Cesar Chavez Day: How well do you know the farm labor hero?

Barth Falkenberg / The Christian Science Monitor / File
Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers of America, walks a picket line at Boston's Prudential Center in July 1983.

March 31 is Cesar Chavez Day (although many people will observe it Friday) which aims to promote service to the community in honor of Chavez’s life and work. An American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist, Chavez is to many an icon of justice for the underclass. How much do you know about him? Take our quiz. 

1. While it’s not a national holiday, Cesar Chavez Day is an official state holiday in which US states?

North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska

California, Colorado, Texas

Oregon, Washington, Arizona

New Mexico, Michigan, Georgia

Javascript is disabled. Quiz scoring requires Javascript.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.