Today is the birthday of Cesar Chavez. He died at the relatively young age of 66, but had he lived, he would be 83 years old. The grandchild of Mexican immigrants, Cesar was born on his family’s farm outside Yuma, Arizona. During the Great Depression, his family lost the farm and they became migrant workers, following the harvests in fields and vineyards throughout the southwestern United States.
Cesar saw firsthand the hardships, exploitation and discrimination suffered by migrant workers, and in 1952 he joined the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group. Eventually, along with Dolores Huerta, he founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers of America. He spent the rest of his life working for and achieving change, including fair labor practices, health insurance, improved living conditions and retirement benefits for migrant workers.
As a child working in the fields, Cesar attended over 30 schools, and he left school after the eighth grade. Yet he believed passionately in education. He read voraciously, and continued to educate himself independently throughout his life. He once said, “The end of all education should surely be service to others.”
Like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar believed in the principles of nonviolence. In leading the movement, he used marches, boycotts, and fasts to bring attention to the causes he supported. In 1992, Chavez received the prestigious Pacem in Terris Award from the Catholic Church, and the following year he was awarded the highest honor accorded an American citizen, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As we deal with the everyday stresses we all face, we often feel our lives are limited. We think that because we do not have wealth or power, we cannot affect change in the world. We may have a desire to make a difference in our communities, our nation or even globally, but we defer action to some time in the future, when we may have more resources.
Cesar Chavez never made more than $6,000 in a year. He never owned a home. He died, as he had lived, with no money. But he used his life to affect greater change in the world than most millionaire business owners or powerful politicians. He was touched by the suffering of migrant farm workers and their children; he saw a need and he determined to make a difference. He created a vision of change, and he worked tirelessly to fulfill that vision.
Money and power are certainly tools that can be used for good. But as the life of Cesar Chavez demonstrates, the most important tools we can have are available to all of us: the clarity of our intention and the scope of our vision.
1 thought on “The Value of One Life”