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Chávez did not attend high school. When his father had an accident that made him unable to work in the fields, Chávez quit school to help support his family. Yet, education continued to be important to him, and, as an adult, Chávez became an advocate for education for all (www.ufw.org).
Because a large number of migrant workers were Mexican American, they also often faced prejudice, and their children had to skip school to earn wages to help support the family. Cesar Chavez attended about 30 schools in California as his family moved from place to place to find work.
César Forced to Leave School
In 1942, when César was in eighth grade, his father was in a car accident and César quit school in order to work in the fields with his brother and sister. César did not want his mother to have to work. Working in the fields was very difficult.
Chávez did not attend high school. When his father had an accident that made him unable to work in the fields, Chávez quit school to help support his family. Yet, education continued to be important to him, and, as an adult, Chávez became an advocate for education for all (www.ufw.org).
Chavez rose to general director of the C.S.O. in 1958, but resigned after four years to found a new organization, the National Farm Workers Association (N.F.W.A.). Boycott Grapes! … merged with the AFL-CIO to form a new union that since 1971 has been known as the United Farm Workers of America (U.F.W.).
— Results of an autopsy released Tuesday showed labor leader Cesar Chavez died peacefully of natural causes. Chavez’s longtime physician, Dr. Marion Moses, said the autopsy performed by the Kern County Coroner’s Office in Bakersfield confirmed that the founder of the United Farm Workers died in his sleep.
Deceased (1927–1993)
National Chavez Center, Keene, California, United States
April 23, 1993
As a child Cesar Chavez was a migrant worker, moving from place to place to work on farms. As an adult he helped improve the lives of migrant farmworkers in the United States by organizing them into a labor union.
He passed away on April 23, 1993, in San Luis, a small village near Yuma, Arizona. He learned about justice or rather injustice early in his life. Cesar grew up in Arizona; the small adobe home, where Cesar was born was swindled from them by dishonest Anglos.
In 1975, Chavez’s efforts helped pass the nation’s first farm labor act in California. It legalized collective bargaining and banned owners from firing striking workers. Levy, Jacqueline M. & Fred Ross Jr.
Chavez leads a 250-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, California, to let the public and law-makers know about the mistreatment of farm workers. Chavez starts his first hunger strike; it lasts for 25 days in February and March (it was done to stop violence against strikers).
Annual earnings | Farm work only | Farm and nonfarm work |
---|---|---|
Total workers | 92,525 | 76,675 |
Median earnings | $3,181 | $2,817 |
In 1973, the UFW organized a march through the Coachella and Imperial valleys in Central California to the United States-Mexico border to protest growers’ use of illegal immigrants as strikebreakers. The thousands of marchers were joined by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale.
Cesar Chavez is best known for his efforts to gain better working conditions for the thousands of workers who labored on farms for low wages and under severe conditions. Chavez and his United Farm Workers union battled California grape growers by holding nonviolent protests.
Why did Chavez go on a hunger strike? The strike, which he undertook in opposition to an Arizona law severely restricting farm workers’ ability to organize, lasted 24 days and drew national attention to the suffering of itinerant farm workers in the Southwest.
66 years (1927–1993)
Again following the example of Gandhi, Cesar announced in February 1968, he was fasting to rededicate the movement to nonviolence. He went without food for 25 days, only drinking water. It was an act of penitence for those who advocated violence and a way of taking responsibility as leader of his movement.
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César Estrada Chávez (March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) was a Mexican-American labor leader who used non-violent methods to fight for the rights of migrant farm workers in the southwestern USA.
American
Chávez and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked to promote civil rights using nonviolent methods. They both wanted social change, justice, and equal treatment for all people, especially the poor, and dispossessed.