César Chávez was a dear family friend. He would often call ahead (sometimes far in advance, other times just before arriving) to let my parents know that a group from the United Farm Workers (UFW) was coming to our house in Sacramento. On this night, the UFW gathered to discuss a protest at the California State Capitol the next day. 

Founded by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and other labor and community organizers in 1962, the UFW fought to establish and protect the working and human rights of farm laborers and their families against growers and large agribusiness corporations. Migrant farm workers in the U.S. have historically suffered from discrimination and poverty at the hands of profit-prioritizing businesses. Social unionizing in the U.S., specifically in support of non-English speaking, impoverished, immigrant workers, began in the mid-nineteenth century and is part of a distinctly Jewish-American tradition in industrial relations. This history and Jewish shared values of social justice and impetus to organize for widespread change were an integral part of César’s education when founding the UFW. César was known to study the work of many Jewish social unions and their leaders—David Dubinsky of the Ladies Garment Workers Union and Ralph Helstein of the United Packinghouse Workers of America were among his predecessors and collaborators. And many of the UFW’s critical organizational skills and resources were gleaned from modern Jewish community organizers such as Fred Ross and his mentor, Saul Alinsky, with whom César had worked at the Community Service Organization for over ten years. Through community organizing and campaigns seeking justice for day laborers, the UFW gained supporters across diverse geographical, cultural, racial, and class lines and fueled a powerful civil rights movement that still fights against the growers and legislators who continue to exploit farm workers today.

The energy to organize and mobilize fueled much of my childhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s— I was born into a family of activists, but I didn’t learn to name our work that way until later. Growing up I thought everyone knew about grape boycotts and about never crossing a picket line. Like César, my family’s commitment to social justice and civil rights was something they learned from those before them and taught to those after; my siblings and I were all raised in community organizing and still consider it a pillar of our lives and work. While poster-making had been a major part of our participation, my family joined many other activists in support of the UFW through marches, fundraisers, community gatherings, and boycotts.

César passed away in 1993 when I was nine years old. Attending his funeral and the march that followed is the last memory I have of him. I remember the heat in Delano that day and what felt like an endless sea of people who had gathered to say goodbye. But what so many of us were also engaged in, that day in April, was recommitting to honor and continue his work. The circumstances that made César’s life’s work necessary are still present almost thirty years after his death, and the need to organize against oppressive systems of government and exploitative structures of labor persists seventy years after he worked to do so with Ross and Alinsky. But these forces are met by the multitudes who continue to doggedly support the struggle for social justice and civil and human rights.

I was raised in the noisy, hectic environment of activist organizing. I am proud to bring these experiences and values to my work at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and prouder still that the institution I am a part of has those same values embedded in its cultural history and vision for the future. Today, the stakes are still high and the urgency to work together across industries, borders, and any other defining lines still feels complex and messy at times. But all of the movement and all of the noise in the gathering to organize is imperative, because it is a critical way to show up and to make clear: tonight we’ll gather, tomorrow we'll march—together.