Students honor end of boycott
Nearly 20 students gathered in the Culturas de las Razas Unidas room Thursday night to listen to music, talk and eat grapes by the handful. Ironically, it’s a scene that would have flared tempers exactly five years ago. “Anyone eating grapes in this room would have had their butts kicked,” journalism senior Ernesto Mireles said. Past and present members of Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan, MSU’s Chicano student group, held a reception celebrating last November’s end of a 16-year California table grape boycott called by United Farm Workers, a major farm union co-founded by worker rights advocate Cesar Chavez. The protest focused on higher wages for farm workers and better working conditions, especially concerning the use of potentially dangerous pesticides. MEXA members supported the boycott through several protests that occurred throughout the 1990s in hopes the university would stop allowing non-union grapes into its cafeterias. In February 1996, six of the group’s members camped in the CRU room during a six-day hunger strike in an attempt to force the university into a campuswide boycott. Mireles took part in the fast. “One guy even went to the hospital because he had a diabetic attack,” he said.
