Chávez, César

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César Chávez

Born March 31, 1927

Yuma, Arizona

Died April 23, 1993

San Luis, Arizona

Migrant workers union leader

"Our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of people we are."

César Chávez was the leader of California farm workers who for three decades helped them achieve improved wages and working conditions as well as a measure of dignity. He also persuaded millions of Americans who may never have been on a farm, or even in California, to stop buying table grapes as a way of supporting the cause of farm workers. Chávez made visible to mothers and fathers in grocery stores across America the symbolic fingerprints left on those grapes by the hands, brown hands mostly, that had picked them. Those brown hands belonged to migrant workers: the families who sometimes spent nights in tin storage sheds or broken-down cars parked under bridges, and spent days picking grapes and other crops for wages that barely sustained life. Chávez grew up traveling from farm to farm harvesting crops, barred from speaking his native Spanish in school, unable to stay in school past the eighth grade, barred from watching a movie in the "whites only" section of a California theater—but able to dream of social justice for those on the bottom of America's social heap: Mexican American migrant workers.

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