Cesar E. Chavez Chronology
1927, March 31 – Cesario Estrada Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona near the small farm his grandfather homesteaded in the 1880s.
1937 – Cesar’s family lost their farm in the Great Depression. The Chavez family migrated across the southwest laboring in the fields and vineyards, finally settling in California.
1942 – Cesar quit school after the eighth grade to work in the fields full-time to help support his family.
1946 – He joined the U.S. Navy during the aftermath of World War II and served in the Western Pacific. Just before shipping out to the Pacific, Cesar was arrested in a segregated Delano, California movie theater for sitting in the "whites only" section.
1948 – Cesar returned home from the Navy and married Helen Fabela whom he had met working in the vineyards of San Jose, California. They settled in the East San Jose barrio of Sal Si Puedes (Get Out if You Can) and would eventually have eight children and thirty-one grandchildren.
1948-1949 – He began studying the social teachings of the Catholic Church.
1952 – Community organizer Fred Ross met Cesar, then a young farm worker laboring in apricot orchards outside San Jose, and recruited him to work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a prominent Latino civil rights group.
1952-1962 – Cesar and Fred Ross, organized 22 CSO chapters throughout California. Under Cesar's leadership, the CSO became the most effective Latino civil rights group of its day. It helped Latinos become citizens, registered them to vote, battled police brutality and pressed for paved streets and other barrio improvements.
1962, March 31 – On his birthday, Cesar resigned from the CSO and moved his wife and eight small children to Delano where he founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and dedicated himself to organizing farm workers full-time.
1962, September 30 – The first NFWA convention was convened in Fresno, California.
1962-1965 – Cesar often took his youngest children to dozens of farm worker towns as he painstakingly built up NFWA membership.
1965, September 16 – On Mexican Independence Day, Cesar's NFWA, with 1,200-member families, voted to join a strike against Delano-area grape growers that was initiated by the mostly Filipino American members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO (AWOC). This began the five-year Delano Grape Strike.
1966, March–April – Cesar and a small group of strikers embarked upon a 350-mile Peregrinacion (or Pilgrimage) from Delano to the steps of the state Capitol in Sacramento to draw national attention to the suffering of farm workers. During the march and after a four-month boycott, growers negotiated an agreement with NFWA, which was the first genuine union contract between a grower and farm workers in U.S. history.
1966, Spring-Summer – The NFWA and the Filipino American AWOC merge to form the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW).
1967 – The UFW began a boycott of all California table grapes.
1967-1970 – Hundreds of grape strikers fanned out across North America to organize an international grape boycott. Millions of Americans rallied to support the farm workers' cause known as “La Causa.”
1968, February-March – Cesar fasted for 25 days to rededicate his movement to nonviolence. U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy joined Cesar, and more than 8,000 farm workers and supporters at a mass where Cesar broke his fast. Senator Kennedy called Cesar "one of the heroic figures of our time."
1970, Summer – Cesar called for a nationwide boycott of lettuce.
1970, December 10-24 – Cesar was jailed in Salinas, California for refusing to obey a court order to stop the boycott against Bud Antle lettuce. Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert Kennedy, visited Cesar in jail.
1971 – The UFW moved from Delano to La Paz in Keene, California, which is Southeast of Bakersfield. With table and wine grape contracts, and some agreements covering vegetable workers, UFW membership grew to nearly 80,000.
1972, May 11-June 4 – Cesar fasted a second time for 25 days in Phoenix, Arizona, in protest of a law that denied farm workers the right to strike and/or boycott for better working conditions.
1973, Spring-Summer – A bitter three-month strike by grape workers in California's Coachella and San Joaquin valleys began. Thousands of strikers were arrested for violating anti-picketing injunctions, hundreds were beaten, dozens were shot, and two were murdered. In response to the violence, Cesar called off the strike and began a second grape boycott.
1973-1975 – A nationwide Louis Harris poll, documented that 17 million Americans were boycotting grapes. Many were also boycotting lettuce and Gallo wine in support of UFW campaigns.
1975, June – Jerry Brown became governor and signed a state law that guaranteed California farm workers the right to organize and bargain with their employers. Cesar’s efforts pushed the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act through the state Legislature.
1979 January-October – The UFW began strikes against several major lettuce and vegetable growers throughout the state. Rufino Contreras, a 27 year-old striker, was shot and killed in an Imperial Valley lettuce field by a grower/foremen.
1980s – The number of farm workers protected by UFW contracts grew to nearly 45,000.
1984 – Cesar declared a third grape boycott.
1986--Cesar kicked off the "Wrath of Grapes" campaign to draw public attention to the pesticide poisoning of grape workers and their children.
1988 – At the age of 61, Chavez conducted his last and longest public fast for 36 days in Delano to call attention to farm workers and their children stricken by pesticides.
1988- 1993 – Cesar recovered from his fast and continued pressing the grape boycott and leading farm worker organizing efforts.
1992, Spring-Summer – Cesar worked with then UFW First Vice President Arturo Rodriguez to lead vineyard walkouts in the Coachella and San Joaquin valleys. As a result, grape workers won their first industry-wide pay hike in eight years.
1993, April 23 – Cesar died peacefully in his sleep at the modest home of a retired San Luis, Arizona farm worker. Cesar was in Arizona conducting UFW work at the time of his death.
1993, April 29 – More than 40,000 mourners marched behind Cesar's plain pine casket during funeral services in Delano.
1993 – Chavez family and friends established the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization dedicated to maximizing human potential to improve communities by preserving, promoting and applying the legacy and universal values of civil rights leader Cesar E. Chavez.
Information generously provided by the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation in California.