An insult against our history

November 23, 2010

Alan Bean, director of the Texas-based Friends of Justice, looks at the decision of a Texas school board to refuse to name a holiday in the honor of César Chávez.

ARLINGTON, TEXAS, school students will still have a holiday in May, but it won't bear the name of César Chávez.

On November 18, a series of eloquent Latino activists--many of them in their teens--made the case for naming this anonymous holiday after the great labor organizer and civil rights activist. Gloria Peña, president of the Arlington school district's board of trustees, presented a motion in favor of the change. I even made a little impromptu speech of my own. It made no difference.

For me, this issue is personal and therefore emotional. First, the local fight for a Chávez holiday is being led by Luis Castillo, the Arlington League of United Latin American Citizens president, Friends of Justice board member and friend.

Secondly, Chávez has had an indirect influence on the organizing strategy Friends of Justice employs. Marshall Ganz, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, went to work for César Chávez in the mid-1960s after cutting his teeth as an organizer in Mississippi. (Ganz talks about this experience here and in a new book, Why David Sometimes Wins.)

César Chávez speaks at a farmworkers demonstration
César Chávez speaks at a farmworkers demonstration

From Chávez, Ganz learned the difference between marketing and organizing. Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008 because Marshall Ganz trained 25,000 organizers to lead a grassroots campaign; the president's problems began when a Chávez-style organizing strategy degenerated into a marketing campaign featuring silly e-mails purportedly from Barack Obama.

It was Ganz who stole the Chávez rallying cry "Yes, we can" (Sí se puede) for the Obama campaign. Friends of Justice board member Lydia Bean has worked closely with Ganz in recent years and has channeled key pieces of his philosophy into our work.

Why does the Arlington board of trustees have a problem with naming a currently anonymous and nondescript holiday after a Latino organizing hero and civil rights icon? What's the big beef here?

Trustee Wayne Ogle has mixed feelings about Chávez. As Marshall Ganz freely acknowledges, Chávez developed a paranoid streak in his later years and embraced some questionable ideas. Fair enough. All great leaders have their flaws--most of them resulting from the extraordinary pressure change agents work under.

But Ogle voted for the measure. He realized that the vote wasn't about his personal views; it was about honoring the Latino students who comprise 41 percent of the Arlington Independent School District (AISD) student body.


THE FOUR trustees who turned thumbs down claim to have great admiration for Chávez as a person; they're just afraid that naming a holiday in the Latino icon's honor might spark an outcry from military veterans.

Huh? Sure, Arlington kids don't currently get Veterans Day off. But the schools compete to see who can put on the most elaborate November 11 ceremony. If we want to honor our veterans, we should ensure their domestic and medical needs are taken care of. We are great at honoring veterans in the abstract while we ignore the concrete needs of the real men and women in the military.

If this issue is about empowering students, the veterans issue is a red herring invented to mask a more sinister issue.

César Chávez is unacceptable to a majority of AISD trustees for the same reason the great organizer is so important to the Latino community: Chávez defended the interests of Mexican-American laborers who were being exploited by the Anglo business community. Trustees couldn't care less about the man's late-career crankiness; they are offended by his positive achievements.

It was painful listening to Trustee Bowie Hogg explain his opposition to President Peña's motion. He had nothing personal against Chávez, he told the meeting, he just didn't like to see partisan politics injected into the board's deliberations. Hogg's body language and facial contortions communicated a very different message. Here's the message I picked up: "Madame president, I would like to take this opportunity to tell all the socialists, radical-labor-sympathizers and foreigners who favor your proposal to go to hell. Thank you very much."

What we saw was just another example of the pro-white bigotry we have been hearing from the Texas State Board of Education in recent years. They, too, have a beef with César Chávez, and for precisely the same reason. Texas conservatives aren't happy that, within two decades at most, there will be more Latino voters in Texas than Anglo voters.

Arlington, Texas, the proud home of the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers, has a school population that is 41 percent Latino, while our City Council and School Board have but one token non-Anglo apiece.

Our population may be diverse, but our monochrome politicians demonstrate that the power structure hasn't changed since Arlington was an all-white community in the 1950s.

First published at the Friends of Justice Web site.

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