Cesar Chavez
... wrong. While his childhood school education was not the best, later in life, education was his passion. The walls of his office in La Paz (United Farm Worker Headquarters) are lined with hundreds of books from philosophy, economics, cooperatives, and unions, to biographies on Gandhi and the Kennedys’. In 1944, he joined the U.S. Navy during World War II and served in the Western Pacific as a deckhand on a troop transport. During the war he experienced discrimination and strict regimentation. Just before shipping out to the Pacific, he was arrested in a segregated Delano, California movie theater for refusing to follow the rules by sitting in the “whites only” section. After completing his duty two years later, he returned to California working in the fields. In 1948, Cesar married Helena Fabela, daughter of a Zapatista hero of the Mexican Revolution, who he met while working. They honeymooned in California by visiting all the California Missions from Sonoma to San Diego. Meeting the needs of his family he took a job in a lumberyard and in fruit orchards. Later he moved to and settled in Delano. He then pursued his organizing activities, raising the social consciousness of the Chicano community, achieving notoriety with all his work to improve the working atmosphere of the farm laborer. So by 1952 he met Fred Ross, an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a barrio based self help group formed by Saul Alinsky. Chavez became part of the organization and led voters registration drives, helped Chicanos with immigration problems, and organized CSO chapters in other cities. For farm workers he helped them cope with police, immigration authorities, and welfare boards. In 1958, became general director of the national CSO. He saw that the CSO lost its purpose to help the poor when the CSO was attracting more middle-class liberals than poor farm workers. As Chavez said, “While the CSO was doing some good for the poor in the communities, after a few years I began to realize that a farm workers’ union was needed to end the exploitation of the workers in the fields.” So in 1962, resigned when the CSO refused to create a farm-workers union. In 1962, he founded, along with Dolores Huerta the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). UFW committed to organize farm workers to campaign for safe and fair working conditions, reasonable wages, decent housing, and outlawing of child labor and harmful pesticides. The union used non-violent tactics such as boycotts, pickets, and strikes against the growers to obtain union contracts and improve conditions for agricultural laborers. Such terrible conditions farm workers faced were: unsafe and unsanitary conditions, no clean drinking water, no access to portable toilets, no lunch breaks or short rest breaks during the workday. Also were not entitled to minimum wage or unemployment insurance, housing was terrible, and were required to work long hours. Chavez and the UFW gained publicity by mobilizing concerned consumers, college students, peace groups, religious supporters, Hispanic associations, unions, and activists and with assistance of the New Republic and the Kennedys’. To stronger his case about the farm workers conditions, he conducted a march Peregrinacion of 340 miles from Delano to Sacramento, and stopped eating on Februa...