César Chávez

American labor leader and social reformer

• Born: March 31, 1927
• Birthplace: North Gila Valley, near Yuma, Arizona
• Died: April 23, 1993
• Place of death: San Luis, near Yuma, Arizona

Primary founder of the United Farm Workers, Chávez was one of the earliest and most influential advocates of immigrant farmworkers and Latinos in the United States. He worked to improve conditions for farm laborers by organizing the California farmworkers’ movement through events such as the Delano strike of 1965, thereby engineering the passage of the nation’s first farm labor law in the late 1970’s.

Early Life

César Chávez (SAY-zahr CHAH-vehz) was born on an Arizona farm that his grandfather first cultivated during the 1880’s. Hit hard by the economic chaos created by the Great Depression, the Chávez family lost the farm and a small grocery store by 1937. The young Chávez and his family joined the ranks of migrant farmworkers, traveling throughout the southwestern United States in search of work. From 1944 to 1946, Chávez served in the U.S. Navy, returning to work in the agricultural fields around Delano, California, upon his discharge. He married Helen Fabela in 1948. Chávez’s direction in life changed dramatically after he met Fred Ross in 1952.

Life’s Work

Ross, an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), was affiliated with Saul Alinsky, founder of the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation, and successfully recruited Chávez to work with his organization. Chávez’s involvement with the CSO during the 1950’s laid the groundwork for the founding of the United Farm Workers union.

Driven by his desire to improve conditions for farmworkers, Chávez left the CSO in 1962. He devoted all of his efforts to organizing farm laborers, serving as the primary organizer of the Farm Workers Association that same year. The first person he asked to help with the new union was CSO colleague Dolores Huerta. By 1964, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) had one thousand members in fifty areas, mostly in California. A black eagle on a red background and the words “Viva la causa” (long live the cause) became the emblem and motto of the union. Chávez embraced the concept of nonviolence, incorporating the philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi into his work.

Chávez, who had been organizing farmworkers to protest low wages and rent increases in the migrant labor camps, joined with other organizations in 1965 to support a strike against grape growers in Delano. Organized by the Filipino workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), the strike was also supported by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This action led to a successful five-year effort that combined the strike with a boycott of table grapes and lettuce that eventually won international support.

The grape strike helped focus national attention on the conditions endured by migrant farm laborers. In 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York conducted Senate hearings in Delano about the agricultural industry’s treatment of farmworkers. Chávez assembled a coalition of supporters that included labor unions, religious and minority groups, students, and consumers. The NFWA merged with AWOC to become the United Farm Workers (UFW), affiliated with the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations). The UFW membership pledged to adhere to the principles of nonviolence, seeking peaceful methods of protest and social action such as marches, rallies, and demonstrations. In 1968, Chávez demonstrated his personal commitment to nonviolence by fasting for nearly a month when fights broke out on UFW picket lines. By 1970, most table grape growers, tired of the successful boycott, had signed contracts with the UFW.

Although Chávez gained enormous respect for his commitment to social justice and nonviolence, the agricultural industry quickly turned to the Teamsters Union in the early 1970’s to negotiate more favorable contracts. Chávez called for a worldwide grape boycott. Public opinion polls indicated that by 1975, seventeen million Americans supported this effort. California, under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown, enacted the first law governing farm labor organizing, which established the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

In the early 1980’s, UFW health clinics began to see a rise in the number of pesticide poisonings among farmworkers. Calling attention to the harmful effects of pesticide residue on produce, Chávez and the UFW embarked on a new grape boycott in 1984. In addition to marches and demonstrations, the UFW produced a film entitled The Wrath of Grapes, which graphically depicted the effects of pesticide poisoning. Chávez also held another hunger fast protesting the use of pesticides by the agricultural industry.

Chávez, still serving as president of the UFW, died of natural causes in 1993 at the age of sixty-six.

Significance

Chávez was not only a charismatic leader whose quiet dignity inspired the social activists of the 1960’s and beyond. He also understood, from within, the meaning of being poor and being an immigrant in the American Southwest. He was one of the most influential Latino leaders in American history. Working conditions for farm laborers improved immeasurably because of his efforts, and he successfully engineered the passage of the nation’s first farm labor law in the late 1970’s.

Bibliography

Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. A general history of Chicanos, now a classic. Detailed sections on Chicano agricultural labor organizing, tracing Chicano labor struggles to the turn of the century. Also details labor struggles in other sectors of the economy. Well referenced, with an excellent index.

Ferriss, Susan, and Ricardo Sandoval. The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers Movement. Edited by Diana Hembree. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Based on the PBS documentary of the same name, this work is full of photographs and text that trace Chávez’s life from his Arizona boyhood through the harsh years of drought during the Great Depression to his devotion to farmworkers’ rights. Includes a bibliography, an index, and a map.

Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcia. César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. A concise (203-page), illustrated biography for general readers, including bibliographical references and an index.

LaBotz, Dan. César Chávez and La Causa. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. A concise (210-page) biography suitable for students. Starting with Chávez’s childhood, the text quickly moves to experiences that shaped him as a community organizer and labor leader, focusing both on Chávez’s actions and on his ideas. Includes a list of acronyms, a glossary, and notes.

Levy, Jacques E. César Chávez: Autobiography of La Causa. Foreword by Fred Ross, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. A close history of the farmworkers’ movement and Chávez’s key role, from meetings at all-night cafés to days on the strike lines a definitive, six-hundred-page history of both the movement and the man. The term “autobiography” is appropriate here because Levy had unprecedented access to Chávez and the UFW in writing this work, and his intimate portrayal has been called the closest to what Chávez himself would have written. Illustrations, index.

McGregor, Ann, and Cindy Wathen, eds. Remembering César: The Legacy of César Chávez. Clovis, Calif.: Quill Driver Books, 2000. A collection of accounts of this complex yet humble leader by forty-five contributors who knew him well, including Henry Cisneros, Edward James Olmos, Martin Sheen, Coretta Scott King, and Jerry Brown. Includes black-and-white photographs by George Elfie Ballis, who documented the farmworkers’ movement beginning in the 1950’s.