César Estrada Chávez
BORN: MARCH 31, 1927, IN YUMA, ARIZONA
DIED: APRIL 23, 1993, IN SAN LUIS, ARIZONA
By the time César Chávez was ten years old, he had attended more than thirty schools. It was 1937, the decade of the Great Depression, and work was scarce when César’s parents lost their home in Yuma, Arizona, and had to take to the roads. They joined hundreds of thousands of migrant workers that followed the crops in California. After school César and his buddies fished in the canals and cut mustard greens for meals. There was no money for clothes or food or transportation. César and his brother would take the silver aluminum from discarded cigarette packages until they had enough to make a big ball of foil, which they sold to a Mexican junk dealer to buy tennis shoes and two sweatshirts. It was a life of intense hardship. César never liked school—schools were segregated, and speaking Spanish was not allowed. César stopped going in the eighth grade to help the family.
At the age of nineteen, he joined the Navy and spent two years in the Western Pacific, then returned to California in 1948 and married.
For the next ten years, César learned the art of community organizing, talking to groups and teaching them how they could work together to better themselves. But in 1962, César decided to return to the fields. The workers needed more than just a better salary. They needed insurance, medical assistance, a credit union, and support in translating Spanish into English— and their cause needed a leader.
He traveled from camp to camp, “planting an idea,” about their rights and about his dream to form a union to protect them, like a family that helps one another. “Friends, let us act like one family,” he said. Another organizer, Dolores Huerta, joined him and became a leader alongside César. Yet building a union of farmworkers was a challenge. As hard as he strived to convince the migrants to follow his example and speak out for their rights, he found that most were afraid of losing the only thing they had—their jobs. But Chávez and Huerta did not give up.
In Delano, California, on César’s birthday in 1962, his cousin raised a homemade flag in front of 287 farmworkers. It was painted with a black eagle rising from a hot-red field of land. This was the beginning of “La Causa,” the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), that later would become the United Farm Workers Union, a powerful organization to help migrant workers make a better life for themselves in the United States.
Three years later, in 1965, César and his 1,200 NFWA families voted to join a strike against the Delano-area grape growers. This was the beginning of a five-year grape boycott. The following year, during spring, César and a small team of strikers made a historic march—a 340-mile peregrinación, or pilgrimage, from Delano to the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento to attract attention from the media, the politicians, and the public about La Causa. On the twenty-fifth day of marching, with a line of 10,000 sun-scorched people, César and the NFWA arrived. ¡Viva la Causa! Long live the Cause! Schenley Industries growers scrambled for an agreement with the NFWA—the first union contract between a grower and farmworkers in U.S. history.
¡Huelga! Strike! On August 3, 1967, the farmworkers called a strike against the largest of the grape growers, who brought in strike breakers and the Teamsters Union. There were beatings, arrests, shootings. But violence was not part of César’s plan. He had read about achieving goals through peaceful protest. César went back to Delano and made a vow: He would not eat until the workers would end violent clashes and act as one familia. Twenty-one days later, César, frail and trembling, ended the fast. By this time more than fifteen million Americans had joined the grape, lettuce, and Gallo wine boycott. He fasted again in the coming years in support of nonviolence and to protest the harmful effects of pesticides on workers.
Finally, in 1975, the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act was signed into law, a guarantee that California farmworkers had the right to organize and bargain with their employers.
César Chávez never owned a car, a house, or had a good-paying job; he devoted his life to assisting thousands to receive just wages and safer working conditions.