Biden taps into farmworker leader’s family in re-election bid. Who is Julie Chávez Rodríguez?

More than 30 years after his death, César E. Chávez continues to make his presence felt beyond the renaming of streets in Fresno or having a bronze bust of the farmworker leader on a console in President Joe Biden’s White House.

In April, Biden picked Chávez’s granddaughter, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, to run his re-election campaign. He called her and deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks “trusted, effective leaders that know the stakes of this election and will bring their knowledge and energy to managing a campaign that reaches all Americans.”

Today, César Chávez’s union membership may be a fraction of what it was in the 1970s, but his movement continues to pay dividends. His granddaughter’s appointment is the most recent example.

Who is Chávez Rodríguez? And, can she handle what is expected to be a bruising campaign?

Outside the Beltway and the agriculture-rich San Joaquín Valley, the 45-year-old Chávez Rodríguez remains largely unknown.

She is the middle of three children born to Arturo S. Rodríguez, who became UFW president after his father-in-law’s death in 1993. Chávez Rodríguez graduated from Tehachapi High School, close to the UFW headquarters in Keene, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley.

She joined Biden’s 2020 campaign as senior advisor in charge of Latino outreach, and in 2021 became director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Chávez Rodríguez worked on the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, and was deputy director of public engagement for Obama.

Last June, Biden elevated her to senior adviser.

She also served as deputy press secretary for then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and as Sen. Kamala Harris’ California state director.

I spoke with four people who know her best — longtime United Farm Workers communications chief and now César Chávez Foundation spokesman Marc Grossman; her uncle Paul Chávez; veteran political operative Amanda Rentería; and her father, former UFW President Arturo S. Rodríguez — to paint a picture of her.

“A new generation vibe”

Rentería said Chávez Rodríguez — who helped create a curriculum about her grandfather that is used in California’s public schools — is the perfect choice for what she represents: “A new generation vibe, multicultural kind of style that she’s always had in her political sphere.”

“She is just incredibly talented, No. 1. And, visibility is not necessarily the key to winning a campaign,” said Rentería, a Central Valley native and former political director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

“The key to winning a campaign is that you come with experience, skills and a way of managing a large organization. You have political instincts,” said Rentería, CEO of Code for America, a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization whose goal is connecting the private and public sectors.

Rentería, a former congressional candidate in the Central Valley, said Chávez Rodríguez’s previous White House job positions her perfectly for the new post.

“Her role as leading intergovernmental affairs in the White House is a role where you’re working with mayors and governors all across the country, particularly during a time where that relationship was more important than ever given all the different changes that the pandemic created,” said Rentería.

“I hope he dies this time”

Grossman, a Sacramento resident, remembers that in 1988, a 10-year-old Chávez Rodríguez was at a southeast Fresno supermarket passing out leaflets warning about pesticide poisoning of farmworkers and their children when a woman stopped.

At the time, her grandfather was holding a 36-day fast, longer than a 25-day fast two decades earlier, to protest the use of dangerous pesticides in the fields..

The woman took a leaflet and remarked, “I hope he dies this time.”

That angered and upset Chávez Rodríguez, who upon getting back home to Delano quickly ran to her grandfather and told him what had happened.

“Next time that happens, just tell her we’ll pray for her and leave it at that,” responded her grandfather.

Grossman reflected on that incident in providing an insight into the 45-year-old Delano native.

“She learned that lesson,” said Grossman, who has known Chávez Rodríguez since her birth. “Despite her achievements, she remains very humble. I mean, there’s no self-promotion or self-aggrandizement about her.”

“She is very hard on herself”

A year prior to that supermarket episode, Chávez Rodríguez and her older sister, Olivia, were arrested for distributing leaflets outside a New Jersey grocery store.

Her father asked the police for permission to ride in the police car with his daughters.

If asking people not to buy grapes would result in an arrest, said Arturo S. Rodríguez, “she was going to do it.”

“They went through the process of being fingerprinted and having a mugshot taken,” said Rodríguez. “It was a feeling that ‘If this is what it takes, then we’re going to do this in a nonviolent way.”

Her father is proud of the role Chávez Rodríguez has with the Biden campaign, and believes she is hard nosed and ready for the knocks that come.

“She is tough. She is hard on herself. She’s very disciplined,” he said. “She is very aggressive about the work and what needs to be done. If she’s doing it, it’s because she believes it.”

“Talent at an early age”

Her uncle, Paul Chávez, remembers hearing from a longtime UFW volunteer who noticed a hard-working, pre-teen Chávez Rodríguez.

“The woman leans over to me and says, ‘We should be nice to that little girl because I think we’re all going to be working for her one of these days,’” recalled Chávez.

“She recognized Julie’s talent at an early age.”

“I lived a tremendously privileged childhood”

Chávez Rodríguez’s own words offer the best perspective.

“Growing up in the farmworker movement, I was surrounded by some of the country’s best organizers,” she wrote in a 2014 essay for UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies. “I spent my childhood in meetings, at rallies, walking picket lines, and handing out leaflets in front of supermarkets.”

By the time she was 12, she said, she could recite some of her grandfather’s most-known quotes and rattle off the names of the five most harmful pesticides.

“I lived a tremendously privileged childhood, not in terms of material wealth since my parents were full-time volunteers for the United Farm Workers, but in terms of experience,” she wrote. “The opportunity to travel with my grandfather, to learn from him, and to see him organizing is one of the most valuable classrooms I have ever been in.”

Juan Esparza Loera is editor of Vida en el Valle.