A lot of dramatic changes are taking place in the White House after yesterday’s inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. More subtle changes, like the Oval Office décor, have drawn attention for their symbolic significance. Portraits of Andrew Jackson were replaced with those of Founding Fathers, and busts of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks line the walls of the most important office on earth. One particular bust is tremendously significant to the Latino community: behind the Resolute Desk, along a collection of personal photos of the President’s family, sits Cesar Chavez, Mexican-American union leader and labor organizer.
Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona to Mexican immigrant parents in 1927. In 1939, he moved to California with his family, where he would spend the next decade working in agricultural fields. During this time, he came to know and endure the brutal working conditions that he would spend the rest of his life fighting to change.
In 1962, Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association, which would eventually merge to become the United Farm Workers Union. In September of 1965, his association joined Filipino-American farmworkers in the years-long Delano grape strike to protest substandard pay and farmworker treatment. In 1968, he went on a 25-day hunger strike. The strike culminated in a meeting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy who, horrified by the working conditions Chavez was protesting against, pledged support to his cause. Two years later, the strikers’ efforts paid off as Delano growers signed contracts officially recognizing the United Farm Workers Union.
During the decades that followed, Chavez’s efforts, which stressed nonviolent methods like boycotts, marches, and strikes, brought national awareness to the plight of Latino and immigrant workers harvesting the crops that fed the rest of the country. After his death in 1993, Chavez was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Thanks to his advocacy and lifelong commitment to workers’ rights, farmworkers in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and beyond gained access to basic commodities like toilets and clean water and secured fairer wages and safer working conditions.
The fact that a bust of Cesar Chavez is prominently displayed behind President Biden’s desk brings hope to activists that efforts to continue Chavez’s legacy will be at the forefront of the administration’s priorities. “It represents the hopes and aspirations of an entire community that has been demonized and belittled, and we hope this is the beginning of a new day, a new dawn in which the contributions of all Americans can be cherished and valued,” Paul Chavez, Cesar Chavez’s son and president of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, said of the bust. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the activist’s granddaughter, called it the “proudest moment of [her] life. Rodriguez will serve in the Biden White House as Director of the Office of Intergovernmental Relations.