Amazing how history is changed to accommodate some people, want Cesar Chavez as a great leader? Then let us change the history to suit Cesar.
That is a photograph of my uncle Librado. He has the distinct honor of having been arrested the most often during the farm workers strike. Many of my relatives were farm workers from Starr County.
Browse through this photos and you will not find Cesar Chavez.
Here is a photo story and you will find Cesar Chaves, he came on the last day to make sure he took credit for something that he was not supporting. You will run across Guillermo De La Cruz, another uncle. I don’t forget things like how the my relatives (Farm Workers) were betrayed by Cesar Chavez.
I again state Cesar Chavez was not a friend of the Texas Farm Workers.
A few months later, on June 18, 1977, TFWU started a historic 1,600-mile journey from Austin to Washington to win more public support for agricultural workers and gain an audience with President James E. Carter. The march culminated at the Lincoln Memorial on September 5, 1977. Religious leaders and union officials endorsed the march by the forty people. Carter, however, possibly at the behest of UFW president César Chávez, refused to meet with the marchers. Source
There were two marches to Austin, one in 1966 and the other in 1977. The first one, my father and his brother, were there on the final leg of the march. So was one of my younger brother. The last photo of my brother Jose was on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 March. My youngest son and I went to Austin to walk the final leg of the march. I took the photo.
Cesar Chavez helped many people and is to be admired for his work, but I have never considered him a leader of the Civil Rights movement unless one counts union organizing as such.
Texas Rangers and the farm workers strike of 1966
If nothing else, because of the barbaric nature of the Texas Rangers during the farm workers’ strike, Texas was forced to rein them in.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the brutal way in which the Rangers, under the command of the notorious Captain A. Y. Allee, suppressed the United Farm Workers’ strike in 1966-1967 at La Casita Farms in Starr County.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Rangers in 1974 in a lengthy opinion detailing the Rangers’ chilling violence and law-breaking against the workers, organizers, and supporting clergy. The legislature had no choice but to rein them in, converting them into an investigative arm of DPS, and getting them off the street. Source
Here is the case and why, to my father, they were always “Los pinche Rinches.”
