Rio Grande Valley, Texas—Antonio was born in Etzatlán, Jalisco on May 28, 1930. Orendain died on the afternoon of April 12, 2016. In May he would have been 86, but a serious illness did not let him get to his birthday.
This Friday the 15th we arrived in the Valley to bid him farewell. On Friday night was the rosary and Saturday morning on the 16th the funeral mass in the church of San Juan and then burial in one of the pantheons of McAllen.
This was the way to fulfill a commitment to someone who 39 years ago, invited us and convinced us to become members of the movement of the farm workers.
Orendain was part of the group that formed the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in 1962 in California. Cesar Chavez was one of the leaders of the group who also included Gilberto Padilla and Dolores Huerta. Orendain was then elected treasurer of the steering committee of the Association. Eventually the Association, under the strike movement of 1965 in Delano, joined forces with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), mainly composed of Filipino laborers and which highlighted peers as Larry Itliong, Phillip Veracruz and others. This merging in time became the foundation for the forming of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW).
In 1966, the agricultural workers in South Texas began a movement to organize to improve their wages and working conditions in the melon field and requested support for the UFW. It was then that Orendain, Eugene Nelson, Gilberto Padilla and Bill Chandler came to the Valley. It’s how the historic La Casita Farms Strike to demand better wages, and it was only contained by the force of the “Texas Rangers.”
And although the movement was contained through the Rangers violence the strike was the beginning of a historic struggle taking place in 1975, after the founding of the United Farm Workers of Texas (TFWU).
This stage deserves to be reviewed by everyone to understand the cause to which Orendain devoted much of his life, with Rachel his wife at his side, who died in 1985, his family and a large group of farm workers in the Valley, and many, many supporters and activists in the TFWU—who found space to unleash their anti-systemic social concerns.
On Saturday April 16, we bid farewell to Orendain in the Roselawn Cemetery of McAllen. Hence we fulfilled once again that part that we all have to do “to go back to the earth because that’s where you were taken from.”
Orendain’s departure symbolizes the closing of a struggle that began in 1962 and deepened in 1975. We should remember Antonio Orendain. Mainly we have to remember the reasons and the meaning of his struggle.
