biography
| name: |
Chavez, Cesar (Estrada)
|
pronunciation:
[chavez, chahvez]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1927–93)
|
| biography:
| Labour leader, born in Yuma, Arizona, USA. A migrant farmworker in his youth, he attended 65 elementary schools and never graduated from high school. He became a community and labour organizer of agricultural workers in the 1950s, and in 1962 founded the National Farm Workers Association, based in California and the SW among the mainly Chicano (Mexican-Americans) and Filipino farmworkers. In 1966 this union was chartered by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations as the United Farm Workers of America, and he remained its president until his death. He first attracted national attention when in 1965 he struck the table grape growers in California by calling for a national boycott; this action lasted five years and ended with the first major victory for migrant workers in the USA. He continued his struggles, both with the Teamsters Union that tried to take over his workers and with the large growers that refused to improve their wages and working conditions, and at the time of his death he was leading yet another national boycott of grapes to protest the use of pesticides harmful to workers. He went on three hunger strikes (25 days in 1968, 24 days in 1972, 36 days in 1988), and it was believed that these produced physical damage that hastened his death. |
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