César Chávez

This week I listened to Studs Terkel's rather brief interview with César Chávez from 1971. In the interview, Chávez discusses his childhood growing up in California, focusing mostly on his experience during the years of the depression. Chávez's father was a migrant farm worker, and he recounts their family's experience moving from city to city following the work, and their living conditions at each of the new labor camps. The Chávez family owned a small plot of land for only the first few years of César's life, but it was foreclosed on by the bank and after that their family moved from labor camp to labor camp, sometimes living out of the car or even under nearby bridges when housing was not available. Chávez also tells a couple of stories from his early teen years when he first experienced outright racial prejudice, such as refusing to be served in a hamburger joint in Fresno and being told "We don't serve Mexicans here, get out" by a young waitress. He stresses that as a young child, most of these hard times were rather easy to deal with, that children are resilient and can easily adapt to new and difficult situations. But he does say that the humiliation and the shame that his parents experienced was extremely hard for him to handle, harder than being forced to miss school or work doing difficult labor for little money at a very young age. Something I found very interesting about this interview was that Terkel only had to ask one question and that set Chávez off talking non stop for over sixteen minutes. It seemed like he had a lot to say, and really great experiences to share. His childhood was incredibly difficult and it is amazing to see the way he was able to move past those experiences and the things he was able to accomplish in his adult life.