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LOS ANGELES (CNS) - A César Chávez Day of Service event will be held in South El Monte Saturday while a remembrance of the late labor leader's fight for farmworkers' rights will be held at Stanford Avalon Community Garden in South Los Angeles.
More than 250 volunteers are expected to come to Earthworks Farm to celebrate Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis' partnership with the nonprofit organization CultivaLA in promoting urban agriculture in the San Gabriel Valley.
The day of service is set to begin at 8 a.m. and will include native plant installation, a presentation on increasing local food access and a mulch and compost workshop.
CultivaLA describes its mission as transforming healthy food access and wellness through people, social enterprise and environmental justice.
The remembrance will begin at 10 a.m. and include mariachi and Aztec dancers, a resource fair with representatives from city agencies, youth services and employment opportunities. There will also be a gardening workshop and a farmers market with fresh produce.
The events come two days before Los Angeles and Los Angeles County mark César Chávez Day. The state holiday commemorating the anniversary of Chávez's birth is Friday.
Chávez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 with Dolores Huerta. The union merged in 1965 with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form the UFW.
Chávez, an advocate of nonviolence, is best remembered for spearheading a grape boycott in 1965 that went nationwide in 1968 and lasted until 1978, resulting in higher wages for farm workers and focusing national attention on their plight.
Chávez and the UFW played an instrumental role in the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, which made California the first state to give farm workers the right to seek union representation and bargain collectively within an established legal framework.
Born March 31, 1927, in Yuma, Arizona, Chávez dropped out of school after the eighth grade to help support his family by joining them in the fields as a migrant farm worker, witnessing the many adversities those workers faced daily.
Chávez died in 1993 at age 66.