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Cesar Chavez Movement

In the nineteen twenty-seven, Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona. Prior to their migration

to Yuma, Cesar's mother served as a casual farm worker in California. In 1925, Librado and

Juana purchased buildings near the family home, but they were indebted heavily, sold them, and

moved to Dorothea's home. Chavez was brought up in a poor but comfortable and well-clothed

family. The family communicated in Spanish, and they were Christians of the Catholic

denominations. Chavez loved sports because he participated in handball and listened to wrestling

games on the radio for entertainment. Cesar had Rita and Richard as his siblings. Chavez

attended Laguna Dam school in the nineteen-thirties where Spanish was forbidden. Their home

was auctioned to the local governments to cover the taxes that Dorothea had after she died. This

left him and his mother homeless. The Chavez family left for California and joined several

American immigrants. They worked as pickers of avocado in Oxnard then as pickers of pea in

Pescadero. In California, he changed schools many times, but he was an average student, and he

did extremely well in Mathematics. He was ridiculed for his poverty in school and faced

discrimination from Americans. He graduated junior high school and went into full-time casual

laborer (Garcia,2013). He joined the United States Navy but was discharged later in 1946. He

relocated to Delano and started a family with Helen, where he got married. In 1947, Chavez was

identified with members of the National Farm Labor Union. He started fighting for the civil

rights of farm laborers, to which he dedicated his life. Cesar made known the struggles of
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laborers in the United States to improve their working and living conditions. He did this by

organizing and negotiating contracts with the workers.

He practiced resistance to non-violence, which Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior also

practiced. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, he started the National Farm Workers

Association, later named United Farm Workers of America, which helped improve casual

workers' working and living standards at the farms. Chavez worked at a lumbering yard in San

Jose when he became a founding organizer for Community Service Organization, a Latin civil

Rights group in the year nineteen fifty-two (Garcia,2013). He worked as a registrar of new voters

and fought any prejudice due to race, economic status, and became the director of Community

Service Organization. He later resigned in 1962 when he did not receive enough support

information from a labor association for the farm laborers. Despite that, he gave up his life

savings and started a National Farm Workers Association in Delano, California.

After founding National Farm Workers Association, the grape strike stroke. On the formation of

the association, he understood that he had to fight for the struggles of the powerless and poor

workers. These people worked hard to put food on the nation's table, but they never had food of

their own many a times. These laborers were never privileged to have unemployment insurance,

they had no laws that protected them from minimum wages, and in an hour, they made as low as

forty cents (Green, 2010). Chavez had failed previously to unite farmworkers because California

had a powerful agricultural industry that fought back because of their power and wealth. Gandhi

from India was an inspiration to Chavez due to his nonviolent civil disobedience and St. Francis

of Assisi, who gave up his wealth to work for the poor and live with them. Chavez had difficulty

recruiting new union members because he traveled around San Joaquim and Imperial Valleys for
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National Farm Workers Association. On this, he worked with Dolores Huerta. On the other side,

her wife had on the field to provide for the family when her husband was away.

The strike against California's grape growers was started in nineteen sixty-five in September by

the National Farm Workers Association, which was done in conjunction with the Agricultural

Workers Organizing Committee (a Filipino- American labor group). The campaign led to the

boycott f the Californian grapes into the market nationally. This campaign went further and

received a lot of support. In his speech that he read after the first hunger strike ended, Chavez

said that he was convinced that the most concrete action that demonstrated courage was to make

sacrifices for others to struggle for justice for the farmworkers. According to Green (2010), he

also mentioned that to be manly is to suffer on other people's behalf and prayed that God may

help men. The farmworkers reached an agreement after the farmers agreed to increase the

workers' wages and stay united in their unions in 1970. In nineteen seventy-one, the NWFA and

AWOC united to form the United Farm Workers of America.

Cesar continued working in the Union, in which he won some labor contracts for the farm

laborers in the industry of agriculture through the employment of nonviolent strikes and

boycotts. He did this in the nineteen-seventies. In1972, another hunger strike happened which

they protested against the law of Arizona, which banned the farmworkers from organizing and

protesting against unfair treatment of the workers (Rast, 2014). To mark the end of the strike,

California passed the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act in nineteen seventy-five, which

allowed all farm laborers to unite and discuss more fair pay and conditions in which they

worked. Moreover, the act banned owners from firing striking workers. The third hunger strike
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happened in the mid nineteen eighties. He stated the effects of pesticides on the workers and

their children.

He also had some struggles, like when the farming companies tried to pull the Japanese and

Mexicans against each other by reducing their wages in half. He solved their indifferences and

brought them together. Research done by Wells (2009) shows the Japanese and Mexicans reacted

to their sharp pay cut by uniting so that they could demand their original scale of wages was

restored. In 1933 in the El Monte Berry Strike, these workers fought for higher pay and better

working conditions. The strike led to sharp racial tensions between the Japanese and the

Mexicans and the American residential areas by the local laws. After an agreement due to the

strike, the Japanese and Mexicans could own land and grow berries.

However, Cesar died while sleeping in 1993 at the age of sixty-six. In nineteen ninety-four, Bill

Clinton gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barack Obama has used his slogan "Yes we

can" during his campaign for the presidency.

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References

Garcia, R. A. From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the

Farm Worker Movement. (2013)

Green, S. M. Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the struggle for justice in the 21st

century. (2010)

Rast, Ray. "From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm

Worker Movement." Journal of American Ethnic History 33.3 (2014): 122-124.

Wells, Ronald A. "Cesar Chavez's Protestant Allies: The California Migrant Ministry and the

Farm Workers." Journal of Presbyterian History 87 (2009): 5-16.