On March 31, 1966, labor rights pioneer Cesar Chavez wasn’t celebrating his birthday in any usual manner. Rather, he was 14 days into a 25-day pilgrimage in California from Delano to Sacramento.

Leading a group of striking farm laborers and supporters, Chavez’s plan was to build momentum and support for the workers’ cause in a march that would conclude on the steps of the California State Capitol on Easter Sunday morning.

The date here is crucial. A foundational, but mostly forgotten, feature of the nearly 300-mile pilgrimage during Lent was that it was a deeply religious endeavor.

As a scholar of religion and the farmworkers movement, I believe Chavez’s endeavor was not simply a “march” or “protest” – although workers’ rights were, of course, central to the event. Rather, it was a “pilgrimage,” and to overlook the religious dimensions is to fundamentally misunderstand what Chavez was trying to achieve.

Chavez, whose birthday is celebrated as a commemorative holiday in the U.S. every March 31, remains the preeminent icon of civil and labor rights in the U.S.

But contrasting with the view of labor rights as a purely secular endeavor, Chavez fused his understanding of Catholic social doctrine with principles of community organizing.

Accordingly, when it came to raising attention to the plight of striking grape harvesters – denied the right to unionize in their fight for higher wages and better conditions – Chavez leaned on his religious beliefs.

From the outset, Chavez made clear the pious nature of the march, calling it a peregrinación – Spanish for “pilgrimage” – in the registration form he penned. Leaving no room for ambiguity, Chavez detailed: “This is a religious march” and added the headline banner of “Pilgrimage, Penance, Revolution” – framing designed to appeal to both the majority-Catholic farmworker faithful and more revolutionary members of the labor movement alike.

At first blush, penance seems a bit out of place in a world of protest. Even more ironically, Chavez held that penance during the 1966 Lenten season march was required “for all the failings of Farm Workers” rather than for the exploitative growers that kept farmworkers uprooted and impoverished. But to Chavez, revolution could not happen without penance – that is, an undertaking to offer oneself blameless. As a collective public ritual, however, it also hoped to call the entire nation to penance.

The pilgrimage was an extension of a strike launched on Mexican Independence Day in 1965 at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano. There, the Chavez-led National Farm Workers Association joined forces with the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.

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