The Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: Part Three, At the Funeral of Cesar Chavez

Everyone carried flags with the union’s black eagle—some adding “Arizona” or the name of some other state they’d arrived from. The United Fruit Workers organized a march from Delano to Sacramento to show that even with the death of their leader, their union was very much alive.

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Editor's note: We’re delighted to share the third of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s thirty years of photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library.

Part Three tells of the funeral march for human rights and labor organizer Cesar Chavez, April, 1993. Chavez, with Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and others, co-founded the United Farm Workers. A following post will include images of the rebuilding of the union in the year after Chavez' death.

I drove down to Delano the night before Cesar’s funeral with my wife Lillian and my daughter Miki, who must have been four. Lillian was one of the Filipina students who worked on building the Agbayani Village retirement housing for her father’s generation of Filipino farm workers, the manongs.  

The kitchen in the Village was just shutting down as we got there. The manongs were gone by then of course. A young man coming from the islands in the 1920s would have been in his nineties by the time Cesar died. Their lives were too hard for anyone to survive to that age, working in the fields of the Pacific coast. The union built the Village for them in the 1970’s, and it had given them a place to stay once they couldn’t work any longer.

We looked at what the students had built twenty years earlier, and then slept in the car.

In the morning we headed into Delano to meet up with the people gathering for Cesar’s funeral march. Even as early as six, men and women were already standing in the dusty dawn with their children, waiting for it to start. Everyone carried flags with the union’s black eagle—some adding “Arizona” or the name of some other state they’d arrived from.

I didn’t want to take photographs of the funeral service at the Forty Acres. It was too formal, and there were plenty of photographers there to do that anyway. Instead, I began taking pictures of the people as they gathered. Then the march started. Following the young people carrying Cesar’s plain pine coffin, we all walked through Delano and up the Garces Highway to the union’s old headquarters on the Forty Acres a mile outside of town.

I wanted to see and understand through taking the photographs how people felt and how they reacted to Cesar’s death.

There were notable people, like Jesse Jackson, at the head of the march. But many were already waiting in the huge tent where the service would be held. The hundreds of people marching in the dust along the highway were almost all farm workers and their families.  

I wanted to see and understand through taking the photographs how people felt and how they reacted to Cesar’s death. There were certainly people overcome with emotion, crying as they walked or stood in the April sun. But most walked and talked as they might have in any other march. Stoicism, restraint, determination—that’s what I saw on their faces.

Alfredo Figueroa and his daughter Carmela brought guitars and a huge banner, proclaiming Blythe and the Palo Verde Valley the “valle de puro triunfo” (the “valley of total victory”). Alfredo claimed the union had never lost a campaign in his desert community next to the Colorado River. Having been an organizer there, sleeping on the floor of the school he organized, I know the claim is true.

In some ways the photos are a tribute to those years I spent as an organizer for the United Farm Workers in the 1970s. I took them with the same spirit of concentration on the workers that I remembered from those times when Cesar went with me to the fields, to visit crews I was organizing. He always made a point of showing workers (and the organizers) that workers had the first claim on his attention. Even if I had some urgent question I had to discuss, he’d cut me off and turn to a woman in the grape vines trying to get a moment to speak with him.

For thousands of farm workers Cesar was the leader of the movement to which they’d given a good deal of their lives.

For thousands of farm workers Cesar was more than just a symbol. He was the leader of the movement to which they’d given a good deal of their lives. But his death and the march came at the end of a long period in which the union had lost most of the contracts won at its height in the 1970s. And Cesar had made enemies of many people who’d given their lives to build the union. While the bitterness was fresh enough to keep some away, others came despite it.

Alfredo, who'd known Cesar's family long before the union started, came as much to recognize his own history as he did to honor Cesar's.  For most of the people on the march, recognizing Cesar's passing was a way to pay tribute to him as a person, but also to the movement they built together. I heard many people say, “Cesar is gone, but we are still here. The union is still here.”

When I took the photograph of Lillian and Miki in front of the memorial set up by Delano's Filipino community, it had that message.  Many Filipinos were antagonized by Cesar's trip to the Philippines while Ferdinand Marcos was still dictator, and felt sidelined in the union itself. Yet recognizing Cesar at his funeral was also a way of recognizing themselves, and the contributions they'd made, going far back to years long before the great grape strike of 1965-70.

The United Farm Workers was and is the product of a social movement, and Cesar would have been the first to say so.  He was not the single author of the boycotts or the strategic ideas the union used in fighting for its survival. No one person could have been, because they evolved as the responses of thousands of people to the age-old problems faced by farm worker unions for a century - of strikebreaking, geographic isolation, poverty and grower violence.  That movement produced other leaders - women like Dolores Huerta and Jessica Govea, Filipino labor leaders Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, African American Mack Lyons and many white organizers from the civil rights and student movements of the day.

“Cesar is gone, but we are still here. The union is still here.”

In the years since the first grape strike in 1965, farm worker unions have grown to over a dozen, in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, in addition to California. To one degree or another, all draw inspiration from the movement that started in Coachella and Delano. When workers walked out at Sakuma Farms in Washington in 2013, forming their new union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and then spent four years striking and boycotting to get a contract, they were using lessons farm workers learned in Delano in 1965.  

The year before Cesar died, five thousand workers struck the grape fields of Coachella, winning the first wage increase they’d had in a decade.  Every year spontaneous work stoppages like it, although perhaps not on that scale, take place in U.S. fields.

A union that doesn't lead and organize the anger that produces those job actions becomes irrelevant to workers. Organizing depends on taking that anger and need, and transforming it into a powerful economic weapon. And any union depends on organizing to survive.  If there's inspiration to be drawn from Cesar's example, it is that this can be done. The social movement sparked half a century ago is still capable of transforming life for farm workers, and in the process, much of the rest of our world as well.

That was the possibility that I saw on the faces, and heard in the voices, of the people marching at Cesar's funeral.  It is what I still see in those photographs I took then, and in the ones I take today.”

Photos 1-5: Farm workers and their families, joined by Jesse Jackson, wait for the march to start.

Photos 6-9: Young people hoist Cesar’s plain pine casket onto their shoulders, and carry it at the head of the march.

Photos 10-13: Children and mothers walk up the Garces Highway.  Some came with a group of Aztec dancers, and dance as they march.

Photos 14-16: Alfredo and Carmela Figueroa came from Blythe, carrying their guitars. They sing the songs of the farm worker movement as they walk.

Photos 17-18: Some workers carry irises which they hand out to other marchers. Lillian holds a tired Miki in her arms as she stands in front of the Filipino community's memorial to Cesar.

Photo 19: Cesar Chavez picketing Safeway during the grape boycott in San Francisco, 1989. Behind him is Oscar Mondragon.

Photo 20: Cesar Chavez on the picket line during a strike at CBS in Delano, 1991.

Find other installments in this series here.