "illegal aliens are doubly exploited, first because they are farm workers, and second because they are powerless to defend their own interests. . . . If there were no illegals being used to break our strikes, we could win those strikes overnight and then be in a position to improve the living and working conditions of all farm workers." But he promised that the United Farm Workers would support legalization for the undocumented, "our brothers and sisters." By the late 1970s, Chávez's views had changed, and he was advocating the legalization of undocumented immigrants and encouraged their inclusion in the union movement.”

“racial and ethnic minorities were being environmentally-and economically-exploited in ways that didn't involve incinerators or dumps. Between 1965 and 1971, for example, under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, Mexican farmworkers in California launched a historic resistance movement to organize a union not only in the interest of raising wages and improving working conditions but also to combat pesticide abuse, which was notorious for making workers sick.”

“I was very impressed with Cesar Chavez's grasp of organizing strategy. He started organizing around small fruit to start with, where there was a semipermanent work force. That gave the union continuity. These workers didn't move around to follow the different crops. You didn't start fresh every time there was a strike.”

“Cesar, a priest, a minister, and nine farmworkers were arrested for going into a camp in Borrego Springs, just to get the workers’ clothes after the workers were fired for union activity. They were arrested, stripped naked, and chained by the officers.”

“[L]ate one night in 1962, there was a knock at the door and there were three men. One of them was Cesar Chavez. And the next thing I knew, they were sitting around our table talking about a union...Cesar said, "The women have to be involved. They're the ones working out in the fields with their husbands. If you can take the women out to the fields, you can certainly take them to meetings." So I sat up straight and said to myself, "That's what I want!"”

“Our separate struggles are really one. A struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity. ... You and your valiant fellow workers have demonstrated your commitment to righting grievous wrongs forced upon exploited people. We are together with you in spirit and determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized.”

“Forty years ago, here in the United States, there were true activist visionaries and mass movements to enact those visions...There was a César Chávez and a viable farm workers' movement, propped up by the agit-prop of a teatro para un movimiento campesino.”

“Many years ago, when I was merely a vegetarian, I met the great Cesar Chavez, and he said to me: "If you are interested in preventing animal suffering, the first thing you should give up is eggs and milk, because the animals who produce those foods lead the most unhappy lives. You would do better to eat meat and stop eating eggs and dairy products." I was shocked, since I had no intention of eating meat but had never thought of giving up eggs or dairy products. But when I looked into it I realized he was right, and now, years later, after I have studied the matter up close, I know for certain that he was completely correct about the cruel treatment of the animals raised for such products. The advantages of a vegan diet are enormous for our health, for the environment, for the animals themselves.”

“The reality is that many businesses, large and small, have long used undocumented workers to pad their bottom lines. Just consider the agricultural workforce. In California alone-where the $45 billion-a-year agricultural sector supplies more than half the produce consumed in the United States-between 40 and 50 percent of the workforce is made up of undocumented workers. No wonder California has been the site of some of the most important immigrant labor struggles, brought to the consciousness of many Americans in the 1960s and 1970s by the great United Farm Workers leader, Cesar Chavez. That struggle continues today.”