During Adams State University’s National Farmworkers Awareness Week, Alamosa Citizen spoke with civil rights lawyer and activist Maurice “Mo” Jourdane. Jourdane spoke at two events on Wednesday, April 10, and talked about the legal battle of El Cortito, which was encouraged and supported by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. He also spoke about the Victory Against the Devil’s Arm: The Story Behind Chicano Park’s new mural.
Jourdane, now 81, lives in Point Loma, California. He’s been fighting for farm workers’ rights since the 1960s. His fight started with short-handled hoes in California in 1968. Called el cortito, or the little one, it was used by laborers and caused serious and debilitating injuries in farmworkers. He himself felt that pain of working with the tool after just one day in a sugar beet field. The fight, which was really a legal war, went on for years until 1975, when California Gov. Jerry Brown banned the short-handled hoes.
Since then, Jourdane has been fighting and advocating for farm workers in California and the rest of the nation.
Here’s our Q&A with Jourdane, conducted by Alamosa Citizen and Rural Journalism Institute intern Javier Rodriguez. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Javier Rodriguez: So what inspired you to become an activist?
Maurice “Mo” Jourdane: Cesar and Dolores. I think Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, what they were doing. I saw the life of a farmer was so hard. It was, and decided you have to try to do something to infer that. And so I then, at Cesar and Dolores’s suggestion, went to work with California Rural Legal Assistants then became a civil rights lawyer over the years.
JR: Was there ever an encounter with a farm worker that moved you, that really, like somebody you met in the farm worker feels that really touched you, made you feel sad or upset that this was happening?
MJ: I had farmers as clients and seeing the life of farm workers, how people lived in those days, and they still do live in labor camps, sleep on – not beds, maybe on the ground, maybe a sleeping bag that they sleep on. When you barely have enough food, they work harder. In those days especially, there was no water in the field, there were no toilets in the field. And I remember if a woman was in the field, had to go to the bathroom, other women would make a circle around her so the men … workers couldn’t see her going to the bathroom. I just saw that kind of stuff over and over and so it makes you want to do something to forever change it.
JR: I was reading an article about you, with the fight to stop California from labeling Spanish-speaking students as mentally disabled. That was you, right? What was that fight like?
MJ: Now I’m going to start it out in Soledad, little town south of Salinas. And I was seeing clients in the evenings in the parish hall of the Catholic church there. And this was when California Rural Legal Assistance was new and a lot of the growers and the conservatives didn’t like us. They wanted to get rid of us, so we were seeing clients and the Catholic church allowed us to see clients in their parish hall. So I was walking from there one night and a guy comes up to me, a farmer worker, who I recognized and says, ‘Can I talk to you?’ And I said, sure, you know, but I have to drive clear back to Salinas because Soledad’s 30 miles or so from Salinas.
So we ended up in his labor camp talking about his son. What he told me that got me there was, he says, I have a 10-year-old son who they labeled mentally retarded and they put him in a class, but he’s not learning anything. Can you help him? And I didn’t know anything about mental retardation or psychology, or any of that. So I said, well, I’ll look into it. And that started the process of what became… was the state of, I think they were this board of education of California when they ended up banning the use of IQ tests to label Spanish speaking. That’s the part I left out of this. The guy, the farmer worker who I was talking to, his son spoke only Spanish and the farmer worker spoke only Spanish. And the son was, and his whole class were tested for IQ in English. And so he scored low. And so once they scored low, below 70 on IQ test, they labeled the mentally retarded, put them in the class for the mentally retarded where they did stuff like they helped clean the school buses, they helped clean the lid of the stools. It was unbelievable stuff. It was not learning, it was not education. So we filed, that was after Brown vs. Board of Education when the U.S. Supreme Court said people have a constitutional right to education. And our argument was if you’re not allowing kids to learn, then you’re denying them education and we won. So that’s the case you’re talking about.
JR: What is your take on the current state of farm workers in America today, and do you have any concerns? And if I can narrow it down specifically in California?
MJ: I think the primary concern is that they’re dying from the heat. They’re not bent over anymore. But over the last 10 years, I’ve worked with Gov. Brown to solve that problem, to stop people – farm workers – from dying in the heat. And we, in fact, Jonathan, our son who started out here in Alamosa, and I went to Washington, D.C., to meet with the head of the Marines, the U.S. Marines. And I’m not a big supporter of military, but the Marines have developed a system so that trainees don’t die during training because they’re training most of them in North Carolina, Georgia, the South, where it’s real hot and really humid, and so they were dying. And so what the Marines did was they created a whole system where if it’s over 85, you got to have breaks every 10 minutes. If it’s over 90, you’ve got to have a half hour break every hour. And if it’s over 95, you can’t work at all. So they’re talking, I say work, but the Marines are talking training. You have to stop training if it’s over 95 degrees, unless you’re in war, obviously. But now for training purposes. So I think that’s the biggest issue right now.
It depends if you came across the border and you don’t have papers, that’s probably a bigger issue. It’s what we hear about alien immigration. But aside from that, the other issue, it really is the heat, farmers dying from the heat.
JR: How did you meet Cesar Chavez?
MJ: Yeah. Over the years Cesar and Dolores became friends. You realize people are people you get beyond the title and the level and all that. When I first met Cesar and Dolores, I had no idea who they were. Over the years, I was encouraged by them to do what I did.
