The United Farm Workers of America is the most influential farm-labor union in America. Founded in southern California, in the small San Joaquin Valley agricultural town of Delano in 1962, and led by Cesar Chavez, Arturo Rodriguez, Dolores Huerta and others, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) has ceaselessly battled some of the most powerful forces in the agribusiness industry in an attempt to organize farm laborers, raise wages and improve working conditions.
The historical records of the UFW have been deposited at the Archives for over thirty years. Chavez believed that the preservation of union records was essential for historians, journalists and other researchers as well as Unionists of the present and future. The UFW's historical legacy is still an active blueprint for the organizing and bargaining activities of the 1990s.
Cesar Chavez, first president of the UFW and internationally respected spokesman for Chicano and Latino Americans, came from humble beginnings. Born in 1927 into a poor family of Mexican Americans, the Great Depression of the 1930s forced the Chavez family into a life of migrant labor. As a child, Chavez picked every conceivable crop in the sun-baked fields of Arizona and California. His education ended at the eighth grade.
Chavez first honed his organizing skills in 1952 with a Mexican American barrio-based organization called the Community Services Organization (CSO). Primarily working in the East San Jose barrio of Sal Si Puedes, -- or, as translated, "get out if you can" -- Chavez battled racial and economic discrimination against Chicano residents, coordinated voter registration drives and established new CSO chapters across California and Arizona.
Chavez was a dedicated community organizer, but he never forgot the migrant workers in the fields. After failing to convince the CSO to organize farm labor, Chavez resigned and moved his family to Delano, California where he founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in 1962. For the first few years, Chavez and his family picked grapes and cotton during the week, and on weekends he traveled to farm communities in the Southwest, organizing members for the NFWA.
In September 1965, representing 1,200 NFWA members, Chavez reluctantly agreed to join the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) in a strike against major Delano table and wine grape growers. Unhappy with their low wages and poor working conditions, Mexican Americans and Filipino farm workers had walked off the fields. Although he believed the time was not right for such an action, Chavez nevertheless devoted his full efforts to the strike and created a strong coalition of unions, church groups, student activists and minorities in support of what was soon internationally known as The Great Delano Grape Strike. By 1967, the AFL-CIO officially sponsored NFWA when it merged with AWOC and became the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) with Chavez as its leader.
The grape growers were not interested in a Mexican-American union leader telling them how to treat their laborers. Growers refused to bargain with the UFWOC and many of them supported brutality against the strikers, often with the aid of local law enforcement. UFWOC members and other farm workers were harassed, beaten, and shot at. As a result of the escalating violence, Chavez called off the strike, but not the battle.
Long an advocate of non-violence, Chavez developed a new strategy and brought a bold, new dimension to struggle against the growers. In 1968, the UFW launched an international boycott against table grapes that lasted two years and was supported by millions of Americans. It resulted in a history-making contract, the UFW's first with a major grape grower. And, in 1972, the union became the United Farm Workers of America AFL-CIO.
This was only the beginning. While he continued the boycott against grapes and lettuce, Chavez and the UFW campaigned against the use of pesticides where farm workers labored, child labor, alien laborers, substandard housing, and one of the most hated foes of all, the back-breaking short-handled hoe. He brought the concept of secret union elections for farm workers to the national consciousness, something most trade Unionists took for granted. Chavez went on three lengthy fasts to personally and publicly sacrifice for non-violence and social justice for farm workers. In 1966, he walked 350 miles in a single march through California's farm lands to promote "La Causa." Just before his untimely death in 1993, Chavez was battling the powerful agri-giant Bruce Church Incorporated in Yuma, Arizona, the place of his birth.
Today Arturo Rodriguez, Chavez's son-in-law, a union veteran and boycott organizer, leads the UFW. In 1966, Rodriguez began working with the UFW while attending St. Mary's University, and he continued to organize support for the grape boycott at The University of Michigan, where he earned a masters of arts in 1973. After graduating, Rodriguez continued to work for the UFW in Detroit, married Chavez's daughter Linda, and moved to California in 1975. He became president of the UFW after Chavez died in 1993.
As president, Rodriguez is still an organizer. In 1996, he initiated a strawberry boycott and the UFW's largest organizing drive. The UFW´s current organizing campaign focuses upon the plight of the strawberry pickers, who are fighting for better conditions in the fields and against improper use of pesticides.
