![]() Dolores Huerta, a fellow CSO organizer, was the first person he approached to assist in the creation of the National Farm Workers Association (NWFA). Although he broke with the organization in 1962, his experiences informed his creation of theUnited Farm Workers (UFW).Ĭhávez’s decision to create a farmworker’s union changed his life and the lives of migrant workers in the United States. Alinsky and Ross hoped to convince farmworkers to organize, and Chávez, despite having only an eighth-grade education, became a powerful speaker and leader in the CSO. Alinsky, a community organizer and activist, wanted poor people to organize and become politically active to pressure governments to be more attentive to their needs. In 1952, Chávez met Fred Ross, an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), who was allied with radical Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. There he met and married Helen Fabela in 1948, and together the couple had seven children. ![]() After his discharge, he returned to Delano, California, a community in the San Joaquin Valley famous for its table grapes. War ended the suffering of the Depression, and Chávez joined the U.S. Worse, although the Depression led to the creation of new labor laws, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, many of those protections did not apply to farm workers. Chávez’s childhood as a migrant farmworker would forever shape him as he experienced firsthand the injustices of brutally long hours, back-breaking labor, corrupt labor contractors who deducted high rents from workers’ pay, and extremely low wages. Like thousands of others, his family lost their land during the Great Depression, forcing them to join throngs of itinerant laborers crowding California in search of work. Use this Narrative with the Art as Protest: Images from the United Farm Workers of America, 1973-1978Primary Source while talking about the various civil rights movements occurring during the 1970s.Ĭésar Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona, in 1927, on the farm his grandparents had settled in the 1880s.
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