Cesar Chavez Day and the Legacy of Farm Worker Organizing

Celebrated annually since 2014, Cesar Chavez Day is a U.S. federal commemorative holiday celebrating the legacy of Cesar Chavez, a labor leader and civil rights activist who helped make major progress for farmworker rights. The holiday is celebrated on March 31, Chavez’s birthday. In commemorating the life and work of Cesar Chavez we also want to recognize and acknowledge the activists, organizers, and farm workers that came before him and those he worked alongside who through their collaborative efforts pushed this movement forward.

Cesar Chavez (1927-1993); *Photo credits: Scott Maguire/AP*

Youth and Early Organizing

Born in Arizona in 1927, Chavez and his family moved to California during the Great Depression and became migrant farm workers, working everywhere from Brawley to Oxnard, Atascadero, Gonzales, King City, Salinas, McFarland, Delano, Wasco, Selma, Kingsburg, and Mendota. As a result, Chavez attended 37 different schools growing up, finishing through eighth grade before leaving school to work as a farm worker full time. He left agriculture briefly to serve in a segregated unit of the U.S. Navy for two years at the age of 19. In 1948 Chavez married Helen Fabela, with whom he had eight children.

Cesar Chavez’s introduction to organizing came in his mid-20s. He was working at a lumberyard in San Jose when in 1952 he became a grassroots organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO). While the CSO was not a labor organization, Chavez’s experience there laid the foundation for his future work as an organizer. He spent a decade working with the CSO and rose to the role of national director before resigning in 1962 because of a lack of support from CSO members for forming a farmworker labor union.

The Farm Workers’ Movement

Larry Itliong (1913-1977) and Cesar Chavez; *Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections*

By the 1960s, the farm worker movement had been slowly growing in the U.S. over several decades. Ernesto Galarza, an activist, scholar, and organizer who worked on farms as a young boy and while attending college, began leading organizing efforts among farm workers in the 1940s. During this time he also helped initiate what would become decades of activism in protest of the Bracero Program and the unfair treatment of braceros by employers.

The Bracero Program was established by executive order in 1942, creating a partnership between Mexico and the U.S. that would bring millions of Mexicans to the U.S. on short-term labor contracts to work in agriculture and on railroads. Intended to be a temporary solution to address the labor shortage during WWII, the program would end up lasting over two decades until its termination in 1964. The end of the Bracero Program was a major victory for farm worker organizers and activists, motivating further action. In the context of broader social justice movements happening throughout the U.S., the farm worker movement was finally gaining momentum.

Dolores Huerta (1930-present); *Image via: Dolores Huerta Foundation*

In 1959, a group of Filipino-Americans including Larry Itliong founded the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). Itliong began organizing in the 1930s, with his work spanning Alaska and California, from canneries to lettuce and asparagus fields.

In 1962 after resigning from the CSO, Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) alongside Dolores Huerta in Delano, California. Parallelling Chavez, Huerta got her start as an organizer at Stockton’s CSO chapter. While serving with the CSO Huerta also founded the Agricultural Workers Association. Despite decades of organizing, any attempts to unionize farm workers in California had failed due to monetary and political push back from the state’s powerful agricultural industry. At the time of the NFWA’s founding, farmworkers were not covered by minimum wage law and did not qualify for unemployment insurance. The NFWA held its inaugural convention in Fresno that September with almost 300 farmworkers in attendance.

Organizing for Change

Cesar Chavez at Senate hearings on farm labor in Delano, CA in 1966; *Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections*

In 1965, inspired by the success of a week-long strike by Filipino-American grape pickers in California’s Coachella Valley, Larry Itliong and the AWOC decided to organize against grape growers in Delano after growers refused to negotiate with the workers to provide better pay. On September 8, 1965, the Delano Grape Strike officially began when 2,000 Filipino-American farm workers refused to pick grapes.

Itliong reached out to the NFWA (based in Delano) asking its members to join the AWOC in its strike. The NFWA was still young, but when Itliong’s request was presented, members of the NFWA voted overwhelmingly in favor to join the strike, which they did on September 16.

The Delano Grape Strike would last for five years, spark a national boycott of California grapes, and become one of the most important strikes in American history. You can learn more about the strike and the work of Larry Itliong and other Filipino-American farm workers in this previous blog post. During the strike in 1966 the AWOC and NFWA merged to form the United Farm Workers Committee which in 1971 became the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) which is still active today.

Cesar Chavez speaking on capitol steps in 1966; *Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections*

Throughout the strike, Chavez stayed committed to his position of nonviolent civil disobedience, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and St. Francis. In 1966, Chavez led a 360-mile march from Delano to the state capital of Sacramento. The march began with 70 people in Delano and culminated 25 days later with 10,000 people at the Capitol. In 1968 he went on his first of three hunger strikes, lasting for 25 days.

The strike ended in July of 1970 when more than 30 Delano grape growers signed their first union contracts. They agreed to pay pickers $1.80 an hour plus 20 cents for each box picked along with granting other health benefits and protections.

Another big win came in 1975 when California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act which finally gave all farm workers the right to unionize and negotiate for better wages and working conditions.

Chavez went on his second hunger strike in 1972 to protest an Arizona law that banned farm workers from organizing and protesting. In the mid-1980s, his focus shifted to highlighting the dangers that pesticides pose for farm workers and their families, the focus of his final hunger strike in 1988.

Lasting Impact

Chavez passed away on April 23, 1993, at the age of 66. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the following year by President Bill Clinton. Chavez’s impact extends beyond the progress mentioned here, and is carried on in the work of the organizers he’s inspired today. Last year in celebration of Cesar Chavez Day, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden met with farm workers at Forty Acres in Delano – the birthplace of the UFW and where Chavez went on his first hunger strike in 1968.

First Lady Jill Biden participates in a Day of Action roundtable at Forty Acres in Delano on Cesar Chavez Day in 2021. *Photo credits: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times*

The fight for farm worker rights continues today. According to the USDA, about half of all farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented, but growers and labor contractors estimate that it is actually closer to 75%. Over the past decade the demand for H-2A workers has more than doubled. The H-2A program is a guestworker program, like the Bracero Program before it, allows foreign nationals to work temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs in the U.S. The total amount of H-2A positions in the U.S. increased more than 220% between 2010 & 2019.

While the legal status, living, and work conditions are different for undocumented workers and H-2A guestworkers, both face power imbalances at the hands of their employers that hinder their economic and political freedoms and bargaining power. In the past year several bills have been brought before Congress to reform immigration and support farm workers. Among these is the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would provide a path for agricultural workers to obtain immigration status and would revise the H-2A program.