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I was very interested in trying to understand who he was,
not just as an activist but as a thinker, as a theorist.
And this is a position that most people usually don't think of as Cesar Chavez,
in fact, if you read most of his biographies, they're stories of him coming to consciousness
as a labor organizer and as a leader.
I think that he had a unique perspective on the idea of
how to use nonviolent civil disobedience as a tool for social justice and education.
But, really learned in the fields and in his work
how to connect with people and to become a strong community organizer.
And from that experience realized that no one was addressing the issues of
farmworker injustice in the United States.
Martin Luther King, around 1966 or so, started to realize - he said in Where Do We Go From Here,
one of his books, that he realized that the early civil rights movement was a movement that was
in his words reactive to injustice.
And they developed strategies and tactics for creating demonstrations and marches and so forth
that were reacting to problems that were already existing.
And so, after the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act,
1964 and 1965, he realized that more needed to be done.
But he recognized that the tactics and strategies that had been developed
early on in the Civil Rights movement, creating large marches and large demonstrations,
in trying to petition the government for redress could only go so far.
And problems now were about housing, were about cultural changes
about militarism and racism and materialism in the United States.
And that demonstrations and marches were not going to be particularly effective
at trying to alter that kind of consciousness in the United States.
And that other kinds of work needed to be done.
Those kinds of emphases - of creating alternatives, of getting people to think about themselves
as active participants for envisioning a different kind of world,
were emphases that Cesar Chavez had early on in the building of the farmworkers' movement.
So, while he recognized - as Cesar Chavez recognized-
the importance of building marches and structures that were about resistance and speaking out against injustice,
part of that, for him, was always about using those spaces at the same time to think about
how can we build a better life and how can we envision something different for farmworkers
that would be about creating spaces for new structures.
And the Farmworker movement was always talking, also, about, not only how do we change legislation
for instance to protect farmworkers, but how can, then, we get farmworkers
to think about creating new ways of housing or cooperative markets.
Cesar Chavez, in some sense, was trying to develop the strategies and techniques
for alternative envisioning of a socially just world.
This was always the centerpiece of the United Farmworkers' Movement. Social justice activism can take place
in the 21st century that we can learn a lot from - not only the example of his activism,
but the ways in which he thought that kind of envisioning should take place.