Civil rights leader Antonio "Tony Orendain" honored
McALLEN — The family of a Rio Grande Valley civil rights leader and activist was honored Friday with the presentation of an official congressional proclamation at the Doubletree Suites hotel.
Antonio “Tony” Orendain was born in 1930 in Jalisco, Mexico, and died in 2016 in McAllen. He was civil rights leader, co-founder and original longtime secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers and founder of the Texas Farm Workers Union. He was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico and crossed over to the United States in 1950. Orendain was an agricultural laborer. He developed a goal that some day workers would be able to “put a price on the sweat of their own brow,” according to the proclamation.
In the 1960s he joined the United Farm Workers in California and worked with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Almost a decade later he had a falling out with Chavez and in 1975, through the teachings of Chavez, Orendain returned to Texas and began the Texas Farm Workers Union.
After establishing the Texas Farm Workers, Orendain became a director and led members of the local United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on a march to the middle of the Roma Bridge. About two years later, he made a trip to Austin from San Juan {Texas}, leading a group of 40 farmworkers on a march for basic human rights.
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