Eulogy for Manuel Vasquez, by Arturo S. Rodriguez, President United Farm Workers of America, September 7, 2010—Delano, Calif.
09/07/2010
Arturo S. Rodriguez, President United Farm Workers of America Eulogy for Manuel Vasquez September 7, 2010—Delano, Calif.
Brothers and sisters. We are united together in sorrow but also in celebration as we mark the passing of a true pioneer in humankind’s long and relentless march towards equality and dignity.
Courage isn’t doing what comes easy. It’s doing what comes hard. Measured by that standard, Manuel Vasquez led a very courageous life.
That he will be laid to rest tomorrow, September 8, is especially poignant. For September 8 is forty-five years to the day that Manuel Vasquez joined fellow members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in walking out on strike against area wine and table grape growers, thereby kicking off the Great Delano Grape Strike. Cesar Chavez’s union, the National Farm Workers Association, would vote to join the walkouts eight days later. The two organizations would merge the following year to form the United Farm Workers of America.
Manuel was one of the last of a remarkable generation of heroic farm workers who forty-five years ago did the unthinkable by challenging, and overcoming, the awesome power of one of California’s richest industries.
Today, our union’s task of organizing farm workers is still difficult and at times daunting. The challenges we face continue to be great. But they are nothing compared to the hurdles that faced Manuel four and a half decades ago on the fateful day when he and 1,500 of his comrades in AWOC struck the Delano grape growers.
Today, we work with a state law that is supposed to encourage and protect the right of farm workers to organize. We have the confidence that comes from forty-eight years of experience in organizing.
But forty-five years ago, Manuel Vasquez and his co-workers were literally struggling against history. For 100 years, every organizing attempt had been defeated. Every strike had been crushed. Every union had been conquered.
The only law that the 1965 grape strikers knew was the law of the jungle.
Manuel suffered contempt, intimidation and violence at the hands of the growers and their agents.
All the social, economic and political institutions in the Central Valley—including the courts and law enforcement—were solidly arrayed against the strikers.
In the face of such oppression, Manuel Vasquez and his fellow strikers were truly pioneers.
Manuel Vasquez and Cesar Chavez went back together in Brawley to the 1940s, when they lived near each other. But Cesar came into his life again later, in the early 1960s, when Cesar was organizing the union that became the United Farm Workers, going house to house in Delano, asking farm workers about their conditions and what kind of wage they thought they deserved.
These were the days before toilets and clean water in the fields, before unemployment insurance and workers compensation, before any protections against toxic pesticides. Those who complained about conditions or asked for more money were fired.
When the Delano strike began in 1965, Manuel was one of the first to walk out—along with his entire family. These were hard, hungry—and difficult—times.
As Manuel said, “Being a Chicano from Delano, you have to know when to stand up for your rights, [and] then here comes a man [Cesar Chavez] who tells you you have to be nonviolent.”
The difference between violence and nonviolence was a lesson Manuel came to learn well. “When you organize someone with your fists,” Manuel explained, “you’ve only organized them as long as you have your fist in their face. But if you organize with nonviolence in the light of the true facts—that they’re being exploited, that their conditions can be changed—then you can work together. Then it is everlasting.”
Manuel left his home in the valley in 1968 and travelled across the country to organize the first grape boycott. He did it again in 1973, during the second grape boycott.
As Cesar observed on the day the Delano grape growers signed their first union contracts at the Forty Acres on July 29, 1970, most of the strikers lost their homes and much of their worldly possessions. But like so many of the Delano strikers, sacrificing everything to build the union—being part of building this historic movement—also gave meaning and purpose to Manuel’s life.
Cesar used to say that his job as an organizer was to help ordinary people do extraordinary things. Manuel said Cesar “came into our lives when we really needed him. I think he wanted us to feel worthwhile.”
I think the example of Manuel’s life reflects why the Delano strike and the movement it created succeeded while others tried and failed for nearly 100 years to organize farm workers. By helping farm workers believe in themselves, by giving them hope, by making everyone believe the jobs they were doing were important, the Delano strikers and their successors in the decades that followed were able to do the impossible by confronting and vanquishing California agribusiness.
The lessons of Manuel’s life—of commitment and sacrifice, of being part of a cause that’s bigger than he was—are as relevant in our time as they were in the 1960s and ‘70s. The memory of this nonviolent warrior for justice will live on as long as we strive to follow his example and continue his work.
Now Manuel has gone to be with his friend and brother, Cesar, and with all the heroic strikers who changed the world forty-give years ago with simple acts of bravery and defiance.
To paraphrase that passage from the Book of Proverbs, give him the reward he has earned and let his own works praise him at the gates.
Viva La Huelga! Viva La Causa! Viva Manuel Vasquez!
