Cesar e
Cesar e. chavezCesar Estrada Chavez, was a great Mexican American labor union organizer, leader and An Agricultural migrant worker. He used nonviolent action to gain recognition and respect from the Migrant farm laborers. Cesar Chavez knew he needed recognition in order to negotiate in collective bargaining for the labor rights of the migrant worker. Agricultural growers and agricultural business corporations where rich and powerful and had never allowed any recognition of any union. Farm workers had been excluded from the right to collective bargaining that had been guaranteed to other workers by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Zannos, p.68). It would not happen for forty years; later in 1975 through the efforts of Cesar Chavez, United Farm Workers Union (UFW) and the migrant workers that they secured for themselves the protection of the National Labor Relations Act and an Agricultural Relations Board.
Cesar Chavez was born in 1927, in a farm near Yuma, Arizona. In 1939, his parents lost their farm in a bank-foreclosure. Cesar's parents and family members, including the ten-year old Cesar, moves to California to become migrant workers (Griswold, p.22). Chavez had worked in the fields as a child and had encountered the reality of being poor, as well as a member of a discriminated class of people (Altman, p.87). The land shaped the thinking and emotional being of Cesar Chavez. The reality of hard work in the hot fields at low wages, the planting, hoeing and harvesting of the agricultural produce that was the foundation of a multi-billion food chain industry impressed Cesar. He discovered his place in the whole enterprise and that the workers were merely expendables obtained at the lowest price with the least personal protection and job benefits. Cesar Chavez had realized the workers were too weak to fight the agricultural business that controlled public, political enforcing and policing agencies. The powerful growers and corporations lacked the consciousness of putting into practice the fair integration of workers as partners in the agricultural enterprise. The situation of the migrant workers guided Chavez’s actions and provided him with the emotional motivation to organize farm workers. There is no doubt that the land, the people, his family and cultural environment of his home shaped his character and motivated him in his efforts on behalf of migrant field workers.
Cesar Chavez organized grape pickers in California in 1962, into the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Chavez originally from Arizona knew first hand about meagerness and directed his union organizing activities with few resources. He started out with the solidarity of his wife-Helen, his brother-Richard and a few friends. Cesar borrowed $3,000 from his brother Richard to begin the union. The National Farm Workers Association had developed a non-violent strategy to survive and selected the Aztec eagle for its emblem. They also carried the image of the Lady of Guadalupe on banners during their Huelgas (strikes) and other marches.
Cesar Chavez never wavered from his task of helping the migrant workers. He knew personally the suffering...
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