Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 24, 1993 TAG: 9304240187
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SAN LUIS, ARIZ. LENGTH: Medium
"He was really a visionary," said Jerry Brown, the former California governor and a close political ally.
Chavez was president of the alifornia-based United Farm Workers Union, which gave voice to farm workers, many of them poor and Hispanic.
Praised in 1968 by Sen. Robert Kennedy as "one of the heroic figures of our time," Chavez called attention to his causes by going on a 25-day fast in 1968, a 24-day fast in 1972 and a 36-day fast in 1988.
His doctors said the water-only fast in 1988 to protest the use of pesticides on California table grapes caused Chavez to lose 19 percent of his body weight - 33 1/2 pounds - and left him with kidney damage.
Chavez apparently died in his sleep at the home of a union supporter, said police Lt. John Miranda.
Dolores Huerta, union vice president, had worked with Chavez since 1955 and co-founded the union with him in 1962. "We know he is irreplaceable, but people are in place to continue the work of the union," Huerta said.
"He was a worthy advocate for his cause," said Bob Vice of the California Farm Bureau Federation.
Chavez was in San Luis, a southwestern Arizona border town, to testify in the retrial of a lawsuit filed by a farm company that said the boycott hurt business.
His death came at a time when the union's influence is dwindling.
Membership, which totaled about 109,000 in the 1970s, was down to about 20,000 by the early 1990s. Conditions and wages for farm workers peaked in the late 1970s. They suffered through the 1980s and continue to decline. Workers often live near farm fields in shacks or cars, or out in the open.
Chavez once said: "If the union falls apart when I am gone, I will have been a miserable failure and it will have been a terrible waste of a lot of time by a lot of people."
Chavez first attracted national attention in 1965 when his fledgling union struck table-grape growers in California's San Joaquin Valley.
The union called for a national boycott to reinforce "La Huelga" - the strike - and organized a 300-mile march from Delano, Calif., to the state Capitol in Sacramento.
The boycott lasted five years, and ended when growers agreed to a contract with the union in 1970, the first big labor victory for migrant workers in the United States.
Chavez, who lived in Keene in Southern California, is survived by his wife, Helen, and eight children.
by CNB