Cesar Chavez stamp unveiled in San Jose April 24

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[chance33_98]

Cesar Chavez stamp unveiled in San Jose April 24

(San Jose-AP) -- A new stamp honoring farm labor leader Cesar Chavez will be unveiled in San Jose next week.

The Postal Service announced today the stamp will be unveiled at a ceremony April 24th at the Mexican Heritage Plaza.

Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante and Chavez's widow, Helen, will be on hand.

Chavez founded the United Farm Workers Union. He died in 1993.

[NoAction]

That's nothing.

A friend of mine was recently on jury duty here is San Diego and they took a day off for Cesar Chavez Day. I didn't even know that was a holiday, but apparently someone thinks it is.

[chance33_98]

I covered that on here too :)

[FITZ]

I doubt Chavez was a perfect guy ---I don't think he was trying to get Communism put into place ---at least not by anything he actually said. Here are some of his quotes from one interview ---I don't see much radical in anything he said in this:

"Gandhi said that the boycott was the most perfect non-violent weapon available to people, especially poor people. Because the boycott is so simple, anybody can help. If a family stops buying grapes when they go to the store, it's a tremendous help to the cause. They don't have to go on a picket line, they don't have to put money into it, they don't have to take time off from their jobs, they don't have to take time off from their busy schedules. All they have to do is not buy any grapes."

"I would say the green carders and the wetbacks make up about 95 or 98 per cent of the work force in the grapes now and the other 2 or 3 per cent are local people who are supervisors, truck drivers, that sort of jobs. But the majority of the people who are brought in have no roots in the community, no friends, and don't have to go through the agony of knowing that they are hurting their brothers by strike breaking."

"Well, it's an unfounded charge because if you're going to start correcting the ills of
society, you've got to start some place. We feel sorry for them. We feel even sorrier because we don't have anything against them. But we can't do anything here for them unless we begin to do something about the economic injustices that are perpetrated against our own people. It is their coming from Mexico that is making it difficult for us."

"I think the basis of our struggle for justice is in religion. It is laid out for us in Christianity... But in the struggle certain things happen, of course. There are some problems we are very afraid of. One is that people may lose their faith in their own strength in organizing and resort to violence as a shortcut. The goal is love between us and everybody else-but at the same time we must be firm about getting what we believe is justice.
Idon't think we can find total happiness in a purely economic struggle, regardless of how many benefits we may get. Not that these aren't important-I'd be the first to say they are important-but I think that if we divorce the struggle from religion we would not be totally happy, even though we may make great gains. Also, there are some of us in the movement who feel very strongly that sacrifice is perhaps the ultimate weapon in the struggle. And religion is the basis for strengthening us to be able to sacrifice. As the movement develops, of course, it is to be feared that all of us, myself included, will begin to become more materialistic about our work and our principles-and then we will tend to look at workers as digits and forget the most important thing: that man has a soul.
So I am very concerned that religion as an institution, and then the individuals within the religious community, participate with us-for two reasons. One is a very personal reason. They're around and even though they may not officially represent the church, they represent the essence of it to the people here. They give people the strength to continue the hard and very lonely struggle. And also, the church at this stage of the organization needs the union. The unions are radically for the people and I think the church ought to take advantage of that and be right with us here, if for no other reason than that for many years to come they can always point to the fact that they were present with the people in their struggle.
If we have a lot of religious people with us, it is more difficult for us to go crooked. Because, you know, we have the priests and the reverends, people whose very lives are involved in ethics. We would be hiding, we wouldn't be as open. It's just that first step you take away from people that is the disaster. The moment you take that step, you lose the whole joy of struggle."

"We have a prayer before our meetings. It's part of the tradition that we have mass. It blends in. If we want to put a cross here in the "40 acre," why-Mexico is full of crosses. Because of this, we can make some great contributions. We sometimes tend to see things a little different than the mainstream, but only because we're forced to. We have to live always off the mainstream. Because of that and because of the experiences that we've had in this country and because of our own values and our own culture, I think that given a chance, we can make some special contributions that would be for the betterment of the society as a whole."

"I think it will be close to twenty years-with good luck-before we can bring economic justice through a union, either our union or any other union, to farm workers. "

http://www.sfsu.edu/~cecipp/cesar_chavez/hope.htm

[tiki]

I think Cesar Chavez might have meant well but like all Liberals, he was misguided. He had Liberal solutions that still to this day keeps Mexicans poor.

[FITZ]

I don't know everything about the guy ---I've just never seen anything I thought was all that radical --no more radical than computer programmers wanting H1B visas ended to protect their wages ---and the farm workers wanted some vacation time and wages that would get them out of poverty level and some workplace protection against dangerous pesticides ---nothing the rest of us don't expect from our bosses. Maybe he got radical at some point or others who are radical are using his name for their own agendas. The most I heard of was boycotts ----and isn't that what we're doing to the Dixie Chicks? I think boycotts are good.

[tiki]

I agree, he seemed to care about the people but he went at it all wrong and ended up hurting the people he was trying to help He was like Arafat, he demanded, farmers gave in, but that wasn't good enough and he demanded more. He wouldn't negotiate in good faith.

As with any business there are bad people who use employees and don't care anything about them but that is usually the exception rather than the rule. The thing with the pesticides is still to this day just a political weapon. The law says that if you spray certain pesticides, the fields have to be marked and workers can't go into that field for 10 days. But spray the same chemical on a golf course and there are no restrictions. Now either the chemical is dangerous for 10 days and the lawmakers care more about field hands than they care about golfers or it isn't that dangerous. To tell you the truth I don't know which is the truth but it is obviously based on politics rather than science because I think there are more golfers than farm laborers.

[T'wit]

Needless to say, Chavez gets heaped with leftist honors this way because he was one of them.

As for Che Guevara -- a romantic idol of the younger left because he was quite handsome in that famous poster, and he even wrote some poetry. Never mind that he was guilty of many assassinations in Cuba, he was cute. Unfortunately for Che, he fancied himself a thinker and great revolutionary too, so he went off to BOLIVIA, of all forlorn places, to stir up a revolution. See, he just knew that all the peasants or toilers or masses were ready to rise up. Instead, the peasants turned him in and had no interest whatever in having a glorious revolution, and the otherwise hopeless Bolivian army easily ran him down. Che tried to bribe his way out of it, saying he was worth more dead than alive, but he was executed. His men were also wiped out, either in fights or by execution (September-October, 1967). As a military commander, Che was totally inept. But he was so romantic, you see, and that beret he wore was so dashing, young commies still wear Che tee shirts and think he was hot stuff.

[Quix]

Interesting quotes.

Thanks.

I remain convinced he traveled with, agreed with, fought with, waged political war on the sid of and probably was to a significant degree Communist.

I never have been and never will be a fan of any such association.

Karl Marx was a fool. The Bible's quite clear about that.
'The fool has said in his heart there is no God.'

Maybe Chavez was a 'nice' Communist compared to others. Does that mean he'd eventually offer tea on the way to the gulag? I didn't trust him way back when. I'm not likely to trust revisionist whitewashes of his associations and philosophical bent.

Am I revising history in my disdain of him? I serously doubt that.

[Quix]

Thanks on the details about Che that I had forgotten or never knew.

Why is Chavez so idiolized? The quotes to me on this thread sound nice enough. But he WAS AT LEAST QUITE ASSOCIATED with card carrying Party members!

Just because

her unroyal lowness,
her hideous heinous--
Bwitch Shrillery was and is a Communist

is NOT the least bit of a reason to feel more kindly toward them!

[Solamente]

First time I laughed today! Thanks, I'm still laughing!

[cicero's_son]

HE WAS A COMMIE THROUGH AND THROUGH, in my book--bent on our destruction.

Yep. But he's a Leftie, so it's safe for the establishment to honor him.

Joe McCarthy, on the other hand, was a genuine American patriot. Just don't hold your breath waiting for a stamp in his honor.

[Cuttnhorse]

LOL! On a Foodstamp, Your grain is very straight today.

[FITZ]

I could be wrong but I don't think Chavez was ever a communist or advocated communist ways but I think for sure the Communist Party did infiltrate the UFW union and has pretty much made Chavez a symbol of their own --- for their own purposes. Eugenio Parente-Ramos was an example of what this. Here's more on him:

"Mr. Parente, whose real name was Gerald William Doeden and was actually of Norwegian descent, reportedly took on the imagined Mexican name and persona to enhance his credibility in his supposed struggles as a radical labor organizer and leader of the Eastern Farm Worker's Association (EFW). The EFW is just one of many front organizations led by Mr. Parente to mask recruitment for his cult-like group. Mr. Parente, who had a history of involvement with left-wing revolutionary groups, was a former disc jockey and one-time owner of a left-wing bookstore in San Francisco in the 1960's. He founded the CPUSA/P on Long Island in 1972. The group, an offshoot of the Progressive Labor Party, (which in turn is split off from the Communist Party USA), seems to follow Communist ideology closely, structuring the hierarchy of their own group after the former Soviet Union's Politburo. Mr. Parente died in March of 1995 at the age of 59."

"Mr. Parente claimed to be a close friend of United Farm Workers' late leader Cesar Chavez. Although Mr. Chavez claimed to have never heard of Mr. Parente-Ramos (New York Post Nov. 13, 1996), Mr. Parente was reportedly a UFW organizer, and was fired by Chavez when he would not submit to UFW discipline after he had advocated violence."

http://www.adl.org/presrele/Militi_71/2853_71.asp

[FITZ]

Anyhow ---I think Cesar Chavez holiday is a Communist holiday ---but I don't think he was one, I think they found him to be a useful symbol for their own movement, they made him into something he wasn't. He was never for massive illegal immigration either ---and he's become some kind of symbol for that too. I don't think Chavez ever wanted the violent overthrow of the USA but those who do have taken over his cause.

[skeeter]

Cezar Chavez is honored in some public way every week around here.

He's the ONLY public person San Jose sees fit to honor. Him and MLK, Jr.

Very soon we will run out of schools, libraries and streets to name after him.

[Scenic Sounds]

I must say--I did sort of lump him in with Chez Guiverra sp?

Yeah, they were actually two different people.

[Quix]

For sure.

I still think he was a great patriot and did a lot of good. That he went over board here and there is regrettable.

But look how far

Dilldo and
her unroyal lowness,
her hideous heinous--
Bwitch Shrillery

went overboard and in what destructive directions!

Then there's the long list of Boxer, Moore, Babs Straysafield et al

And they think of themselves as model Americans. God help us!

[Quix]

You could well be right. It's been a long time since I read in that area.

But my best guess is--wary was a good way to be about anyone close to that ilk of group.

[Quix]

It seems to me if one is known by the company one keeps, he had plenty of disturbing associations.

I don't know if he was co-opted or a secret admirer or what. But he sure gave them plenty of fodder for their mill.

[Quix]

I've always known they were 2 people and that Chavez seemed to be milder by a significant margin.

But I've not alwas been sure at all that milder meant less dangerous.

I hope Chavez was as benign as some seem to think. I'm still skeptical.