|
Le Grand woman helped United Farm Workers
(Merced Sun-Star Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jan. 6--Black eagles crowd a small room in Zeferina Perez's Le Grand home.
Like guardian angels they watch over newspaper clippings, paintings and her memorabilia from the United Farm Workers union and its founder, Cesar Chavez. The block-like eagles, which have for years been the UFW's symbol, spread their wings on red flags and pins and even Perez's T-shirt in this homage to a movement.
This shrine seems a fitting tribute to Chavez and the UFW, to which Perez gave years of her life.
For more than a quarter-century, the 75-year-old Perez has been fighting, in one way or another, for farm laborers' rights. From the first union she helped organize in the late 1970s, to picketing for one of the UFW's several grape boycotts and finally to organizing across the state, Perez has been a foot soldier in "La Lucha" -- the struggle that the UFW midwifed into existence in the 1960s.
In 1962 Cesar Chavez and his family moved to Delano and started organizing farm laborers. The union he began reached a peak membership of 70,000 in 1970. Despite its relatively small numbers, it was a powerful political and moral force into the 1980s. Through strikes, boycotts and statewide marches, the UFW brought the plight of the lettuce and tomato pickers to America's dinner table and consciousness.
Perez, who is now retired from organizing, speaks little English, but still carries the dedication that seeped into her bones under Chavez's leadership. After organizing across the state for 13 years, she seems to hold the fearlessness like an invisible talisman.
Although the UFW and unionized farmworkers in general aren't the force they once were, Perez hasn't forgotten the power that organizing people around a common cause can conjure.
As she sat at her dining room table on a recent cold foggy afternoon and told of her life in the union, she didn't raise her voice. Only her hands, moving in impassioned little arches, seemed to express her emotion and the past life she led speaking before crowds of field workers.
As she goes about her business in Le Grand, she may appear as just one more elderly woman. But not long ago she was a labor organizer. Unlike many of the young volunteers who joined the UFW in the '60s, Perez came to the movement relatively late in life.
Born in the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, Perez first came to the U.S. with her now deceased husband, Benito Perez, when they moved to Texas.
In 1972 the couple and their children moved to Le Grand where she has lived ever since.
The work that she and her husband did in Texas and in California was field work, picking grapes and tomatoes, among other crops. It was hard work for little pay with few comforts, she remembers.
The first time she came into contact with the burgeoning farmworkers movement was when the UFW, in one of several long marches through the state, passed through Merced.
The marchers came, says Perez, and asked local farmworkers what they needed.
Anyone who talked to the union was risking their job. "They said, 'If you talk to Chavez you can't work for us,'" she recalls local landowners saying. "The rich did not want a union here."
Then, she says, when you worked for a farmer, he had a hold over his workers. It was often through him that you were allowed to enter the country. He held your immigration papers as a reminder to stay in line. If you did something he didn't like, she says, he could withdraw them. On top of all this, conditions were abysmal. There was no clean water, so they sometimes had to drink from canals. There were no bathrooms. The pay was minimal.
In 1975 when she was working at a farm in Chowchilla, she began her first organizing. It took two years to organize the workers at Bacchus Farms, she says.
Eugenio Hernandez, of Le Grand, was one of the workers there at the time. He recalls Perez as one of the leaders of the union push.
When they finally won the contract, conditions improved markedly. They got vacations and better pay, among other benefits.
But in 1985 Bacchus Farms closed. Perez and the union had to leave.
For a short time afterwards, she recalls, she helped out at UFW's Livingston office.
Soon afterward she was recruited as an organizer. That began 13 years of driving up and down the state, sometimes with other organizers, sometimes alone in an old diesel Volkswagen bug with engine problems.
Chavez or one of his colleagues would call and say, "We need you down in Coalinga for a couple months," and Perez would go.
By the time she was organizing, she was already in her 50s. But that didn't slow her down even when police and security guards blocked her from going onto private farmland, which was often the case.
"I didn't have fear of anyone," she said. Not the police, not the rich and not politicians.
While this fearlessness drove her organizing efforts, it was muted at home. There, union business was another matter -- it was not spoken of. Her husband was very macho, she says, and he didn't like it that she was out organizing.
Nine years after she began organizing for the UFW, everything changed. In 1993, Chavez died. "He was the heart of the movement," she says. An article at the time noted that Perez compared Chavez to Jesus.
After Chavez's death much of the force behind the UFW began to decline. But she kept organizing.
By the late '90s the travel and long days began to wear on Perez, by then in her 60s, and she retired from union organizing. "It was hard work," she says.
The last effort she made on behalf of the UFW was for its now-closed Livingston office. She solicited local businesses and workers for money so the office could stay open.
She may be retired, but little has changed. Today, she says, the issues that plagued farmworkers a generation ago haven't gone away. People still need to be organized so that someone is looking out for them, she says. But since most farmworkers are illegal, they are afraid of speaking up, so there isn't much interest in unions these days.
Besides doing some housework on the weekends, Perez hasn't completely hung up her organizing spurs.
Carmen Hernandez, who volunteers for a farmworkers' legal aid group in Fresno, which Perez is involved with, says she's still doing her part. "She helped a lot of campesinos," she says.
Perez's continued passion for the cause was evident as she sat in her house fingering a manila folder filled with newspaper clippings. She placed one story on the table picturing a boy without legs or arms.
His mother had worked in fields dusted with pesticides when she was pregnant. His deformities were the result.
This is what Perez has been fighting to stop. These are the people for whom she has been fighting.
Reporter Jonah Owen Lamb can be reached at (209)385-2484 or jlamb@mercedsun-star.com.
Comments
Add Comment
Help & Info
Post Your Comment
622549
You are signed in as:
Submit Your Comment
You need to be logged in to leave a comment.
Commenting on this story has been closed.
MercedSunStar.com is pleased to be able to offer its users the opportunity to make comments and hold conversations online. However, the interactive nature of the internet makes it impracticable for our staff to monitor each and every posting.
Since MercedSunStar.com does not control user submitted statements, we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted on our website. In addition, we remind anyone interested in making an online comment that responsibility for statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not MercedSunStar.com. All comments posted should comply with the MercedSunStar.com's terms of service.
If you find a comment offensive, clicking on the red flag will remove it from the page, we are counting on the good judgment of all our readers to help us.
To see more of the Merced Sun-Star or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mercedsunstar.com.
Copyright (c) 2009, Merced Sun-Star, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
INDUSTRIES
Activate Email 
Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO East, January 20-22, 2010. Miami, FL.
