More than 15,000 people marched on the capitol in Austin on Labor Day 1966, the final day of a 490-mile march that started in the Rio Grande Valley and paved the way for farmworkers rights throughout Texas.
Cesar Chavez, director of the United Farm Workers, led the way during those final miles joined by other members of his union who had just celebrated a major win over grape farmers in Delano, California. But the fight was just starting in Texas.
On June 1, 1966, more than 400 farmworkers went on strike against the Starr County melon growers who were paying them between 40 and 85 cents an hour. Demanding a minimum wage of $1.25, they shut down every packing shed in the county in the middle of the melon harvest, which was the main crop at the time.
Strike-breakers were brought in from Mexico and the melon harvest ended in mid-June with growers blaming their poor harvest on the weather. Strikers still claimed a partial victory despite the lack of contracts reached with the farm owners, according to a 1967 UFW publication Sons of Zapata, which provides a brief photographic history of the farmworkers’ strike in Texas.
It was mid-summer in 1966 when strikers decided to hit the road in an effort to gain support among other farmworkers and sympathizers across the state. With a portrait of the Virgen de Guadalupe, they began making their way through the Rio Grande Valley and through South Texas.
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WHAT: La Union Del Pueblo Entero celebration
WHEN: 9 a.m., Friday
WHERE: UTRGV campus in Edinburg, ITT Courtyard, 1201 W. University Drive, Edinburg
