11/21/2023 0 Comments Symbol cesar chavez flag![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Navy then it was back to the fields and organizing. The young boy learned about strikes, pickets and organizing.įor two years during World War II, Chavez served in the U.S. He was 12 when a Congress of Industrial Organizations union began organizing dried-fruit industry workers, including his father and uncle. Yet, in the fields in the 1930s, something happened that changed Chavez’s life. but paid rent out of his $900 a month as a union official. The couple and their eight children gave much to “La Huelga,” the strike call that became the UFW trademark, from their eventual permanent home near Bakersfield. It was in the fields, in the 1950s, that Chavez met his wife, Helen. He attended 65 elementary schools but never graduated from high school. He never lost the outreach that he had learned from his mother, who, despite the family’s poverty, told her children to invite any hungry people in the area home to share what rice, beans and tortillas the family had. His parents and the five children took to the picking fields as migrant workers.Ĭhavez’s faith sustained him, but it is likely that it was both knowing and witnessing poverty and the sheer drudgery and helplessness of the migrant life that drove him. (1927–1993) leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW), organized strikes, boycotts, and fasts to improve conditions for migrant workers.Ī few men and women have engraved their names in the annals of change through nonviolence, but none have experienced the grinding childhood poverty that Chavez did after the Depression-struck family farm on the Gila River was foreclosed in 1937. ![]()
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