César Chávez

César Estrada Chávez (1927 – 1993) was an American labor leader and civil rights champion. Born to a Mexican-American family that lost their farm during the Great Depression, Chávez grew up as a migrant farmworker, laboring in the sweltering fields of California and enduring subhuman living conditions, pesticide poisoning, and racial humiliation.

In 1962, Chávez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers, UFW) with Dolores Huerta. Adopting Gandhian principles of nonviolence, Chávez led the historic five-year Delano grape strike alongside Filipino organizers, calling a nationwide consumer boycott of table grapes that mobilized seventeen million Americans. He undertook multiple life-threatening hunger strikes—including a 25-day water-only fast in 1968—compelling growers in 1970 to sign the first collective bargaining contracts for farmworkers in US history.