Two days before the state holiday that bears his grandfather's name, 26-year-old Anthony Chávez visited Pittsburg High School on Thursday to tell students about the legacy and hopeful future of César Chávez.
About 50 students gathered in the school's library for the talk, and several of them huddled around Chávez when he was done, asking for advice and ideas.
Just as Chávez had fought for farmworkers' rights, "I'm fighting for something, too," said Charniquera Hines, 17, a junior at the school and a member of the Black Student Union.
Hines said she was inspired to take up a cause last year when she discovered a website chronicling the abuse of factory farm animals. After listening to Chávez speak and asking his advice for how to become more active with her own cause, Hines said she plans to start a Young Vegetarians club.
Kevin Palafox, a 17-year-old senior and member of the school's Latinos Unidos club, said he wants to see more murals go up in his neighborhood. He said murals inspire pride and excitement in people who live near them.
Amara Brown, a 16-year-old junior and BSU member, said she flat-out wants to see more people getting more involved in their communities.
The range of student reactions was well-suited to Chávez's hourlong speech, in which he detailed some of his grandfather's life story but also touched on a number of human rights causes and on what he said is the basic, urgent need for citizens to take action to make their communities thrive.
His focus, though, was on his grandfather's life's work: the rights of farmworkers.
"This is the most honorable work in human civilization," Chávez said. "This is what let us all stop being nomads, and let us start building settlements and growing communities."
He went on to describe workers whose backbreaking work left them unable to pick up their children when they arrived home after working 10- to 14-hour days.
"They'd wake up in the dark and go to work in freezing temperatures that would make your fingers numb. Then they'd still be out there in the midday sun when the heat reached three-digit temperatures that could kill you with heat stroke."
Chávez said his grandfather's work spearheading the farmworkers' rights movement in the '60s, '70s and '80s was his life's passion, though as a devoted vegetarian, "he took almost as much joy out of turning someone vegetarian as he did convincing them to start or join unions."
When César Chávez died in 1993, tens of thousands of people turned out for his funeral -- and Anthony Chávez was just in third grade, confused by the astronomical turnout.
"You're here for my grandfather?" he said he remembered wondering. "You mean that goofy guy who always tells us jokes? Who holds us upside-down when we get hiccups?"
Local students and organizers plan to march in César Chávez's honor on his holiday Saturday, beginning with an 11 a.m. rally outside Pittsburg City Hall at 65 Civic Drive. That will lead to a noon celebration at Marina Vista Elementary School, near the corner of Eighth Street and Railroad Avenue.
