중남미

Since the spring of 1962, Céar Cháez and his colleagues had launched a historical struggle for farm workers’ unionization in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Events in California in 1965 -1966 such as successful unionization of farm workers in the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA), statewide boycott campaigns, and a famous procession to Sacramento promoted César Chávez to the rank of the great U.S. labor leaders. It was a historic moment that was comparable to the emergence of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s for African Americans. Hence, the historical significance of César Chávez transcends the field of labor history. Indeed, he is considered to have been a great civil rights leader among Mexican Americans and other Latino groups which had suffered from ‘internal colonialism’ and had been treated as second-class citizens in the United States. César Chávez was able to solicit hundreds of individual stories of injustice and reweave them into a broader story of economic, political, and racial injustice that enabled him to speak on behalf of Mexican descendants throughout the United States. Although César Chávez saw himself primarily as a labor organizer rather than an ethnic movement leader, the farm workers’ struggle that he headed encouraged what came to be known as the Chicano movement since the late 1960s and it was embraced by many Chicanos as a part of the movement to assert pride in their ethnic heritage and affirm their cultural citizenship. Moreover, César Chávez came across as a spiritual leader and not merely a symbol of ethnic identity. He was a pious Catholic and sincerely demonstrated his strong religious beliefs in practice such as nonviolent acts of resistance to authority, fasting, prayer, and meditation. As a result, he was also revered as if he were a political saint in a form of civil religion which was quite exceptionally developed for him as an exceptional leader of a social movement.