Cesar Chavez was a civil rights, Latino, and farm labor leader; a community organizer and social entrepreneur; a champion of militant nonviolent social change; and a crusader for the environment and consumer rights.
A first-generation American, he was born on March 31, 1927, near his family’s small homestead outside Yuma, Arizona. At age 11, his family lost their farm during the Great Depression and became migrant farm workers. Cesar finished his formal education after the eighth grade and worked the fields full time to help support his family. Throughout his youth and into adulthood, Cesar traveled the migrant streams throughout California laboring in the fields, orchards, and vineyards where he was exposed to the hardships and injustices of farm worker life.
Cesar’s career in community organizing began in 1952 when he was recruited and trained by Fred Ross, a legendary community organizer who was forming the San Jose chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), the most prominent Latino civil rights group of its time. Cesar spent 10 years with the CSO, coordinating voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, leading campaigns against racial and economic discrimination, and organizing new CSO chapters across California. On March 31, 1962, Cesar resigned from the CSO. The Chavez family moved to Delano, California, a dusty farm town in California’s Central Valley. With $1,200 in life savings he founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with 10 members – Cesar, his wife, and their eight young children. The NFWA later became the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). Under Cesar, the UFW achieved unprecedented gains for farm workers, establishing it as the first successful farm workers union in American history.
Cesar adopted historic strategies and tactics that were novel to organized labor. He demanded farm workers strictly adhere to a pledge of nonviolence. Similar to Gandhi, he practiced fasting to draw attention to the issues. Despite skepticism from some labor leaders, Cesar was the first to apply boycotts to major labor-management disputes. Millions of people across North America rallied to La Causa, the farm workers’ cause, by boycotting grapes and other products, forcing growers to bargain union contracts, and agree to California’s pioneering farm labor law in 1975: Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975. This was the nation’s first and still the only law guaranteeing farm workers the right to organize, choose their own union representative, and negotiate with their employers.
Cesar passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 23, 1993, in the small farm worker town of San Luis, Arizona, not far from where he was born 66 years earlier. More than 50,000 people attended his funeral services in Delano, the same community in which he had planted the seeds of social justice decades before.
