La Peregrinacion Song Page

Agustín Lira: As for me, I kind of grew up in the movement. I became a person within the movement. When I was a farm worker, working hard in the fields, I wanted to fight back, but I didn’t know how. The Union is where I got my education; I didn’t get an education in school---they were just babysitting me: Do you need 12 years to learn how to read and write and do math? We came out of school dumber than when we went in. It took years and years to undo the ways that they had taught me to think about myself and my people, and my history. Years and years. Of how to think about yourself, and what you’re capable of.

I started singing when I was around 13. When I was 18, I finally got a guitar, and I started to play and sing in a rock band. I had been in a quartet in school, and in the choir, and I had been in some plays, so I had a basic understanding of music and theater. But I didn’t know anything about being a playwright. I learned how to be a playwright in the Union .

I was really, really lucky to find a door [the work for the UFW], and that door opened to many others. If it hadn’t have been for the Union, I would have been off to Vietnam , just like all of my other friends.

We started the Teatro Campesino in 1965. We had been picketing all day. Luis was there and he asked us if we wanted to go to the restaurant to get some coffee. Sitting in the restaurant, he told us that he had an idea about starting a theater group, and about recruiting other members into it. We didn’t even ask Cesar’s permission in the beginning---not until later. In the beginning, we just recruited members and started practicing our actos after the picket lines, in the office, or at the meetings. It started to really take off, and that’s when we went to Cesar to get his permission to recruit people into the Teatro, and to take it on the road. We started making plans, building the actos, trying them out on the farm workers after the picket line, and then finally, when it really took off, we started to go outside of California .

In 1966, the UFW decided to do the march from Delano to Sacramento , and Cesar approached me two days before the march and asked me to do a song for it; I said, “Only two days? That’s pretty short notice!” And he said, “Well, the march is going to last for 30 days, so if you can do it while we’re on the march.”

The first day of the march, I stayed behind, and so did Cesar. I was working directly across from his office in the pink house, and he came in and asked me how it was going. I played what I had composed up to that point, and he said that he really liked it. He asked me how long it would take me to finish it. I kept on working on it, trying to add two more different verses, but they just wouldn’t fit, and so by the third day of the march, I joined them, and I just started singing it, and I sang it every day on the way to Sacramento .

I have to tell you that it was a tremendous struggle, a spiritual struggle for me to write this song. When I first arrived in Delano , I did not believe in God. I had lost my mother in 1963, and I had a fight with God, and God lost: I didn’t need him in my life. However, when I got to Delano , my job was to write songs for the community, and I had to put my own beliefs aside, because I was working for the movement. So adding the verse about the Virgin of Guadalupe was really a struggle. It was almost like torture: I didn’t want to put it in, but I knew that it was something that the farm workers cared about. So I finally decided that it was more important to represent what they felt, and not just what I felt.

I took the ideas of the words for this song from the picket lines, from the farm workers’ lives. There were thoughts and feelings behind their actions: they were picketing for better wages, better conditions in the fields. But behind that, was self-respect and dignity.

Felipe Cantú wrote another song on the March to Sacramento , El Corrido de Cesar Chavez, and we performed that in Sacramento on the day that we arrived.