Cesar Chavez, the son of Mexican American farmworkers, became a well-known labor leader, founding the United Farm Workers (UFW) union which led a massive grape boycott in the 1960s across the United States. Chavez won wage increases, benefits, and legal protections for migrant farmworkers in the western United States and fought to have dangerous pesticides outlawed for agricultural use.
Chavez was born March 31, 1927, in Yuma, Arizona, one of five children in a family that lived on a small farm. When he was a child the family was pushed onto the road as migrant laborers when Chavez's parents lost the family farm during the Depression. He later often spoke of what he felt was the unjust way the family had lost its property through foreclosure. Chavez never went beyond the seventh grade, and once said he attended over sixty elementary schools because of his family's constant search for work in the fields.
Chavez was exposed to labor organizing as a young boy when his father and uncle joined a dried-fruit industry union in the late 1930s. The young Chavez was deeply impressed when the workers later went on strike. At age nineteen Chavez himself picketed cotton fields but watched the union fail in its efforts to organize the workers.
After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to California where he married a woman named Helen Fabela. In 1952 the Los Angeles headquarters of organizer Saul Alinsky's Community Service Organization (CSO) decided to set up a chapter in San Jose, California, to work for civil rights for the area's Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. A parish priest supplied several names to CSO organizer Fred Ross, including that of Chavez, who was then living in one of San Jose's poorest and toughest neighborhoods—Sal Si Puedes (in English, Leave If You Can). Ross thought Chavez could be the best grassroots leader he had ever encountered, so he sought Chavez out and eventually convinced him to join the group's efforts. Chavez began as a volunteer in a CSO voter registration drive and a few months later was hired as a staff member. He spent the next ten years leading voter registration drives throughout the San Joaquin Valley and advocating for Mexican immigrants who complained of mistreatment by police officers, immigration authorities, and welfare officials.
Chavez believed that unionizing was the only chance for farmworkers to improve their working conditions and in 1962, increasingly frustrated because the CSO would not become involved in forming a farmworkers' union, he resigned. He immediately established the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the UFW, an affiliate with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). At the UFW's first meeting in September 1962, in Fresno, California, Chavez's cousin, Manuel Chavez, unveiled the flag he and Chavez had designed for the new union—a black Aztec eagle in a white circle on a bold red background. The banner soon became the symbol of the farmworkers' struggle.
When Chavez founded the UFW, field-workers in California averaged $1.50 an hour, received no benefits, and had no methods by which to challenge their employers. Under Chavez's leadership, the UFW won tremendous wage increases and extensive benefits for farmworkers, including medical and unemployment insurance and workers' compensation. A strict believer in nonviolence, Chavez used marches, boycotts, strikes, fasts, and civil disobedience to force growers in California's agricultural valleys to the bargaining table. In 1968, Filipino grape pickers in Delano, California, struck for higher wages; several days later, the UFW joined the strike and initiated a boycott of California grapes. More than two hundred union supporters traveled across the United States and into Canada urging consumers not to buy California grapes. The mayors of New York, Boston, Detroit, and St. Louis announced that their cities would not buy nonunion grapes. By August 1968, California grape growers estimated the boycott had cost them about 20 percent of their revenue. The boycott brought Chavez to the attention of national political leaders, including U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who sought the Democratic party nomination for president before his assassination in 1968. Kennedy described Chavez as a heroic figure. In 1970, after its successful boycott, the UFW signed contracts with the grape growers.
In 1975, Chavez had a great success when the strongest law ever enacted to protect farmworkers, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (Cal. Lab. Code § 1140 et seq. [West]), was passed by the California Legislature. This law gave workers the right to bargain collectively and the right to seek redress for unfair labor practices. Other regulations banned tools that caused crippling back injury, such as the short-handled hoe, and required growers to give workers breaks and to provide toilets and fresh water in the fields. Chavez was among the first to link workers' health problems to pesticides. He negotiated union contracts that prohibited growers from using DDT and he targeted five leading pesticides that cause birth defects or kill upon contact.
At its peak in the 1970s the UFW had seventy thousand members. In the early 1980s the UFW's influence began to wane and union membership dipped below ten thousand. Chavez blamed the decline in part on the election of Republican governors, beginning in 1983, who sided with the growers. In addition, Chavez decided to turn his efforts to conducting boycotts rather than organizing workers, a move that was widely criticized and caused a split among the union's members. Chavez was also forced to defend himself against lawsuits stemming from UFW actions taken years before. In 1991, the union lost a $2.4 million case when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a case stemming from a 1979 Imperial Valley strike in which a farmworker was shot and killed (Maggio, Inc. v. United Farm Workers of America, 227 Cal. App. 3d 847, 278 Cal. Rptr. 250 [Cal. App. 1991], cert. denied, 502 U.S. 863, 112 S. Ct. 187, 116 L. Ed. 2d 148 [1991]).
In April 1993, Chavez returned to San Luis, a small town near his native Yuma, Arizona, to testify in the retrial of a lawsuit brought by Bruce Church, Inc., a large Salinas, California-based producer of iceberg lettuce. At the time Chavez testified, Bruce Church had extensive landholdings in Arizona and California, including the acreage east of Yuma that Chavez's parents had once owned. The company had won a $5.4 million judgment for alleged damage caused by union boycotts but an appellate court overturned the judgment and sent the case back to the trial court (Bruce Church, Inc. v. United Farm Workers of America, 816 P.2d 919 [Ariz. App. 1991]). On April 22, Chavez finished his second day of testimony in Yuma County Superior Court. He returned to spend the night at the home of a family friend and died in his sleep during the night.
Following Chavez's death, Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, described him as instrumental in organized labor's efforts to improve the lot of the worker. "Always, Cesar conveyed hope and determination, especially to minority workers, in the daily struggle against injustice and hardship," Kirkland said. "The improved lives of millions of farm workers and their families will endure as a testimonial to Cesar and his life's work."
In a 1984 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Chavez said, "Regardless of what the future holds for our union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishment cannot be undone. The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm."
