Cesar Chavez

Cesar Chavez was an American labor organizer and civil-rights activist whose 1962 founding of the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers union, UFW) made him the most-iconic figure of 20th-century American Mexican-American labor and civil-rights organizing. He was born César Estrada Chávez on March 31, 1927, in Yuma, Arizona, the second of six children born to Mexican-American parents. His family lost their Yuma-area farm during the Great Depression and became migrant agricultural workers — Cesar attended over 30 different schools across his elementary years as the family followed the seasonal harvest cycle through California, Arizona, and the broader American Southwest.

He served in the US Navy from 1946 to 1948 and worked as a community organizer for the Saul Alinsky-influenced Community Service Organization in California from 1952 to 1962. In 1962, he and Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in Delano, California — the labor union focused specifically on California's predominantly Mexican-American and Filipino-American agricultural workforce.

The 1965 Delano grape strike — in which the NFWA joined the Filipino-American Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in striking against California grape growers — and the 1965–1970 Delano grape boycott (in which Chavez led nationwide consumer boycotts of California table grapes that were enforced in over 30 American cities) became one of the most-iconic American labor organizing campaigns of the 1960s. The boycott successfully forced major California grape growers to sign contracts with the union by 1970.

Chavez and the UFW continued their farm-worker organizing through the 1970s and 1980s — including the 1975 Salinas Valley lettuce strikes, the 1988 36-day water-only fast that he undertook at age 61 to draw attention to pesticide poisoning of farm workers, and continued boycotts of California crops contaminated with dangerous pesticides. He died on April 23, 1993, in San Luis, Arizona, at age 66, during a UFW legal-defense fund-raising trip. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously from Bill Clinton in 1994. César Chávez Day (March 31) is a state holiday in California, Texas, and Colorado.

His name Cesar is the Spanish form of Caesar — anchored in classical Roman tradition through Julius Caesar. Cesar has been continuously among the most-popular Spanish-American boys' names for over a century.