Momentum builds to erase Cesar Chavez’s name from schools, streets and parks after allegations of sexual abuse
Gaining national prominence in the mid-1960s in the San Joaquin Valley, Chavez galvanized public support on behalf of farmworkers after organizing community groups across Central and Southern California. For decades, agricultural laborers had lived in substandard housing and were paid terrible wages. Efforts to organize migrant laborers were usually crushed violently by farmers and local law enforcement.
Chavez’s greatest achievement was the 1968 boycott of California grapes. Beginning in the spring, more than 200 union supporters, many of them earning $5 a week for their help, fanned out across the United States and Canada to urge consumers not to buy grapes.
At its peak in the 1970s, the UFW said that about 70,000 workers in California’s fields were covered by its collective bargaining agreements.
But Chavez’s legacy became increasingly tarnished as the years went on. Labor victories became fewer and fewer. His fierce criticism of illegal immigration — Chavez argued that they undercut his unionization efforts — put him at odds with immigration activists. A 2006 L.A. Times investigation detailed how dozens of former associates and workers left the Chavez-led United Farm Workers because of what they described as his increasingly autocratic ways.
According to The Times obituary:
Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, on a small farm near Yuma, Arizona. The Depression shattered his father’s finances when young Chavez was 10, and the family took to the roads as migrant laborers.
He never graduated from high school, and once said he went to as many as 65 elementary schools because of the family’s constant search for work in the fields. He said his mother taught him to be humane while living in often inhumane conditions.
During World War II, in 1944 and 1945, Chavez served in the Navy. After the war, he returned to organizing efforts and met his wife, Helen, while working in the field in Delano, in the rich, flat plains of Kern County.
In 1952, Chavez lived in San Jose’s Mexican-American barrio of Salsipuedes–which means “‘Get out if you can”–when he met Fred Ross, a community organizer who wanted to set up self-help groups in minority areas.
Ross had heard of Chavez and sought him out. “He looked to me like potentially the best grass-roots leader I’d ever run into,” Ross recalled later.
In 10 years with the group, Chavez led a successful voter registration drive in San Jose. He took up the cases of hundreds of Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants who complained of mistreatment by police, immigration authorities and welfare officials.
In 1962, he left to establish the National Farm Workers Assn., which later would become the UFW, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
He died in 1993 in San Luis, Ariz., police said. He was 66.
