What Seems to Have Prompted Chavez's Essay? How Can You Tell?

Written by: Jason Pierce, Angelo State University

Past the stop of this department, you will:

• Explicate the continuities and changes in immigration patterns over time
• Explain how and why diverse groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from 1960 to 1980

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César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona, in 1927, on the farm his grandparents had settled in the 1880s. Similar thousands of others, his family lost their land during the Great Depression, forcing them to join throngs of itinerant laborers crowding California in search of work. Chávez'due south childhood as a migrant farmworker would forever shape him as he experienced immediate the injustices of brutally long hours, dorsum-breaking labor, corrupt labor contractors who deducted high rents from workers' pay, and extremely low wages. Worse, although the Depression led to the creation of new labor laws, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, many of those protections did not apply to subcontract workers.

War concluded the suffering of the Depression, and Chávez joined the U.S. Navy in 1944, at the age of 17. Afterward his belch, he returned to Delano, California, a community in the San Joaquin Valley famous for its table grapes. There he met and married Helen Fabela in 1948, and together the couple had 7 children. In 1952, Chávez met Fred Ross, an organizer for the Community Service Organisation (CSO), who was allied with radical Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. Alinsky, a community organizer and activist, wanted poor people to organize and become politically active to pressure governments to be more attentive to their needs. Alinsky and Ross hoped to convince farmworkers to organize, and Chávez, despite having simply an eighth-grade education, became a powerful speaker and leader in the CSO. Although he broke with the organization in 1962, his experiences informed his creation of theUnited Subcontract Workers (UFW).

Chávez'due south decision to create a farmworker'south union changed his life and the lives of migrant workers in the United States. Dolores Huerta, a beau CSO organizer, was the first person he approached to assist in the creation of the National Farm Workers Clan (NWFA). It was a collaboration that would endure for the rest of his life. 2 years afterwards, the NWFA had more 1,000 members, mostly in California. Chávez and Huerta hoped a marriage of farmworkers could arouse for college wages and assistance with rising rents in migrant camps (equally migrants, they rented houses or campsites, often from the very people for whom they labored).

In 1965, the NFWA joined several other organizations in a strike against grape growers in Delano that began with Filipino workers from the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). The Filipino workers were upset that they received only $1.25 per hr compared with the $1.forty hourly wage of farmworkers who were part of the bracero program (a invitee worker program started during World State of war II). Embracing the principles of nonviolence that Martin Luther Rex Jr. endorsed, the groups staged strikes and protests. In addition, they organized a successful consumer boycott of grapes that attracted international attention. In 1970, the growers relented and signed labor contracts with the strikers. Never before had migrant workers won such a major victory. By this time, the NFWA and AWOC had merged into the United Farm Workers.

The flag and logo of the United Farm Workers (UFW), a black stylized eagle with wings shaped like an inverted Aztec pyramid.

Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Chávez had a leadership style marked by his devout Catholicism. He staged a march from Southern California to the state capitol in Sacramento, which he saw equally a kind of spiritual penanceas much as a mode of raising awareness for farmworkers' rights. In 1968, later on a UFW protest turned trigger-happy, Chávez staged a hunger strike equally punishment for himself and his motility, the first of several hunger strikes he would undertake during his life. His delivery to nonviolence and justice won him many supporters. But every leader needs good lieutenants who can make up for their shortcomings, and Chávez's number two, Dolores Huerta, was molded from tougher textile.

Huerta grew up in a poor simply various neighborhood in Stockton, California. Her single mother worked hard to back up her and her two brothers. Her mother somewhen opened a eating house and hotel, which provided a lower-middle-form income for her children. Dolores, meanwhile, excelled in schoolhouse, merely societal expectations were low for Mexican American women. Following her mother's case, she became a fiercely contained adult female who saw herself equally equal to men. Afterwards graduating high school, she attended community college simply eventually dropped out, marrying her high school sweetheart in 1950. Not unlike feminist leader Betty Friedan, Huerta found herself wanting more and, equally her wedlock failed, she threw herself into civic organizations. These women's organizations, nonetheless, did not accost deeper social issues (e.g., poverty and racism) that increasingly drew her attention. Eventually, she joined the CSO, where she met Chávez.

Dolores Huerta remains an activist for social justice today. In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

Huerta'southward contributions toLa Causa (the cause of farm workers rights) were many. She excelled at arrangement and item, much more Chávez. She believed in tackling issues caput-on and was comfortable treatment many confrontations. She and Chávez argued incessantly, and although she deferred to him publicly, in private she made her opinions known. She tangled with other leaders of the UFW, its members, and, of course, the growers. Such behavior was shocking in the Mexican American community, where women were not supposed to exist active and assertive in public. Huerta'south force of personality, withal, undoubtedly helped propel the UFW forrard.

After several successful boycotts, the UFW turned to raising awareness of other bug facing immigrant workers. California, pressured by the UFW, passed the offset law governing farm-labor organizing, which somewhen led to the establishment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB). Chávez endorsed the California law and became friendly with the new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who supported it. The police, passed in 1975, included provisions such as the correct to boycott and strike, wedlock voting rights for seasonal workers, and cloak-and-dagger-ballot union elections.

Although the UFW had success in the 1970s, the 1980s brought challenges. The new presidential administration of Ronald Reagan (a former governor of California) opposed unions, and many in the American public had come to agree with his view. Unions struggled with internal abuse and other problems in the 1980s, and deindustrialization changed the nature of work for millions of Americans with the loss of factories that were going overseas. Even protests, strikes, and boycotts, the UFW's chief tools, came to be seen as relics from the turbulent 1960s. In California, the ALRB was packed with pro-grower representatives who stifled the efforts of the UFW in labor disputes. Internal strife likewise plagued the wedlock, with several high-profile leaders leaving, and union membership declined from a high of 30,000 in 1976 to only 12,000 by the early 1980s.

Worse, growers increasingly turned to undocumented workers for labor. Mexican nationals had legally worked in the fields since the bracero plan of World War Two, but increasingly people arrived without work visas, and their legal status made it incommunicable for the UFW to organize them. Growers could pay these workers less and undercut the UFW. The union tried to dissuade migrants from crossing illegally into the The states, but these efforts largely failed. Chávez defendant the Clearing and Naturalization Service (INS)of working with growers to let illegal immigrants to enter the country, and he demanded stricter enforcement of clearing laws to curtail illegal immigration.

César Chávez's nonviolent efforts for farmworkers led many to compare him to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

The effect of pesticide poisoning offered Chávez a gamble to revitalize the union and return it to the national spotlight. Many farmworkers, exposed to pesticides while working in the fields, were coming into medical clinics with symptoms of poisoning. Although the potential dangers of pesticides had first reached the public consciousness two decades earlier with Rachel Carson's bestselling volume Silent Spring, the furnishings on farmworkers had never caught the public's interest before. Chávez figured he could attract the attending of Americans by focusing on the dangers of pesticides to workers and consumers. The UFW staged a new grape cold-shoulder and produced a movie titled The Wrath of Grapes (a pun on the classic John Steinbeck novel of the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath). The union also organized marches and protests, and Chávez staged another high-profile hunger strike. For 36 days he subsisted entirely on water.

Although Huerta claimed the hunger strike was "a spiritual thing with him," it likewise had the issue of refocusing national attention on the UFW's phone call to boycott grapes. Celebrities, including thespian Martin Sheen, participated in their own shorter hunger strikes to raise awareness. Although the cold-shoulder did injure growers, it did not achieve Chávez's larger goal of revitalizing the spousal relationship. Lawsuits by growers also hurt the UFW, including a 1991 court decision that the UFW pay a fine of $ii.4 million in damages from a 1979 strike. To bargain with these issues, Chávez connected his usual frenetic pace of work. Some other fast took too much out of him, all the same, and his friends convinced him to break it early on. That evening, Apr 23, 1993, he retreated to bed wearied and passed away in his sleep.

Although Chávez is remembered as the creator of an important union and a champion of social justice, in death he became much more. President Bill Clinton called him an "accurate hero," and for Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, he became an icon and an inspiration. His rallying cry "Si se puede" ("Yes, nosotros tin") continues to inspire social reformers today.

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Review Questions

1. The event that led to the Chávez family'south losing their land in Arizona was

1. World State of war I
2. World State of war II
3. the Dandy Depression
4. the Mexican Revolution of 1910

2. The law that allowed unions like the UFW to organize and negotiate with growers was

1. the 1935 National Labor Relations Act
2. the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Board Human activity
3. the Fourteenth Amendment
4. the court decision in the UFW vs Bruce Church, Inc. example

3. César Chávez's most significant collaborator during his time every bit head of the UFW was

1. Helen Fabela
2. Saul Alinsky
3. Fred Ross
4. Dolores Huerta

4. How did the National Labor Relations Act protect migrant workers?

1. It required that all American workers have equal opportunity to unionize.
2. It did non provide them legal protection.
3. It express merely the number of working hours.
4. It provided but the right to collective bargaining.

five. The United Farms Workers was formed primarily to

1. provide social and economic programs for the braceros
2. unionize Filipino farmworkers
3. protect the rights of migrant farmworkers
4. proceeds equal pay for equal piece of work in the agricultural industry

half dozen. The UFW's influence began to diminish considering

1. its ability to strike was weakened during the Reagan Administration
2. growers began to rent undocumented immigrants
3. the release of The Wrath of Grapes damaged its reputation
4. César Chávez passed away

Free Response Questions

1. Explain how the childhood experiences of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta shaped their careers as labor activists.
2. Depict the challenges in the 1980s that hurt the United Farm Workers.

AP Practice Questions

"The growers even went to India for labor, and in the early twenties they were recruiting in the Philippines. When they saw that many Mexicans were leaving their country because of the Revolution, they saw an opportunity. I grower explained that Mexicans were adept for California state work because they were brusk and shut to the footing. The growers went further than they ever went before. During World War 2, our own government became the recruiter for laborers, braceros. Even today, equally I stand here talking to you, we cannot asphyxiate off product on the swell farms for i uncomplicated reason. The regulations on immigration are not being enforced. Our own regime is the biggest strikebreaker confronting the union. The biggest weapon in the easily of the growers is the "dark-green menu" commuter."

Cesar Chávez, voice communication at Calvary Episcopal Church building in Manhattan, New York Metropolis 1968

Refer to the excerpt provided.

1. With which of the post-obit issues of the time period was César Chávez most concerned?

1. Undocumented clearing
2. Integration of the military
3. Lack of ceremonious rights for subcontract laborers
4. Union disputes

2. Which of the following groups would about probable support the sentiments expressed in the excerpt?

1. African American civil rights protestors
2. Progressives
3. Abolitionists
4. Anarchists

3. The bug described in the excerpt most closely resemble which issues faced by American workers in the nineteenth century?

1. The desire to exclude Chinese immigrants from the United States
2. The lack of rights for spousal relationship workers, leading to violent strikes
3. The living conditions in the tenements of industrializing cities
4. The business concern practices of the robber barons

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Master Sources

"(31873) Posters & Graphics, Boycotts, Pesticides, New York, 1976. Boycott Grapes; Protect Your Family from the Scourge of Pesticides." http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/11920

Chávez, César. Speech by Cesar Chavez to the Confederate Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, ca. 1968. Speeches and Writings of Caesar Chavez. https://chavezfoundation.org/speeches-writings/#1549061453809-a37ed09b-c027

Pawel, Miriam. "Farmworkers Reap Little as Marriage Strays from Its Roots." Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2006.http://world wide web.latimes.com/local/la-me-ufw8jan08-story.html#

"United Farm Workers – Graphics." Reuther Library at Wayne State also has a collection of UFW posters. http://reuther.wayne.edu/image/tid/1836

"(31873) Posters & Graphics, Boycotts, Pesticides, New York, 1977. Una Sola Union" [A Single Union]." Poster in support of the UFW. 1977. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/11859

United Farm Workers website. https://ufw.org

Young Americans for Freedom. "This Man is Selling You Sour Grapes" poster. Anti-UFW poster, ca. 1980. Library of Congress. http://world wide web.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015648342/

Suggested Resources

Garcia, Matt. From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chaves and the Subcontract Worker Movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012.

Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcia. César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

LaBotz, Dan. César Chávez and La Causa. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.

Levy, Jacques. César Chávez: An Autobiography of La Causa. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Printing, 2007.

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Source: https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/cesar-chavez-dolores-huerta-and-the-united-farm-workers

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