César Estrada Chávez

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(b. Yuma, Arizona, 31 Mar. 1927; d. 23 Apr. 1993) US; labour organizer and Hispanic political activist Chavez became a migrant labourer at age 10 and was entirely self-educated. An avid reader, he was influenced especially by Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography and, although a radical activist, adopted a philosophy of non-violence which fitted well with his deep Christian commitment. In 1952 he joined a community service organization but left in 1962 when it rejected his ideas for mobilizing itinerant farmers. That year (1962) Chavez founded the United Farm Workers' Union, effectively the first organization of migrant farm workers in American labour history. He also began his campaign to heighten public awareness of the conditions in which many migrant farm workers lived in the USA. In 1965 he launched a grape boycott against the wine producers of the Central Valley of California who refused to give union contracts for their workers. He later embarked on public hunger strikes, tactics which earned him huge sympathy and forced concessions from the employers. In 1970 the UFW signed its first union contract with the growers.

Chavez thereby achieved national prominence becoming the most well-known Chicano leader of his time. Union contracts delivered better wages and working conditions for farmers and their families. His union grew to a peak of about 70,000 members and engaged in a range of other successful boycott campaigns. Largely as a result of Chavez's pressure, California in 1975 enacted an Agricultural Labor Relations Act which recognized the right of farm workers to organize collectively.

Thereafter Chavez's influence declined. His union lost members and economic and political conditions allowed growers to return to employing non-union workers and to cut wages. Nevertheless Chavez remained a heroic figure and an important political strategist among Hispanics and migrant workers, especially in the south-western United States.

Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was a Mexican-American labor leader who organized the first effective unionof farm workers in the history of California agriculture.

Cesar Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, near Yuma, Arizona. His grandfather had homesteaded some 112 acres there in 1904, but the family lost the ranch during the Depression in 1939, when they could not pay the taxes. The family then joined the migrant laborers streaming into California.

Early Organizing

Chavez quit school after the eighth grade to work fulltime in the fields, but in 1944 he joined the U.S. Navy. He served for two years in the Pacific, but racism kept him in menial jobs, so upon discharge he rejoined his family and continued as a farm worker in California. In 1948 he married Helen Fabela of Delano, California.

In 1952 Chavez met Fred Ross, who was organizing Mexican-Americans in the barrios (quarters) of California into the Community Service Organization (CSO). They concentrated on voter registration, citizenship classes, and helping Mexican-American communities obtain needed facilities in the barrios as well as aiding individuals with such typical problems as welfare, contracts signed with unscrupulous salesmen, and police harassment.

Chavez's work in the voter registration drive in Sal Si Puedes, the notorious San Jose barrio, was so effective that Ross hired him as an organizer. Over the next 10 years Chavez rose to national director of CSO. In 1962, when the CSO rejected his proposal to start a farmworkers union, he quit the organization. At 35 years of age, with $1,200 in savings, he took his wife and eight children to Delano to begin the slow, methodical organizing process which grew into the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). When, three years later, members of Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) struck the vineyards in Delano, they asked for support from Chavez's NFWA.

Thus began the great California table-grape strike, which lasted five years. In 1966, the two unions merged to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) of the AFL-CIO, headed by Chavez. During the struggle to organize the vineyards Chavez initiated an international boycott of California table grapes that brought such pressure to bear on local grape growers that most eventually signed with his union. The boycott ended in September 1970. Soon after this victory, Chavez again employed the boycott strategy, this time against lettuce growers who used non-union labor. Chavez became the first man ever to organize a viable farm workers' union in California that obtained signed contracts from the agricultural industry.

Believed in Non-Violence

Chavez was an outspoken advocate of social change through nonviolent means. In 1968, to avert violence in the grape strike, he undertook a 25-day fast; the fast was broken at an outdoor Mass attended by some 8,000 persons, including Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Chavez also led a 200-mile march from Delano to Sacramento to dramatize the demands of the farm workers.

In July 1970 Chavez's union faced one of its most serious challenges when the Teamsters' union signed contracts that applied to farm workers with some 200 growers in California. Chavez met the challenge head on: within 3 weeks the largest agricultural strike ever to hit California had spread over 180 miles along the coastal valleys. About 7,000 farm workers struck to win recognition of Chavez's UFWOC as their bargaining agent, with the national boycott again used as the weapon.

From 1972 to 1974, membership in the union dwindled from nearly 60,000 to just 5,000. But Chavez's efforts were rewarded. From 1964 to 1980, wages of California migrant workers had increased 70 percent, health care benefits became a reality and a formal grievance procedure was established. Chavez continued to fight for the rights of workers up to the day of his death on April 22, 1993.

Further Reading

Collins, David R., Farmworker's Friend: The Story of Cesar Chavez Carolrhoda Books, 1996.

Ferris, Susan, et al, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement, Harcourt Brace, 1997.

Gonzales, Doreen Cesar Chavez: Leader for Migrant Farm Workers, Enslow Publications, 1996.

(1927-1993), executive director of the United Farm Workers. Born in Yuma, Arizona, to immigrant parents, Chavez moved to California with his family in 1939. For the next ten years they moved up and down the state working in the fields. During this period Chavez encountered the conditions that he would dedicate his life to changing: wretched migrant camps, corrupt labor contractors, meager wages for backbreaking work, bitter racism.

His introduction to labor organizing began in 1952 when he met Father Donald McDonnell, an activist Catholic priest, and Fred Ross, an organizer with the Community Service Organization, who recruited Chavez to join his group. Within a few years Chavez had become national director, but in 1962 resigned to devote his energies to organizing a union for farm workers.

A major turning point came in September 1965 when the fledgling Farm Workers Association voted to join a strike that had been initiated by Filipino farm workers in Delano's grape fields. Within months Chavez and his union became nationally known. Chavez's drawing on the imagery of the civil rights movement, his insistence on nonviolence, his reliance on volunteers from urban universities and religious organizations, his alliance with organized labor, and his use of mass mobilizing techniques such as a famous march on Sacramento in 1966 brought the grape strike and consumer boycott into the national consciousness. The boycott in particular was responsible for pressuring the growers to recognize the United Farm Workers (ufw; renamed after the union joined the afl-cio). The first contracts were signed in 1966, but were followed by more years of strife. In 1968 Chavez went on a fast for twenty-five days to protest the increasing advocacy of violence within the union. Victory came finally on July 29, 1970, when twenty-six Delano growers formally signed contracts recognizing the ufw and bringing peace to the vineyards.

That same year the Teamsters' union challenged the ufw in the Salinas valley by signing sweetheart contracts with the growers there. Thus began a bloody four-year struggle. Finally in 1973, the Teamsters signed a jurisdictional agreement that temporarily ended the strife.

Believing that the only permanent solution to the problems of farm workers lay in legislation, Chavez supported the passage of California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act (the first of its kind in the nation), which promised to end the cycle of misery and exploitation and ensure justice for the workers. These promises, however, proved to be short-lived as grower opposition and a series of hostile governors undercut the effectiveness of the law.

After 1976 Chavez led the union through a major reorganization, intended to improve efficiency and outreach to the public. In 1984 in response to the grape industry's refusal to control the use of pesticides on its crops, Chavez inaugurated an international boycott of table grapes.

For thirty years Chavez tenaciously devoted himself to the problems of some of the poorest workers in America. The movement he inspired succeeded in raising salaries and improving working conditions for farm workers in California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida.

Bibliography:

Jacques E. Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (1975); Dick Meister and Anne Loftis, A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America's Farm Workers (1977).

Author:

Richard Griswold del Castillo

See also Agriculture; Labor.

Chavez, Cesar Estrada (sā'sär āsträ'THä shä'vĕz), 1927-93, American agrarian labor leader, b. near Yuma, Ariz. A migrant worker, he became involved (1952) in the self-help Community Service Organization (CSO) in California, working among Mexicans and Mexican Americans; from 1958 to 1962 he was its general director. In 1962, he left the CSO to organize wine grape pickers in California and formed the National Farm Workers Association. Using strikes, fasts, picketing, and marches, he was able to obtain contracts from a number of major growers. In 1966 his organization merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO. Chavez also launched (1968) a boycott against the table grape growers, mobilizing consumer support throughout the United States. In 1972 the United Farm Workers (UFW), with Chavez as president, became a member union of the AFL-CIO. Chavez expanded its efforts to include all California vegetable pickers and launched a lettuce boycott, as well as extending his organizational efforts to Florida citrus workers. His successes in California were sharply diminished, however, as the result of a jurisdictional dispute with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters over the organization of field workers. In 1973 the Teamsters cut heavily into UFW membership by signing contracts with former UFW grape growers, but Chavez renewed the grape workers' strike. In 1977, the two unions signed a pact defining the types of workers each could organize. Membership in the UFW later fell, in part due to disputes between Chavez and his followers, some of whom accused him of nepotism.

Bibliography

See J. E. Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (1975); R. Franchere, Cesar Chavez (1988).

An American labor leader of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, Chávez organized food harvesters in California, many of them Mexican-Americans like himself, into the United Farm Workers. This labor union led nationwide boycotts against the table grape industry and the lettuce industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Chávez is known for his commitment to nonviolent resistance.

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."