Chavez, Cesar Estrada

CHAVEZ, CESAR ESTRADA

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) was raised in Arizona as the son of a farming family. He devoted his life to union organizing and nonviolent social activism on behalf of laborers in the fields and vineyards of the Southwest. The founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Chavez planted the seeds of a broadly–based civil rights movement among Hispanic Americans. As a deeply religious man he drew from the teachings of his Roman Catholic heritage. He was also deeply influenced by the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), and the tactics of radical community activist, Saul Alinsky.

Cesar Chavez was barely ten years old when a bank repossessed his family's farm. With his parents and four siblings, he became one of thousands of migrant workers roving from one crop harvest to another. They all worked to earn a marginal existence during the Great Depression.

Chavez was twelve when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began organizing dried-fruit industry workers. His father and uncle actively supported unions. In this way the boy learned firsthand about strikes, picket lines and organizing operations. Most efforts, however, failed to organize farm workers in those days. After long and brutally exhausting days in the field, there was little time to attend meetings. The labor force was constantly shifting from place to place, and many of the Mexican immigrants feared personal retribution by farm owners if they joined together to protest working conditions.

Chavez's family moved from one migrant labor camp to another; Chavez later said that though he attended 65 schools, he never graduated from high school. He served in the U.S. Navy for two years during World War II (1939–1945). When the war was over he returned to working in the fields. Three years later he married Helen Fabela, a fellow migrant worker. They shared strong religious beliefs and a commitment to investing farm workers with hope and dignity.

In 1952 Chavez began actively organizing workers in the fields. He was recruited and trained for his work by the California-based Community Service Organization (CSO). During the next ten years Chavez built new chapters of CSO, led voter registration drives, and helped Mexican-Americans confront issues of police and immigration abuse. In 1958 he became general director of CSO. He resigned four years later to found the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with $1,200 of his own savings.

Organizing farm workers was agonizingly slow work, but by 1965 Chavez had organized a union with a membership of 1700 workers. The staff was composed mostly of Roman Catholic clerics and lay people. In September of that year Chavez led California grape pickers on a five-year strike. Grape growers fought back, but gradually the nation's consumers swung to the workers' side and stopped buying grapes. By 1968 there was a nationwide boycott of California grapes, and the growers were forced to negotiate.

Chavez went on to wage a successful boycott of iceberg lettuce. Like Gandhi, he dramatized his fights against grape growers and lettuce producers by fasting and inviting arrest. He picketed alongside his workers and did jail time with them. By the late 1960s the movement had been baptized La Causa (The Cause).

In 1966 Chavez's union merged with the AFLCIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. It became the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC). By May 1970 farmer after farmer signed contracts with UFWOC, but problems arose three years later when it was time for these contracts to be renewed. The UFWOC—now renamed the United Farm Workers of America (UFW)—found itself challenged by the National Teamsters Union. Backed by growers who saw an opportunity to weaken or break the UFW, the Teamsters were moderately successful in luring workers away from the UFW. After years of conflict between the two unions an agreement was signed giving UFW the sole right to organize farm workers.

In the final years of Chavez's life the UFW and La Causa were troubled with internal dissension. Union membership fell from a peak 100,000 members to 20,000 agricultural workers. This represented a small precentage of the actual number of men and women working in the fields. Many of Chavez's key lieutenants resigned in protest against his increasingly eccentric behavior and autocratic management of the UFW's affairs. But among his followers and supporters Chavez remained respected and admired. La Causa continued to attract nuns, priests, ministers, rabbis and other veterans of the nonviolent civil rights and antiwar movements.

Chavez's self-sacrifice and personal devotion to the cause of liberating farm workers from exploitation was an inspiration to millions. He brought the nation's attention to the plight of desperately poor migrant workers. His legacy does not consist only of the increases in pay, eligibility for medical insurance, employer-paid pensions, and unemployment benefits that UFW members received. He was responsible for La Causa, the birth of the Hispanic American civil rights movement. When Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, 1993, at age 66, he was on the road in Arizona working for his union.

See also: Agriculture Industry, American Federation of Labor, Congress of Industrial Organizations, United Farm Workers

FURTHER READING

Barr, Evan T. "Sour Grapes: Cesar Chavez 20 Years Later." The New Republic, 25 November 1985.

Cletus, Daniel. "Cesar Chavez and the Unionization of California Farm Workers." In Labor Leaders in America, edited by Melvin Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Ferriss, Susan, and Ricardo Sandoval. The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.

Jones, Arthur. "Millions Reaped What Cesar Chavez Sowed." National Catholic Reporter, May 7, 1993.

Kannellos, Nicholas, ed. Hispanic-American Almanac. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.

Tardiff, Joseph, and L. Mpho Mabunda, ed. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.

Taylor, Ronald B. Chavez and the Farm Workers. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.