Chávez, César Estrada

Abstract

César Estrada Chávez (1937–1993) was a civil rights activist, community organizer, and founder of the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA), the first union to successfully organize agricultural workers in the United States. A self‐educated follower of Gandhi's nonviolent protest strategy and Catholic theories of penance, he began his organizing career in 1952 with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civil rights organization for urban Mexican Americans in California. In 1958, he became executive director of the CSO but, due to an abiding commitment to organizing farm workers, resigned in 1962 to found the National Farm Workers Association, the predecessor of the UFWA. In August 1966, he became director of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), a merger of the NFWA and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC/AFL‐CIO), which he led until his death on 23 April 1993. Chávez's major contribution was applying a nonviolent protest strategy to the challenge of organizing farm workers, a group that suffered intense discrimination, little community cohesion, and high levels of poverty, even as they labored in the most profitable sectors of American agribusiness. In 1994 Chávez was posthumously recognized with the Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, for his work on behalf of Mexican American civil rights and the rights of farm workers to organize, and in 2003 a US commemorative postal stamp was issued in his honor.