![]() The strength they show us is a strength not many people have,” he said. I don’t know how far they traveled to be there, how they did it. “I had a feeling of looking at people so much better than me. Luna took out his phone to take a photo of them. Hundreds of people held up cellphones to take his photo. Luna got on the stage to introduce the film as the Central Valley sky darkened. “I’m here to learn,” the recent immigrant said in Spanish. ![]() The next day, the forelady threw wet overalls on the ground and said: ‘You want to work, wear them.’ ”Ĭruz said he knew little of Cesar Chavez. “There was another woman who went to human resources because the overalls are thrown together and dirty and they might have chemicals. “They used him as an example,” former co-worker Alma Patino Alvarez, 29, said. He said he was fired this year shortly after wearing a UFW shirt to the fields. ![]() He worked for a company where the employees are in a tense struggle over whether to leave the union. In the Fresno area, the person pushing hardest was Juan Cruz, 26. “We had house meetings, and I saw that it only takes a couple of people to get everyone else excited,” said Rubi Flores, a UFW organizer. This week, to get hundreds of people to a film screening in the middle of grape fields on short notice, organizers used the same tactics that Chavez once employed to transform this isolated spot into the center of a social movement. Every morning, Mass was celebrated in the warehouse of the union’s co-op gas station. ![]() Thousands of workers came to support him. In 1968 at the Forty Acres, this UFW center west of Delano, Chavez fasted for 25 days to rededicate the farmworker movement to nonviolence. The film is set in the 10 years surrounding the grape boycotts that began in the 1960s and drew national attention to brutal working conditions in the fields. “The night was about reuniting people and reminding us what happened here.” “I saw enough to know there are many details I don’t know,” she said. When the film played, its images were a mirror of everything around: the fields, the stretching sky, the buildings - and the faces in the audience.īy the end of the evening, “si se puede” would meet “que sera sera” in the form of an unexpected spring shower that abruptly cut the showing short. ![]()
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