preview

Cesar Estrada Chavez Research Paper

Decent Essays

Cesar Estrada Chavez (1927- 1993) Cesar Chavez was born on March 31, 1927 in Yuma, Arizona. He was born into a Mexican American family with 4 siblings. His parents were Juana and Librado Chavez who both worked hard to keep food on the table. In 1938, when Cesar was 13, the family was evicted from their home and they moved to California to try to find work. The entire family had to help keep food on the table and Cesar compared the work to “being nailed to a cross”. Cesar eventually dropped out of school after 8th grade and as he lived in California he dealt with latino segregation which was very common in California. When he was 17 he joined the army and served two years before being honorably discharged. He soon married Helen Fabela who …show more content…

Two years later he and his family, with eight children, moved to Delano, California and founded the National Farm Workers Association, NFWA, which pushed for a minimum wage and unemployment insurance for farm workers. They also created life insurance, a credit union and a hiring hall for members. In 1965 the NFWA joined in a large-scale strike with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, AWOC. In 1966 the NFWA merged with AWOC and won its first supervised representation election. By 1967 the organization was doing well but its contracts only went over 5,000 of California’s 250,000 farm workers. In August the organization began to strike against Giumarra vineyards, the largest grower of grapes in California. In the middle of the harvest 5,000 workers went on strike against Giumarra but Giumarra fought back by getting other workers, the union responded with boycotting Guimarra grapes. In 1968 Guimarra got around the boycott by shipping under different labels of grape growers and the union changed the boycott to all grape growers. Volunteers went across the United States and tried to get stores and customers to stop buying grapes until the strike was settled, by 1969 the sales of grapes stopped in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and other

Get Access