Table Of ContentCesar Chavez, who died in 1993, was propelled to prominence during the late 1960s
and early 1970s. This was a time when great social reform movements changed how different
Americans regarded themselves—and each other. Each of the reform movements was
spearheaded by a charismatic leader who not only inspired individual followers, but who also
transformed personal injustices into national crusades.
For African Americans, that leader was Martin Luther King, Jr., the galvanizing force and
incomparable orator of the civil rights movement. For young women, and for many housewives
as well, Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), became the medium and the
message of modern feminism; indeed, the royalties from her best-selling book provided the
foundation for the National Organization for Women (NOW). Environmentalists did not even
have a name for themselves until Rachel Carson published Silent Spring (1962), a hauntingly
powerful indictment of the harmful effects of pesticides and other chemicals upon the
environment.
And for Hispanic Americans, especially recent immigrants and seasonal agricultural
workers from Mexico, Cesar Chavez both created and symbolized the movement that
established basic rights for many Hispanic Americans. More—and in this way, too, he
resembled King and Friedan—Chivez transformed a local struggle between growers and
farmworkers into a nationwide phenomenon; his campaign to persuade Americans not to buy
nonunion farm produce was perhaps the nation's most celebrated boycott since the Boston tea
party.
This biography can be read as a celebration of the man who has become an iconic
figure for Hispanic Americans. But this book is much more. Chavez embodied the struggle of
Hispanic farmworkers because he lived their struggle; consequently, this
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book offers a detailed social and economic history of migrant labor in the 20th century. And
Chavez, though never far removed from the heat of the fields and the sweat of those who toiled
in them, studied the writings of other reformers. His conscious application of the ideas of
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the very different circumstances of modern
America constitutes a real contribution to applied political theory.
Dan La Botz, author of this significant biography, has himself paid his dues. During the
late 1960s, when La Botz was in his twenties, he volunteered to work for Chavez's United Farm
Workers. "I remember union members and supporters praying in front of the house of one of the
owners of a tomato farm on Sunday morning, and when he came out to go to church, he
shouted at the kneeling men and women: 'What are you doing?' One of the workers replied, 'We
are praying that you will see the light and recognize the union."
Once, when asked whether his support of Chavez impaired his ability to tell the story
fairly, La Botz described objectivity as "an intellectual mirage."
"No author can be free from bias, and every author brings a point of view to the subject
matter. I think my own commitment to and understanding of democracy and social
justice have led me to assess Chavez more critically than other writers who support the
labor movement and no doubt more sympathetically than some who have no experience
with civil rights struggles and social movements. For me, the question is not 'Can one be
objective?,' but 'Can one study and sympathize with another's life and still see it in its
complexity and contradictions?'"
La Botz now teaches history and directs the Latin American Studies program at Miami
University in Ohio; his wife, Sherry Baron, is an occupational health physician whose research
includes studies of Latino immigrant farm workers.
- MARC C. CARNES
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Author's Preface
For a generation of Americans, Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was the voice of farmworkers
and of the Mexican American people. He was to the Mexican American community what Martin
Luther King, Jr., was to the African American community, its spokesperson and its symbol, and
to many, its pride and its joy. Chavez earned this position through his role as founder and
organizer of the United Farm Workers union, through his leadership in the Chicano movement,
and through his crucial role in politics. As a result of his efforts, the concerns of Mexican
American and other Latino peoples in the United States were, for the first time, brought into the
national political debate. He put Latinos on the political map.
Cesar Chavez was born into a modestly successful immigrant family, but the Great
Depression and the loss of the family farm plunged them into poverty. Together with his parents
and his siblings, at the age of twelve he became a farmworker in the fields, a child laborer. He
attended schools irregularly, served a couple of years in the Navy in World War II, and then
returned to marry and raise a family. When a Catholic priest introduced him to the Church's
teachings on social justice and gave him practical experience in community organizing, Chavez
realized that perhaps he had another calling.
A deeply pious Catholic, Chavez decided early on to dedicate himself to improving the
economic situation and increasing the political power of the Mexican American people. Trained
by the community organizers Saul Alinsky and Fred Ross, Chavez spent ten years organizing in
Mexican American communities, registering voters, and lobbying. From the beginning, however,
he had wanted to organize farmworkers, to lift them out of their poverty and their oppression. In
1962, with no organizational backing and without financial support, Chavez decided to found
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a union for the field-workers of California. In more than one hundred years, no such union
organizing effort in California had succeeded; every other attempt had been crushed by the
employers, often violently. It seemed an impossible task. Yet Chavez believed that, with the
right leadership and strategy, it could be done.
During the 1960s and 1970s, through grassroots organizing accompanied by the use of
Catholic and Mexican symbols such as the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Chavez
established the United Farm Workers union to improve workers' wages, benefits, and working
conditions. Then, through a series of local strikes and national boycotts, he succeeded in
winning some of the first contracts in agriculture and establishing the first successful union of
agricultural workers in the continental United States. That achievement alone made Chavez a
figure of historic importance.
Yet his influence reached beyond the fields. His success in organizing tens of thousands
of farmworkers made Chavez an important leader of the new Chicano movement, a civil rights
movement among the Mexican Americans throughout the south-west. At the same time, he
worked to register Mexican American citizens to vote, channeled their votes into support for
pro-labor and pro-Latino candidates, and helped elect political representatives who passed
important legislation for farmworkers. Allied with labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the United
Auto Workers and political figures such as Robert F. Kennedy, Chavez breathed new life into
the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Chavez emerged as one of the great and characteristic figures of the 1960s and 1970s.
He supported the civil rights and poor peoples' movements led by Martin Luther King, Jr. He
opposed the United States war in Vietnam. He put forward an alternative vision of America, one
where people of all races would be treated as equals, where working people would earn living
wages and live decent lives, and where the nation would deal with foreign policy through peace,
not war. His leadership of the United Farm Workers, his role as spokesman for the Chicano
movement, and his influence in politics made him the most important Latino figure in the history
of the United States. Decades later, no other figure has emerged to rival him.
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Chapter 1
Child of Immigrants
The story of Cesar Chavez begins with a farmworker rebelling against his boss.
Sometime in the 1880s, Cesario Chavez, a Mexican peon, angered by some abuse, got into an
argument with the son of Luis Terrazas, owner of the Hacienda del Carmen, who was one of the
richest men in Mexico and a close friend of the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Fearing that Terrazas
would have him drafted into the army—the common punishment for rebellious workers in those
days—Cesario fled from his home in Chihuahua and crossed the border into the United States.
In El Paso, Texas, Cesario found work on the railroads and in the fields, and soon he
had saved enough money to send for his wife, Dorotea, and their children. Like most Mexican
immigrants, Cesario kept to the Southwest, leaving Texas to find work in the area of Yuma and
Gila Bend, Arizona. A hard worker, he saved his earnings, bought a wagon and some mules,
and set up a little hauling company. Still, like many Mexican peasants, Cesario yearned to own
his own piece of land, and in the early 1900s, he homesteaded a hundred-acre ranch in the
North Gila Valley along the Colorado River in Arizona.
Cesario Chavez raised fifteen children on that property. Most of them acquired land of
their own and became farmers there or in the nearby Yuma Valley; only one son, Librado
Chavez, stayed to work on the family farm. When he was 38 years old, Librado married Juana
Estrada, another immigrant
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from Chihuahua. Librado and Juana had three children; their second child, Cesario Chavez,
whose name would later be shortened to Cesar, was born on March 31, 1927.
Cesar ClIvez was born into what had become a family of modestly successful and
prosperous Mexican immigrants. We know a good deal about his growing up from the many
interviews that Jacques E. Levy conducted with Chavez and later published as Cesar Chavez:
Autobiography of La Causa. In the mid-1920s, his father acquired property in Gila: a grocery
store (where the family lived), an automobile repair shop, a pool hail. The store served as the
local post office, and Librado became postmaster as well. By this time the Chavez
clan—Librado's brothers, sisters, and cousins, and their children—numbered almost 200
people, giving Librado a dependable clientele for his business ventures and forming a political
power base. Cesar Chavez referred to his father as "politically influential," the person who
organized the local community to vote as a bloc, thereby giving them some political leverage in
the state. As a local farmer, a small businessman, and a political leader, Librado Chavez
enjoyed both economic security and social prestige, and, in a small way, he exercised political
power in the town of Gila in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Young Cesario made his contribution to the family from an early age. While Librado had
his three businesses in town, he still had to dedicate most of his time to the farm. Cesario
worked beside him, helping his father water and feed the animals. At other times Cesario helped
his mother feed the chickens and gather eggs. Sometimes he accompanied his father as he ran
the post office and the pool hail, managed the garage and the farm, and organized the
community to get out the votes.
If Cesar Chavez learned some of his practical organizational skills from his father, his
mother, Juana, gave him his moral training. She was a religious woman and a curandera, a
healer, known in the community for her knowledge of herbs used to treat illnesses. Chavez
remembered her as warm and affectionate and rather moralistic. She was always
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offering conseios (advice) and moral homilies in the form of (lithos (Mexican sayings). "What
you do to others, others do to you," she told him. Chavez even attributed to his mother his
earliest training in the philosophy of nonviolence. Chavez later remembered that, "Despite a
culture where you're not a man if you don't fight back, she would say, `No it's best to turn the
other cheek. God gave you senses like eyes and mind and tongue, and you can get out of
anything."
Juana Chavez also passed on to her son her Mexican version of the Catholic faith. At
the center of Mexican Catholicism stands the Virgin of Guadalupe, the incarnation of the Virgin
Mary who Mexican Catholics believe appeared to the Mexican peasant Juan Diego in 1531.
This patron saint of Mexico, a combination of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin and the Spanish
Catholic Virgin Mary, became not only a religious image but also a nationalist icon. When in
1810 the Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo launched the Mexican Independence
revolution with his famous grim, "Down with bad government, long live Mexico," he carried
before his troops a banner emblazoned with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Thus the Virgin of
Guadalupe came to represent not only the Catholic Church but also the Mexican nation. Cesar
Chavez was taught to hold her in high esteem, as a symbol of both religious faith and the
struggles of the Mexican people.
While the Virgin of Guadalupe was the most important Mexican saint, Chavez's mother
also honored her patron, St. Eduvigis. St. Eduvigis was a Polish duchess of the early Christian
era, who upon becoming a Christian had given up all her worldly possessions to the poor. On
October 16, her saint's day, it was Juana Chavez's custom to find needy persons and help them
out. Often they were hobos, wandering workers in search of a job, whom she invited into her
house and gave a meal. Though they would usually insist on doing some work on the farm to
pay for their food, she would refuse, telling them that on that day they must be her guests. From
his mother's devotion to St. Eduvigis, young Cesar gained a sympathy for workers and the poor
that would influence his later choice of a career as a union organizer.
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Since there was no church in their area, Cesario received formal religious training from
his grandmother Dorotea, known as Mama Tella. She had lived in a convent, probably as a
servant, and had learned to read and write both Spanish and Latin. Then in her 90s, Mama
Tella led Cesario through his catechism and readied him for his first communion. She prepared
him well enough that the church in a nearby town examined and accepted him and permitted
him to go to his first confession and communion.
While the women in his family took care of his Catholic education, the men oversaw his
Spanish instruction and instilled in him a pride in his Mexican heritage. His uncle Ramon Arias
taught him to read Spanish; his mother's uncle, Chico Salazar, read the Mexican newspaper to
Cesario and the other children. Proud of his Mexican heritage, Arias told him, "Don't learn the
gringo language, learn your own language!" Within his family circle, Chavez remembered, "We
heard tales of the Mexican revolution, the battles fought by farmworkers, how they won and lost.
. . . We learned that when you felt something was wrong, you stood up to it."
When he was six years old, Cesario went to the public school with his sister Rita.
Though the village of Gila was almost entirely Spanish-speaking, and many of the families were
part of the Chavez clan, the schoolteachers were Anglo, classes were taught in English, and
Spanish names were mangled. When Rita introduced her brother to the teacher as Cesario, the
teacher immediately cut his name to Cesar, pronounced in English as Caesar. The name stuck
with him for the rest of his life.
Chavez later remembered that school had been hard for him, particularly having to learn
the English language. The Spanish-speaking children, a majority of the class, were forbidden to
speak Spanish. "When we spoke Spanish, the teacher swooped down on us. I remember the
ruler whistling through the air as its edge came down sharply across my knuckles," Chavez said.
"They said that if we were American, then we should speak the language, and if we wanted to
speak Spanish, we should go back to Mexico." He would
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also remember, more painful than the blows from the ruler, the embarrassment he felt because
of his accent and his mistakes. Painful as it might have been, his public school education
nevertheless insured that he would be fully bilingual and bicultural, capable of participating in
both the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking worlds of the Southwest.
School led Chavez to reflect on his ethnic, racial, and national identity. In the classroom,
he once referred to himself as a Mexican. "The teacher was quick to correct me. 'Oh, no, don't
say that! You are an American. All of us are Americans.' But to me an American was a white
man," Chavez thought. When Chavez asked his mother about the problem, she could not give
him a satisfactory answer either. "She said I was a citizen, but I didn't know what a citizen
meant. It was too complicated." For Mexican Americans, the relationship between their Mexican
ethnicity and their American citizenship was difficult to understand.
Issues of ethnicity and citizenship complicated the lives of all members of the Chavez
family. Cesar's grandfather Cesario had once been permitted to vote in El Paso, shortly after he
immigrated to the United States. When he moved to Arizona, the authorities there told him that
his voting experience in Texas had made him a U.S. citizen. That presumed citizenship
permitted him to homestead his farm in the North Gila Valley. Yet many years later, grandfather
Cesario's citizenship was denied, though his grandchildren, some of them born in the territory of
Arizona before it became a state, were U.S. citizens. Nevertheless, he, his children, and his
grandchildren still thought of themselves as mexicanos, and that was logical because white
Americans tended to treat all Mexicans, native-born or foreign-born, as foreigners and inferiors.
In those years the term Mexican American was hardly used and the word Chicano seldom
heard. So as Cesar Chavez grew up he thought of himself as a mexicano, without
understanding the technicalities of citizenship.
Like many Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States, Chavez wrestled with
this question of identity. Was he a Mexican? Was he an American? Or was he both?
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For Chavez, the questions all children ask—Who am I? What am I? What will I be?—were in his
case bound up with the questions: Who are we mexicanos? What are we? What will we be, we
mexicanos?
In later years, Chavez idealized his childhood and remembered fondly the harmonious
community of Gila. His early childhood experiences in his family and in the social life of the clan
that made up much of the population of Gila became an idyllic world. That Mexican and Roman
Catholic community and its culture, that agricultural world with its everyday talk, its songs, and
its stories told and retold in the Spanish language, became a model of community for him. His
memory of his childhood became for him a model of social solidarity.
At about the time that his son Cesario was born, the ambitious Librado purchased an
additional 40 acres of land surrounding his businesses. Not having the cash, he agreed to clear
80 acres of stumps for the same neighbor from whom he had bought the store, in exchange for
the 40 acres of land surrounding it. When he had finished clearing the land, however, the owner
informed Librado that the property had already been sold to another. Prepared to fight in court
for his right to the land, Librado saw a lawyer who advised him he would be better off to borrow
the money and buy the land. Librado followed the lawyer's advice; later, when he could not pay
the interest on the loan, the lawyer himself bought the land and sold it back to the original
owner. Librado had lost the labor he had invested and got nothing in return.
By then the Great Depression had come. The stock market crash of October 1929 led to
economic stagnation and unemployment, with a quarter of the population, some 12 million
people, out of work. As farmers and small-business people, the Chavez family were somewhat
better off than most. Whatever else happened, they had their livestock and their farm produce to
feed the family, and they had income from the businesses, at least at first. With his built-in family
clientele, Librado was able to survive for a while; but gradually
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his business became unprofitable, largely because he extended credit to family and friends.
The tax collector was less kind. During the depression, Librado was unable to pay his
property taxes, deferring them year after year. When the seven-year grace period ended in
1937, he owed the state of Arizona more than $4,000. One of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
New Deal farm programs entitled him to a loan, but the loan was blocked by a local bank
president, Archibald J. Griffin, who was also a powerful local grower. Griffin, who owned land
adjoining the Chavez property, hoped to force his neighbor into bankruptcy so that he could buy
his land at auction. The state took possession of the land on August 29, 1937.
The Chavez family was determined not to lose its land. In 1938, when Cesar was 12
years old, he and several other family members went to California to work as farm laborers for a
year, hoping to raise enough money to buy back the farm. On February 6, 1939, the Yuma
County Board of Supervisors sold the 118.58 acres in the North Gila Valley at public auction.
Only two bidders had appeared: Archibald Griffin and Librado Chavez. Desperate to get his land
back, Librado outbid Griffin—but then he could not come up with a loan within the thirty-day time
limit to back up his bid of $2,300. At a second auction the following month, Griffin won the ranch
with a bid of $1,750. Not long thereafter, a big red tractor rolled up to the farm and flattened the
corral as Cesar and his brother. Richard watched. "We were pushed off the land," Chavez later
said. "When we left the farm, our whole life was upset, turned upside down. We had been part
of a very stable community, and we were about to become migratory workers. We had been
uprooted."
The family, friends, and community were devastated by the Great Depression. Between
the ages of 10 and 12, Cesar Chavez watched his father driven out of business, cheated by a
neighbor, hoodwinked by a lawyer, threatened by the tax collector, and denied loans by the
bank. The loss of the family farm and his father's businesses meant that for more than a dozen
years, from 1939 until 1952, toiling alongside his family, Chavez would be a migrant farmworker.
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The Chavez family could not have chosen a more difficult time to become farmworkers.
Tens of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and other midwestern
states were then streaming into California looking for work. Their farms ruined by the drought
and the dust storms, they too had seen their land auctioned off and watched the tractors knock
down their homes. Like the Joad family in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, they
loaded up their families' modest belongings in their dilapidated cars and set off across the
country for the promised land of California, hoping to find work first and land later. The work
they found consisted of long hours in the hot sun for wages too low to support their hungry
families. The "Okies" and "Arkies" joined the Mexican Americans in the scramble for jobs in the
fields.
The Chavez clan found work in Oxnard, California, first threshing beans and later picking
walnuts. They lived in a "little shack" in La Colonia, the Oxnard barrio, and Cesar went to school
half-days, spending the other half in the fields, working with his family. For the first time he
found farm work unpleasant. "There is such a difference between working for yourself and
working for others," he later said. Working in the fields meant eight hours or more each day, in
the heat of the valleys, stooped over, wielding the hated, backbreaking, short-handled hoe—and
working as fast as one could because workers were paid by the piece.
At that time the fields of California were tended by a quarter of a million farmworkers.
They were a motley crew: men, women, and children of various ethnicities and races, Okies and
Arkies, Filipinos and Japanese, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans.
The Chavez family established itself in a little house in the San Jose barrio called Sal Si
Puedes (Get Out If You Can). it was an ugly, dirty, rough neighborhood, and no one knew
whether the name referred to the impossibility of getting out of the muddy streets, getting out of
the violent fights, or getting out of debt. Sal Si Puedes served for years as a kind of pit stop for
the Chavez family as each year its members wandered the state in search of work.
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Because the family was constantly on the move, Cesar's education suffered. Sometimes
he went to the Mexican Catholic school in Sal Si Puedes, at other times to public schools in
Brawley or other towns. Once he became a farm-worker at the age of 12, Chavez had no home
like most ordinary children. He and his brothers and sisters each attended more than thirty
schools in their childhood. Everything revolved around the family's finding work.
The decision to quit school was not a hard one for Cesar. He disliked school, and he
knew he was needed in the fields if his family were to survive. He had found it embarrassing
sometimes not to have shoes to wear to school, or to have to wear the same shirt every day.
Mostly he, his sister, and his brother attended segregated schools, segregated not in law but in
practice. School-district lines were drawn to keep Mexican migrants out of the Anglo residents'
schools. The schools for Mexicans, like the one in Brawley, where many of the students were
farmworkers, refused to let students speak Spanish even in the playground, and those who did
so were punished. But Chavez remembered attending the white schools as the worst
experience of his young life, and he preferred the segregated schools. When they went to
school in Fresno, Cesar and Richard were the only Mexicans, and the white students
sometimes laughed at them, picked on them, and challenged them to fight. Though his brother
sometimes got into a brawl, Cesar followed his mother's advice and "never fought back,"
preferring to talk himself out of a situation or to take the beating.
The racist attitudes of the schoolchildren reflected the racism of the society. Ever since
he was a boy in Arizona, Chavez had heard the expression "dirty Mexican." In towns like
Kingsburg, California, Mexicans could not eat in the restaurants, and in many places signs in
the stores said "White Trade Only." The movie theaters in Delano were segregated, with
Mexicans, Filipinos, and African Americans confined to one-quarter of the theater, and Anglos
and Japanese allowed to sit anywhere in the other three-quarters. Looking back on this period,
Chavez later said, "Everywhere
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we went, to school, to church, to the movies, there was this attack on our culture and our
language, an attempt to make us conform to the 'American way.' What a sin!"
The greatest expression of the racism of that time was the forced repatriation of
hundreds of thousands of Mexicans during the Great Depression. In those lean years, with
unemployment at 25 percent and millions of Americans without jobs, state and local
governments pressured Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico. California passed a law
forbidding the hiring of noncitizens on public works projects and discouraged employers from
hiring them for other construction projects. With few jobs available, Mexicans stopped
immigrating to the United States, and many of them returned to Mexico. At the same time, the
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service stepped up efforts to deport Mexicans, and state
and local governments pressured Mexicans to leave. In some cases, city or county
governments offered Mexicans money for transportation if they would return to Mexico; in other
cases, they cut off relief payments to needy families in order to make them leave. In the worst
cases, Mexican immigrants were threatened and forced to quit the country. To those white
authorities, Mexican Americans and Mexicans all looked the same, and in some cases Mexican
Americans who were U.S. citizens were also pressured to leave the country. Immigrant families
of mixed citizenship were forced to leave, even though, because their children were U.S.
citizens, they were eligible to stay. Altogether, about 500,000 Mexicans were deported or
pressured to leave during the 1930s.
Chavez remembered that, when he and his family moved from Arizona to California to
find work to save their house, they had themselves feared deportation. It was late at night as
they drove along a deserted highway: "Suddenly two cars bore down on us, their floodlights
shattering the dark," Chavez recalled. "Uniformed men piled out of the cars and surrounded
ours. We were half-asleep, all scared, and crying. It was the Border Patrol, our first experience
with any kind of law. Roughly they asked for identification, our birth certificates, proof of
citizenship. They harassed my mother without
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mercy. She was terrified. She thought if she said the wrong thing, they would throw her into
Mexico immediately. After all, even though she had lived here since she was six months old,
she was born in Mexico. She couldn't speak English, and the only identification she had was a
letter from my father." The Border Patrol held the family there in the car in the Might, repeatedly
questioning the adults and the children. "My mother must have died a hundred times that night,"
Chavez remembered. "She was praying hard. Finally, after about five hours, they let us go."
Encounters with racist attitudes and fear of the authorities were pervasive problems, but
always the most immediate issue was finding a job. While farmworkers could sometimes find
work directly with a grower, workers usually got their jobs through a labor contractor or crew
foreman. The growers employed contractors to hire workers and foremen to supervise them,
and the foremen and contractors often cheated the workers. Contractors frequently lied to
farmworkers, describing higher pay and better housing conditions than actually existed. They
overcharged workers for cigarettes, beer, and candy, and they cheated them out of wages due
to them. They deducted money for. Social Security, then underreported what they had deducted
and kept the rest for themselves. They pressured young women for sexual favors in exchange
for soft jobs or even pay for no work at all, and they put men and women they did not like to
work on the hardest jobs. Chavez remembered his father as being perpetually naive and
gullible, always believing a contractor's story of a well-paying job with a nice house just over the
hill, and always finding a sweatshop in the field and a pigsty for a home. As soon as he was old
enough, at about the age of 14, Cesar quit school and gently pushed his father aside, taking on
himself the responsibility for dealing with the contractors and selling quotas for his family.
In the fields, Chavez received another and a very different sort of education. He learned
about workers' standing up for their rights, about labor unions, and about strikes. Workers
taught each other how to defend themselves against exploitation in the fields. Even where there
were no labor unions,
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workers had developed a tradition of standing up for themselves, using tactics that would make
the employers pay attention to their problems. Often it was a simple matter of showing solidarity
by walking off the job, either striking or just quitting, and taking other workers along. Years later,
Chavez explained that experience in the fields:
If any family felt something was wrong and stopped working, we immediately
joined them, even if we didn't know them. And if the grower didn't correct what was
wrong, then they would leave, and we'd leave.
We weren't afraid to strike, but those strikes weren't on the picket line. We would
leave and try to take as many people as we could and go work elsewhere. When we felt
something was wrong, we stood up against it. We did that many, many times.
We were constantly fighting against things that most people would probably
accept because they didn't have that kind of life we had in the beginning, that strong
family life and family ties which we would not let anyone break.
Chavez remembered their first experience, in 1948, with a real union strike: A car drove
by the fields where his family was working. The car flew a flag, the driver blew a bugle and
shouted through a loudspeaker. Librado stood up, listened, waved his hand, and said, "Let's
go." They joined the strike, jumped in their car, and crisscrossed the valley calling out other
workers to join them. They ended up that night in the town of Corcoran, where they joined a
union rally. That strike, called by the National Farm Labor Union to get growers to restore a
wage cut, involved thousands of workers in cotton.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Librado Chavez joined various unions that tried to organize
California farmworkers: the Tobacco Workers, the Cannery Workers, the National Farm Labor
Union, and the Packinghouse Workers. All of them, met by employer resistance and
government repression—which sometimes involved the beating and even the murder
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of union activists and leaders—were defeated. While in those years Cesar came to learn
something about unions, he never joined one and he never paid dues. But those experiences of
joining with other workers to stand up to the growers and the contractors, walking out of the
fields either on strike or in protest, led him to form a strong sense of identity with the labor
movement, even if he still knew little about it.
In the 1940s, during his teen years, Cesar went through a period of mild rebellion
against his family, his religion, and his traditional Mexican background. He fell in love with the
