Senator Kennedy, Thank You

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Kenneth Burt

The breaking news about Senator Kennedy’s medical condition has provoked a flood of memories, many of them deeply personal.

I was one of Kennedy’s youngest delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention. For an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, it was a life-altering experience.

The convention experience was amplified by traveling to New York with Dolores Huerta, as I was a staffer that summer for the United Farm Workers. I still have the blue and white Kennedy button I wore with the UFW’s Aztec eagle.

Kennedy’s speech electrified Madison Square Gardens. As he talked about “sailing against wind,” my mind was filled with promise of liberalism to create a more just society. The fact that we came up short in the delegate count only proved that victory is not certain, that the progress often requires a lifetime’s commitment.

Senator Kennedy has certainly dedicated his life to advancing the common good, whether it was advocating for universal health care, the minimum wage, or comprehensive immigration reform.

The last time I saw the senator was in 2004, at yet another Democratic National Convention, where he joined the California delegates in Boston for breakfast. Kennedy brought down the house when he sang “Jalisco,” accompanied by Mariachis, in his Boston-accented Spanish.

It was a number he had first performed in California 44-years earlier while campaigning for his brother, John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Armando Rodriguez vividly recalls how delighted his mostly Mexican Americans guests where to see Kennedy in his backyard in suburban San Diego.

This was just one of the stories that I heard while researching my book, The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics. Everyone, it seemed, had a Kennedy story. He was their senator; a champion of farm workers and urban poor alike.

In fact, I had first seen Kennedy at a UFW convention in Fresno in the summer of 1976. There he was, having picked up the mantled of his martyred brothers, providing farm workers encouragement in the political and economic struggles ahead.