Mexican-American icon earns permanent spot on campus

AUSTIN - It took 124 years, but the largest university in Texas on Tuesday unveiled a monument to a Latino leader, Cesar Chavez.

“Cesar would be humbled to be acknowledged in this way,” said Juan C. Gonzalez, vice president for Student Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Chavez’s granddaughter, Christine Chavez, and the nation’s head of higher education were among the speakers as more than 1,000 people sang, cried, cheered remembered the legacy of the Mexican-American labor organizer who grew up picking crops in California and went on to found the United Farm Workers union.

The statue is a symbol of how far the campus has come in including various ethnicities, said Lety Garza, a second-year government student from Brownsville.

“I guess it’s better late than never,” Garza said.

The bronze statue came about by a student-led initiative that began in 2000.

Christine Chavez was the last to speak during a two-hour dedication ceremony. She remembered a trip she and her sister took as teenagers with their grandfather to New York City, where he had a speaking engagement.

On the plane ride, they read the itinerary and learned that trip organizers scheduled him to stay at the swanky Park Plaza Hotel. Knowing he preferred to stay with fellow labor organizers when he traveled, the girls begged him to try the fancy hotel instead. Chavez reluctantly agreed, she said.

When they arrived at the hotel, workers had formed a picket line to protest job conditions. Instead of staying there, Chavez insisted they spend the weekend walking the line with the picketers, she said.

It was typical of his dedication to the labor cause and of his insistence on solidarity with other organizers, she said.

“I’ve never witnessed that level of commitment or dedication in any person before or since,” she said.

Chavez was born in 1927 on a farm near Yuma, Ariz. When he was 10, his father lost his farm in the Depresssion, sending Chavez and his family migrating for work in the fields of the Southwest.

After laboring in the fields with his family for decades, he began to organize workers, and in 1965 he led the first boycott of California grape growers to protest working conditions.

His work organizing labor resulted in higher wages for those who harvest crops and affected other labor movements around the country.

Chavez died in 1993.