A union organizer and civil rights activist, César Chávez (1927–1993) drew widespread attention to the plight of migrant farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s with high-profile hunger strikes and boycotts. The union he founded, the United Farm Workers (UFW), eventually forced growers to pay higher wages and stop exposing their predominantly Mexican American workforce to harmful pesticides.
Chávez was born in Arizona and began working on farms as a teenager. He joined the US Navy after World War II and became involved in community organizing efforts after his return in 1948. He spent the 1950s leading voter registration drives in California and cofounded the National Farm Workers Association, a predecessor of the UFW, in 1962.
Unfolding at the same time as the civil rights movement in the South, Chávez’s UFW campaign was a social movement as much as an economic one. In addition to raising wages and improving safety, Chávez sought to restore the basic dignity of Chicano farmworkers, who had been subjected to decades of mistreatment by farm and orchard bosses.
The grape boycott, Chávez’s most famous campaign, began in 1965. Urging consumers to avoid California grapes until growers recognized the union, he attracted high-profile support from such politicians as Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968). With the boycott hurting their profits, the first group of growers signed a union contract in 1970.
By the early 1980s, however, many growers had found ways to avoid the union, and Chávez’s autocratic leadership of the UFW came under criticism. Despite its fame, the union never managed to organize all of California’s farmworkers—most of whom are still nonunion.
Still, since his death in 1993 at age sixty-six, Chávez has been embraced as a civil rights hero in the Mexican American community. His birthday, March 31, is a holiday in several states.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- In 1995, the Los Angeles Times revealed that FBI agents had compiled a 1,434-page file on Chávez, apparently out of fear that he was a “subversive.”
- One of Chávez’s best-known slogans, “Sí, se puede”—“Yes, we can”—was adopted by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (1961–) in the 2008 presidential election.
- Chávez reportedly attended thirty-eight different schools before dropping out after eighth grade.
