Marchers pay homage to Cesar Chavez

By Joe Lawlor

FLINT - The struggles of farm workers was not some far-away concept to Maria Salinas, who grew up picking strawberries and cucumbers in Manistee County.

So when the Hispanic/Latino Collaborative on Saturday celebrated the late Cesar Chavez, the famed farm union organizer, it hit close to home.

"I was there, picking the strawberries, although as a kid I probably ate more than I picked," said Salinas, 26, with a laugh.

About 100 members of the community marched along Chavez Drive, singing songs and winding their way back to the University of Michigan-Flint for a presentation and Mexican food lunch.

Chavez visited Flint in 1987, when the downtown street was named for him. Chavez championed many worker rights, including reducing the use of pesticides in farming to protect the workers.

Maria's mother, Filomena Salinas, said they worked as farm workers until she and her husband earned an education. They moved to Flint in the late 1980s to get better jobs.

"Especially when you hear (politicians) talk about immigration, that bothers me," she said. "Without the immigrants, you wouldn't be able to get food into the stores."

March organizer Art Reyes said bringing in Baldemar Velasquez, a farm worker union organizer from Ohio, to speak on Saturday showed that many issues remain.

"When we look at the farm movement, it's a continuous struggle. It's not just a history lesson," Reyes said.

Velasquez said he met Chavez and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, but he was so young that he didn't realize that he was witnessing "history before my own eyes."

"You knew that when you met Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. that they were committed to the cause, no matter what the cost," said Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee.

Velasquez said he is working at unionizing farm workers in North Carolina.

March organizer Arminda Garcia said when the Chavez celebration started last year, it originally was just a cultural event. But the collaborative has started taking up causes, such as trying to reduce diabetes in the Hispanic population.

"Now the ideas are going way beyond when we started," Garcia said.