César Chávez
César Chávez organised farm workers who had been excluded from American labour law since 1935, and the instrument he used was the boycott. Born in 1927 near Yuma, Arizona, he was ten when the family lost its farm in the Depression and became migrant workers in California, moving between crops. He attended more than thirty schools and left after the eighth grade, served in the navy, and returned to the fields. He was recruited into the Community Service Organization in 1952 and spent a decade registering voters and running local campaigns before leaving to found the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 with Dolores Huerta, a union with no members and no money. Agricultural labourers had been written out of the National Labor Relations Act, so they had no protected right to organise and no obligation on growers to bargain. The Delano grape strike began in 1965 when Filipino workers walked out and Chávez's mostly Mexican-American union joined them. It lasted five years. His answer to the legal position was to take the fight to the consumer: a national boycott of table grapes, supported by churches, students and other unions, that by 1970 had some seventeen million Americans not buying grapes and forced the growers to sign. He fasted repeatedly — twenty-five days in 1968, thirty-six in 1988 — and insisted on nonviolence to the point of alienating parts of his own movement. California passed a farm labour relations act in 1975. He died in 1993, and his birthday is a holiday in several states.
- Lived: 1927 CE – 1993 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: labor_organiser, civil_rights_activist, co_founder_ufw
