塞萨尔查韦斯和他的运动：宗教观 Cesar Chavez and His Movement: The Religious Perspective
Introduction
At first, I didn’t know much about Cesar Chavez and his cause to help farmers. As I started reading several of his speeches, I discovered a common ground. During most of his speeches and strikes, Cesar frequently made references to the teachings of the Catholic Church. My research relates to why Chavez promoted his Catholic faith in his speeches, and what type of impact did it have on the migrant farm workers and the Catholic Church.Cesar Chavez and His Motivation for Justice
Cesar Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, in Yuma Arizona. His family lived in a small farm that was granted down to the family by his grandfather.1 Trying to survive the Great Depression, the family had to migrate because they were unable to pay their property taxes. “The loss of land planted the seed of rebelliousness that would one day grow into Cesar Chavez’s willingness to protest against injustice to farm workers.”2 However, the main resentment occurred during school. Born speaking the Spanish language, the school reminded him he was an outsider:In class one of my biggest problems was the language. Of course, we bitterly resented not being able to speak Spanish, but they insisted that we had to learn English. They said that if we were American, then
Villarreal 2
we should speak the language, and if we wanted to speak Spanish, we should go back to Mexico.
When we spoke Spanish, the teacher swooped down on us. I remember the ruler whistling through the air as its edge came down sharply across my knuckles. It really hurt. Even out in the playground, speaking Spanish brought punishment.3
This type of treatment was the typical to Mexican-American immigrants and migrants. From a personal standpoint, my grandmother would tell me similar stories of how she was ridiculed by the teachers and the students when she emigrated from Mexico to the United States during the 1930s. Like Cesar Chavez, my grandmother never received a formal education. Her large family couldn’t afford sending everyone to school. There wasn’t enough money, and she was forced to drop out of school in order to help maintain the house along with her sisters while her brothers were out working in the cotton fields.
This form of “Americanization” to speak English was forced upon many foreigners. For Chavez, however, this treatment didn’t just stay in the schools; it followed him everywhere he went as he remembers being forced to sit in segregated sections in movie theaters and being denied service in restaurants.4 All these experiences, from racial discrimination
Villarreal 3
to the harsh migrant life, would later be the planting seeds to build a union dedicated to eliminating those injustices.
The American Catholic Church was not too optimistic about Mexican-Americans either. The Catholic Church and the culture of Mexican Americans are very different. In Jay Dolan’s book,Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church: 1900-1965, “Hispanics bring to the Catholic Church spiritual and communal traditions which are very different from those of other Catholics whose origins lie in Anglo-Saxon and Eastern European cultures. The challenges presented to the United States Church by the large numbers of Hispanics will be formidable.”5 Mexican Americans has been criticized for their “faith expressions” that did not always reflect official American Catholic Church teachings and regulations.6
However, this was not the case with the entire Catholic Church. When Chavez moved to San Jose, California in 1952, he met a Roman Catholic priest who would dramatically impact his life.7Father Donald McDonnell became acquainted with Chavez, and later began teaching Chavez about social justice and labor movements among farm workers. McDonnell introduced encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII that outlined the church’s support for workers who protests against injustices. These new ideas shared with Chavez sparked the development of his own personal
Villarrea
