Cesar Chavez Educational Posters, Books, Video, Links for Learning

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Cesar Chavez
b. 3-31-1927; near Yuma, AZ
d. 4-23-1993; San Luis, AZ

Farm worker, labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez was a cofounder, with Dolores Huerta, of the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers.

In the mid 1960s the NFWA organized the historic farm workers march from Delano, California state capitol in Sacramento for seeking higher wages and better working conditions. The UFW encouraged all Americans to support the strike by boycotting table grapes.

In the 1970s strikes and boycotts, like the Salad Bowl Strike, protested the use of toxic pesticides on crops and helped farm workers win collective bargaining rights.

As a child Chavez quit school at the end of the eighth grade to work in the fields so his mother wouldn't have to work. Chavez's fasts, the willing abstinence from all food, was influenced by his Catholic tradition of doing penance and by Gandhi's fasts and emphasis of nonviolence.

• “Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. And you cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”
• “Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak... Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.”
• “History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.”
• “When we refer to the Church we should define the word a little. We mean the whole Church, the Church as an ecumenical body spread around the world, and not just its particular form in a parish in a local community.”

• BOOKS, VIDEO

The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement - Cesar Chavez's life and work transformd American society, and his name is synoymous with the struggle of American migrant farmworkers for dignity and justice. He was also a complex man who often frustrated his co-workers. In the years before his death in 1993, the IFW was often divided by conflicts.

The Words of Cesar Chavez -

Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez - essential biography for elementary and middle school libraries about one of America's greatest civil rights leaders.

Cesar Chavez (Photo-Illustrated Biographies)-

TIME - The Grapes Wrath, 1969, Mexican-Americans on the March. - “The Little Strike that Grew to La Causa ... the table grape, Vitis vinifera, has become the symbol of the four-year-old strike of California's predominantly Mexican-American farm workers. For more than a year now, table grapes have been the object of a national boycott that has won the sympathy and support of many Americans — and the ire of many others. The strike is widely known as la causa, which has come to represent not only a protest against working conditions among California grape pickers but the wider aspirations of the nation's Mexican-American minority as well. ...”

LINKS FOR LEARNING : CESAR CHAVEZ

• The United Farm Workers Web Site
• The Cesar E. Chavez Foundation
• Cesar Chavez Bio, Library of Congress
• Fight for the Fields Video