Cesar Chavez

Cesar Estrada Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, near Yuma, Arizona, and named for his grandfather Cesario. He learned about injustice early: his father agreed to clear eighty acres in exchange for the deed to forty more beside their adobe home, but the bargain was broken, and after a lawyer’s scheme the family lost the land. In 1938–1939 they moved to California, settling in a San Jose barrio called Sal Si Puedes — “Get Out If You Can” — and following the harvests from Brawley to Mendota.

School was painful. Speaking only Spanish at home, Chavez was punished with a ruler across the knuckles for using it in class, saw “whites only” signs, and with his brother Richard attended thirty-seven schools. After eighth grade, in 1942, he left school to work in the fields so his mother would not have to. He served two years in the then-segregated Navy from 1946, married Helen Fabela in 1948, and raised eight children. Talks with a priest, Father Donald McDonnell, led him to read about St. Francis, Gandhi, and nonviolence; the organizer Fred Ross recruited him to the Community Service Organization (CSO), where he began by registering voters and rose to become its national director.

When the CSO refused to concentrate on farmworkers, Chavez quit and in 1962 founded the National Farm Workers Association in Delano, California, with Dolores Huerta; his brother Richard designed its black Aztec eagle on a red flag. For three years he traveled from town to town, meeting workers in their homes. Grape pickers then earned about 90 cents an hour, often lived in unheated shacks, and had no toilets in the fields. In September 1965, when Filipino workers led by Larry Itliong struck Delano’s grape growers, Chavez’s association — with $100 in the bank — voted to join them, to shouts of “¡Viva la huelga!”

In March 1966 Chavez led strikers on a 340-mile, 25-day march to Sacramento; on Easter morning he told 10,000 supporters at the Capitol that the grower Schenley had signed an agreement with the union. The two unions merged that summer as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Volunteers fanned out to cities to organize a consumer boycott, and millions of Americans stopped buying table grapes. By 1970 the grape growers had accepted union contracts, bringing higher wages, a union hiring hall that ended contractors’ favoritism, health clinics, and a credit union; the union claimed 50,000 dues-paying members, the most ever represented in California agriculture. In 1975 California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first U.S. law recognizing farmworkers’ right to collective bargaining.

Chavez’s faith in nonviolence drew on St. Francis and Gandhi. He fasted on water for 25 days in 1968, for 24 days in 1972, and for 36 days in 1988, explaining that farmworkers were “angry and worried that we cannot win without violence” and that the fasts were a call to win “through persistence, hard work, faith and willingness to sacrifice.” He believed that “the end of all education should surely be service to others,” and his office walls were lined with books on philosophy, economics, unions, and Gandhi. His union’s rallying cry was ¡Sí se puede! — “Yes, we can!”

The union’s struggle was bitter and long. One grower sprayed strikers with agricultural poisons, and the Teamsters union offered itself to growers as a conservative alternative, colluding with growers against the farmworkers. Chavez’s final fast in 1988 protested the dangers of pesticides to workers and their children. He died while defending the union against a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by a lettuce grower over a 1980s boycott; the judgment was later thrown out.

Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, 1993, in San Luis, Arizona, not far from the farm where he was born. The farmworker movement he led with Huerta and Itliong won higher wages and better working and living conditions, and grew into a national voice for the poor and disenfranchised. His birthday, March 31, is a holiday in California, Colorado, and Texas, and his home and the union headquarters at La Paz form the César E. Chávez National Monument.