CHÁVEZ, CÉSAR ESTRADA

CHÁVEZ, CÉSAR ESTRADA

César Estrada Chávez, the son of Mexican American farm workers, became a well-known labor leader, founding the UNITED FARM WORKERS (UFW) union, which led a massive grape boycott across the United States during the
1960s. Chávez won wage increases, benefits, and legal protections for migrant farm workers in
the western United States and fought to have dangerous pesticides outlawed.

Chávez was born March 31, 1927, in Yuma, Arizona, one of five children in a family that lived on a small farm for a time.When he was a child, the family was pushed onto the road as migrant laborers when Chávez’s parents lost the family farm during the Great Depression. Later, he often spoke of what he felt was the unjust way in which his family had lost their property through foreclosure. Chávez never went beyond the eighth grade, and he once said that he had attended over 60 elementary schools because of his family’s constant search for work in the fields.

Chávez was exposed to labor organizing as a
young boy, when his father and uncle joined a
dried-fruit industry union during the late 1930s.
The young Chávez was deeply impressed when
the workers later went on strike. At age 19,
Chávez 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
Chávez, who was then living in one of San Jose’s
poorest and toughest neighborhoods—Sal Si
Puedes (leave, if you can). Ross believed that
Chávez could be the best grassroots leader he
had ever encountered, so he sought Chávez out
and eventually convinced him to join the
group’s efforts. Chávez 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.

Chávez believed that unionizing was the
only chance for farm workers to improve their
working conditions. He resigned in 1962,
increasingly frustrated because the CSO would
not become involved in forming a farm workers’
union. He immediately established the National
Farm Workers Association, which later became
the UFW, an affiliate of the AMERICAN FEDERATION
OF LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL
ORGANIZATIONS (AFL-CIO). At the UFW’s first
meeting in September 1962, in Fresno, California,
Chávez’s cousin, Manuel Chávez, unveiled
the flag that he and Chávez 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 farm workers’
struggle.

When Chávez founded the UFW, field workers
in California averaged $1.50 per hour,
received no benefits, and had no methods by
which to challenge their employers. Under
Chávez’s leadership, the UFW won tremendous
wage increases and extensive benefits for farm
workers, including medical and unemployment
insurance and WORKERS’ COMPENSATION. A
strict believer in nonviolence, Chávez 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 200 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 that
the boycott had cost them about 20 percent of
their expected revenue. The boycott brought
Chávez 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 Chávez as a heroic figure.
In 1970, after its successful boycott, the
UFW signed contracts with the grape growers.

In 1975, Chávez had a great success when the
strongest law ever enacted to protect farm workers,
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 the use of tools that
caused crippling back injuries, such as the shorthandled
hoe, and required growers to give workers
breaks and to provide toilets and fresh water
in the fields. Chávez 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 during the 1970s the UFW had
over 70,000 members. During the early 1980s,
the UFW’s influence began to wane and union
membership dipped below ten thousand.
Chávez blamed the decline in part on the election
of Republican governors, who sided with
the growers. In addition, Chávez decided to turn
his efforts toward conducting boycotts rather
than organizing workers, a move that was widely
criticized and caused a split among the union’s
members. Chávez 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 its appeal. The case
stemmed from a 1979 Imperial Valley strike in
which a farm worker 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, Chávez 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 Chávez
testified, Bruce Church had extensive landholdings
in Arizona and California, including the
acreage east of Yuma that Chávez’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, Chávez 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.
Following Chávez’s death, Lane Kirkland,
president of the AFL-CIO, described the leader
as instrumental in organized labor’s efforts to
improve the lot of the worker. “Always, César
had 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
César and his life’s work.”

In a 1984 speech to the Commonwealth
Club in San Francisco, Chávez 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.”

FURTHER READINGS
Etulain, Richard W., ed. 2002. Cesar Chavez: A Brief Biography with Documents New York: Palgrav.

Houle, Michelle, ed. 2003. Cesar Chavez. San Diego, Calif: Greenhaven Press.

Matthiessen, Peter. 1969. Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution. New York: Random House.

Tracy, Kathleen. 2003. Cesar Chavez. Bear, Del.: Mitchell Lane.

CROSS-REFERENCES
Agricultural Law; Labor Union.