On Cesar Chavez March to Merced

The day started well with the early morning sun illuminating the glistening green fields around Planada after a night of rain. We gathered in the same park where Cesar Chavez had stopped on his historic march back in the sixties and were sent off with words of encouragement from one of Chavez’s fellow marchers who noted that our cause was also about the need for hope and dignity for working people. Then a brother from the UFW recited the farm worker’s prayer and we did the solidarity clap that originated with their cause decades earlier.

The day before we had marched into Planada’s elementary school with the permission of the principle and the children rushed out of their classrooms and across the playground to greet us. They laughed and jumped and began to chant “Si Se Puede!” when they saw the flatbed truck with our banner followed by the March for California’s Future bus. One of their teachers (who we met after school) had also marched with Chavez back in the day and he told us that he wept when he saw our march coming into his school. He wept because something needs to be done with schools closing down all around the area, teachers getting pink slips, and 80 percent of the children in this little town qualifying for some kind of state aid. The unemployment rate is around 40 percent and it’s hard to see how things will get better unless somebody takes dramatic action, he told us. It is like the Depression here in the Central Valley—with no New Deal on the way.

In the school gym that evening, a group of little girls performed a ballet folklorico for us, and the community thanked us for marching for the future of their beautiful children. They fed us spaghetti and cake and we pledged to carry their story and the stories of others like them to Sacramento.
On the road out of Planada the sky was full of dramatic clouds and the fields were full of golden wildflowers. Our numbers grew to over 200 with students from San Diego and Los Angeles being joined by teachers from around the state, folks from UDW and AFSCME as well as Merced locals inspired by the march.
When I left the road for an hour to speak at Merced College with some students from City College who’d come up on spring break, I told them that we were choosing what kind of future would be out there for their children. I told them that it was time to choose between prisons and schools, time to raise revenue rather than fire teachers, raise fees, and shut the doors to opportunity in California. Then the students and I told them that we came to the Central Valley to start a discussion with our forgotten neighbors, those people the big cities on the coast tend to ignore or disdain. Afterwards they thanked us for coming to Merced, for thinking of coming to the valley in the first place, for marching for them.

The march weaved along Bear Creek on the way into Merced and our numbers grew as more friends joined us. The energy was high and folks could feel it. “This is the biggest thing to happen here in a long time,” a local woman on the march said to me. Labor hasn’t made the front page in Merced for quite a while. And, despite the fact that the Central Valley is still governed by the entrenched oligarchy that opposed Chavez, you had the sense that people were hungry for something other than the same old story.

A bit to the North, the Berryhill brothers represent adjacent districts in the state assembly. Heirs to the Gallo wine empire, they and other Central Valley Republicans are the reason why we can’t pass a budget that would adequately fund our schools and vital public services. In the face of a current day regional Depression, they spew the same social Darwinist rhetoric and anti-tax dogma that has reduced many of their constituents to abject poverty.
The Berryhills and their allies like state Senator Jeff Denham, owner of a plastic factory, are the darlings of the hard right who have managed to “starve the beast” of California’s state government despite being in the minority. They’ve done it by refusing to raise any new revenue while the pink slips for teachers fly, the schools shut down, and the most needy among us have the safety net cut out from underneath them.

Despite all of this, as we headed into Merced, I felt the spirit of Chavez was with us. It has only been through social movements of working people that change has happened in America. So, as more union folks joined us for our rally in the park, I thought that anything was possible. And I hope this march will be the spark that gets the fire burning again.