New generation breathes life into old building in Phoenix with a connection to Cesar Chavez

Everyone was there to hear the poets, the rhymes and beats of musicians, the voices of people who wanted to be heard, but then the music stopped and the lights went out.

The generator quit. Silence drowned out the noise. Everyone who had been moving stopped. A rapper standing in the shadows looked at the audience. No one knew what he’d do next or if the open-mic show would be cut short. What if it was? What does one open-mic show in a battered barrio building mean to people in Phoenix? To a city in the middle of 4.5 million people and a past and present linked to a country whose language, culture and traditions are seemingly everywhere? A place where Native American and Mexican people lived long before the city’s Old West reputation was born?

Franco Habre believes that depends on whom you ask. When he was little, his father would tell him stories about Phoenix barrios and a time when Arizona campesinos (Spanish for farmworkers) and Chicanos fought for their rights.

Franco’s dad, Jose Antonio Habre (who goes by Casper), was raised in Phoenix around people who picked up picket signs and marched with civilrights icon Cesar Chavez.

And so on a dusty, warm Saturday in

March, Casper sat on a plastic lawn chair in front of Santa Rita Center, a community gathering space south of downtown Phoenix, where weeds breed in patches that turn the earth green. He smiled at the kids kicking a ball and nodded at families walking into the building.

This is a place that matters to people who don’t go by one label. Some are Chicanos or Xicanas, some are Mexican-Americans or Latinos. Others are whatever they choose to call themselves.

‘Let’s make noise’

Inside Santa Rita, Franco called to the crowd.

“Let’s make noise,” he yelled over the rumbling generator.

On Facebook, the event, shared among friends and strangers, was called Make Noise: An Open Mic in Barrio Campito. El Campito is the old name for the neighborhood near Buckeye and Seventh Street, where Santa Rita still stands in a community built by people who lived with the segregation and racism that seeped into state and city laws.

A 1920 city directory touted Phoenix as “a modern town of 40,000 people and the best kind of people, too. A very small percentage of Mexicans, Negroes or foreigners.” Deed restrictions prevented non-whites from buying houses north of Van Buren Street.

Much has changed since then, and yet, for some people, too much remains the same.

At Santa Rita, Franco gripped the microphone and told the crowd they were going to see poets, musicians and artists who want Arizona to change.

At one point, Alex Votichenko, known to his friends and others in the Phoenix music scene as Djentrification, stepped out to say a few words about the past and the present before he filled the room with the thump, thump, thump of a steady beat.

In less than one minute, and in just two sentences, Djentrification summed up what one open-mic show can mean to a people in Phoenix finding a place to speak their identities, own their differences and still seek unity.

“I feel real lucky to get to be here in this place, Santa Rita hall, because of the wonderful, wonderful things that people have done at this building, on this ground right here, trying to help out their fellow people, their families, their relatives.”

Franco introduced a poet, one whose words gave voice to black men and women killed by police. Then another poet, who said her words were meant for Native women who need to know their self-worth.

A fight, a fast and three words

The building at 10th and Hadley streets is painted a faded clay beige. Razor wire encircles the fencing, a wallsize mural of a massive hand reaching down from the sky and over a field of green seedlings has settled into the earth on the far corner of the lot.

On most days, it looks abandoned. In 1972, it was filled. Santa Rita became a temporary shelter for Cesar Chavez, the labor leader and civil-rights icon, and his supporters during his 24-day “fast for love.”

Prayers, songs in Spanish and English and the chants of people organizing echoed through the rooms. Many consider Santa Rita the place where Arizona’s Chicano movement started.

Chavez launched a hunger strike to bring attention to the plight of Arizona farm workers after then-Gov. Jack Williams signed a bill outlawing boycotts and strikes during harvest time, making it virtually impossible for workers to organize a union. Families, migrants and activists went to Santa Rita to be by Chavez’s side, as did national leaders, including Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr.

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America union with Chavez, was with him during the fast. Huerta was meeting with the state’s Latino leaders. They told her Arizona’s growers’ lobby was too strong.

“They kept saying, ‘In Arizona, no. No se puede. No se puede,’” she recalled in a 2014 interview with The Arizona Republic. “My spontaneous response was, ‘Sí, se puede. Sí, se puede.’ “

Huerta said it wasn’t until later that same night at Santa Rita Center that she realized the words meant more than the literal translation: “Yes, we can.”

“I was telling my report from our organizing,” she said. Huerta repeated the three words she’d said earlier to Latino leaders.

“All the people started shouting, ‘Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!’ “she said. “It became the heart of our campaign.”

For years, farmworkers and Chicanos in California and Arizona used strikes and boycotts to win fights. Phoenix barrios slowly gave way to redevelopment and growth. And Santa Rita Center was forgotten.

A new generation

At the Make Noise open mic, Casper nodded to people who walked under the black and white sign written in Chicanostyle lettering and through the double doors propped open with bricks.

Casper is a Chicanos Por La Causa board member. The group, born of the labor and Chicano-rights movement, provides social services to low-income groups.

In 2003, Chicanos Por La Causa led an effort to clean up the property. They bought the building and christened it the Cesar Chavez/Santa Rita Cultural Center. A few years later, the building was part of a Phoenix preservation effort to document historic sites that reflected the ethnic diversity of the city. The property drew national attention when the National Park Service surveyed sites that were significant to Chavez and the farm-labor movement in the western United States.