We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.
Cesar Chavez Quotes
There's no turning back...We will win. We are winning because ours is a revolution of mind and heart.
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| Birth: | 31st March, 1927 |
| Death: | 23rd April, 1993 |
| Nationality: | American |
| Profession: | Farmer, Activist, Leader |
About
Cesar Estrada Chavez was born on March 31, 1927 in Yuma, Arizona, in a Mexican-American family of six children. In 1942, Chavez graduated from eighth grade. It would be his final year of formal schooling, because he did not want his mother to have to work in the fields. Chavez dropped out to become a full-time migrant farm worker. In 1944 he joined the United States Navy at the age of seventeen and served for two years.
Chavez worked in the fields until 1952, when he became an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group. He was hired and trained by Fred Ross as an organizer targeting police brutality. Chavez urged Mexican Americans to register and vote, and he traveled throughout California and made speeches in support of workers' rights. He later became CSO's national director in 1958.
In 1962 Chávez left the CSO and co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with Dolores Huerta. It was later called the United Farm Workers (UFW). When Filipino American farm workers initiated the Delano grape strike on September 8, 1965, to protest for higher wages, Chávez eagerly supported them.
Chávez died on April 23, 1993, of unspecified natural causes in a rental apartment in San Luis, Arizona. Shortly after his death, his widow, Helen Chávez, donated his black nylon union jacket to the National Museum of American History, a branch of the Smithsonian.
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