Cesar Chavez Quotes

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

Farm workers are not agricultural implements; they are not beasts of burden to be used and discarded.

Let the prisoners in the jails pick the fruit in place of illegal farm worker immigrants.

I am in complete solidarity with France's farm workers, and I detest McDonald's.

The consumer boycott is the only open door in the dark corridor of nothingness down which farm workers have had to walk for many years. It is a gate of hope through which they expect to find the sunlight of a better life for themselves and their families.

Farm workers are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves

The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed. No one—neither tenants nor their landlords—had any problem making children and women work in the fields.

California is one of the strongest states with one of the solidest economies but, at the same time, ignores the reality of its farm workers.

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

He thinks with regret of the great days when he could at harvest time at least go down into Hungary and work on the big estates and bring back, as his wage, a side of bacon for the winter. That was wealth, to him.

Professional farmworkers who know how to do a number of different jobs, whether it be pruning or picking or crafting, they see themselves as professionals, and they take a lot of pride in that work. They don't see themselves as doing work that is demeaning.

I for one believe that we absolutely need an improved guest worker program, one that holds immigrants and employers accountable and yet still enables us to get a crop out of the ground in south Georgia.

I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.

My first job entailed spending a summer working in a cornfield in Nebraska.

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something.

The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.

It is indispensably necessary that they be placed in positions [reservations] where they can be controlled and finally compelled by sheer necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve. Considering, as the untutored Indian does, that labor is a degradation, and that there is nothing worthy of his ambitions but prowess in war, success in the chase, and eloquence in council, it is only under such circumstances that his haughty pride can be subdued, and his wild energies trained to the more ennobling pursuits of civilized life.

There are no American peasants.

A symbol is an important thing. That is why we chose an Aztec eagle. It gives pride...When people see it they know it means dignity

I dreamed of a future as a muscular, tanned, kibbutznik, who plowed the fertile fields of the Jezreel Valley in the day, sang religiously in the dining hall in the evening, and fiercely guarded the farmland at night, riding a noble horse.

I'll tell you, my dad played and sang, and it didn't take me long to figure out that playing a guitar was a whole lot better than getting ahold of a hoe handle or chopping cotton, man.

There is no law for farm labor organizing, save the law of the jungle.

'Redneck' has been terribly abused as a term. Where I come from, a redneck was a farmer who worked the fields all day and got his neck sunburned. People made fun of them.