Activists rekindling memories of 1966 farmworkers march

Rebecca Flores was sitting in a secretarial pool at Randolph AFB when a group of farmworkers, newly unionized, marched from Rio Grande City through San Antonio and to Austin to demand a meeting with then-Gov. John Connally.

Joined by union organizers, students and others, they wanted farmworkers included in minimum-wage standards. They wanted $1.25 an hour.

In Starr County, farmworkers earned 40 cents, sometimes as much as 85 cents, an hour. Hundreds already had signed union cards and walked out of melon fields to prove their might. It was the summer of 1966. Protest was in the wind.

Flores, then 23, remembers her father’s response to Connally’s vow to head them off in New Braunfels, announcing he wouldn’t be in Austin when they got there.

A former farmer and migrant farmworker, Flores’ father said, “Hasta te hierve la sangre.” He wasn’t alone in feeling his blood nearing a boiling point.

Fifty years have passed since the march dramatized the poor working conditions and wages of farmworkers and the solidarity of those who rallied to their side, the Catholic Church in particular.

Now Flores, 73, who for decades served as Texas director of the UFW, is joining other former organizers and supporters in calling for commemorations about this important period in Texas history. “It was the beginning of the Chicano Movement in Texas,” she says.

They’re planning remembrances, interfaith services and historical markers along the route from Rio Grande City to Austin. They’re looking for farmworkers and others who walked any part of those 490 miles. They’ve found a few — they’re elderly and frail, Flores said.

Starr County Judge Eloy Vera was 15 and working in a field that summer. He signed a union card. He has promised to erect a marker to the 1966 farmworkers.

Hidalgo County Judge Ramon Garcia has promised a marker that will tell generations that farmworkers in South Texas stood their ground in the face of powerful forces that included growers, politicians and Texas Rangers, who harassed, arrested and beat up strikers.

Committees are being led by a few names you might remember: Jim Harrington, longtime civil liberties attorney; Juanita Valdez-Cox, who served as UFW South Texas director; and retired United Methodist bishop Joel Martinez, who’s working with Flores in San Antonio.

The period energized young Chicanos behind farmworkers, in whom they saw not only themselves, but their fathers and mothers, siblings and grandparents who picked vegetables and cotton and fruit in South Texas and migrant routes to the Midwest and California.

Together with other marchers, they sowed seeds that led Mexican-Americans to colleges and universities, into political leadership and the military, into professions and business, producing generations of power yet to be fully realized.

For Flores, it’s also personal. The march altered her path, too. By 1967, she quit her civil service job, cashed in a retirement fund and went to college. She ended up at St. Mary’s University, then the University of Michigan, where she wasn’t the only San Antonian who came out of its school of social work when organizing became a category of study.

The sparks lit a blaze that long, hot summer. Farmworkers arrived in Austin by Labor Day. Flores said more than 10,000 people were there; other sources say 15,000. Marchers had walked 12 miles a day on most days.

Wonderful little stories are being amassed. Flores found a newspaper item that mentioned 18 pairs of shoes donated to farmworkers when they passed through Falfurrias. Brownsville Bishop Humberto Medeiros is being remembered for giving inspiration to farmworkers in San Juan. Parish after parish fed marchers and gave them safe haven; Missions Espada and San Juan included.

Farmworkers encountered far less friendly South Texas towns, too.

Others are looking at old photos of the march, many included in “Sons of Zapata: A Brief Photographic Journey of the Farm Workers Strike in Texas,” and are discovering relatives in the grainy images. The project’s website is farmworkers2016.org.

While the California organizer César Chávez joined the marchers in Austin and they were certainly inspired by him, Texas farmworkers rose of their own agency, even if their personal gains were minimal.

“If farmworkers can do that in the middle of summer,” many others began thinking of what they could do, Flores said. “What was successful is that it awoke a whole demographic of people.”

Nationally only a small percentage of historical markers tell of the contributions of U.S. Latinos, so Flores is especially focused on getting as many of them cemented into the ground.

“It was the beginning of the Chicano Movement in Texas,” she said. “One of the markers will say that.”