Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta

Introduction

This paper focuses on the labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta co-founder of the United Farm Workers. They are known as American labor leader and activist whose work on behalf of migrant farm workers led to the establishment of the United Farm Workers of America. For this purpose the paper will include Political elections, state and local, state initiatives, recall elections Historical analysis of politics in California and civil rights etc.

a. Political elections, state and local, state initiatives, recall elections

In the late 1950s Huerta became interested in the conditions of farmworkers and met Cesar Chavez, a CSO official who shared that interest. Their attempts to focus the CSO's attention on the inequities plaguing rural workers failed, and both eventually left that organization. (Bear, 232-238) By 1962 they had cofounded the National Farm Workers Association, forerunner of the United Farm Workers (UFW), an influential union whose grape boycott in the late 1960s forced grape producers to improve working conditions for migrant farmworkers. As coordinator of nationwide lettuce, grape, and Gallo wine boycotts in the 1970s, Huerta helped create the national climate that led to the passage in 1975 of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law recognizing the rights of California farmworkers to bargain collectively. In the 1980s Huerta cofounded the UFW's radio station and continued to speak and raise funds on behalf of a variety of causes, including immigration policy and farm labourers' health. Over forty years later, the narrative has flipped. (Bear, 232-238) Many perceive Latino/as as central to the revival of the US labor movement and swinging many important political elections in different places like California. Whereas, a number of people label AAPIs as culturally obsequious and compliant. Like the growers in the past who saw Mexican farm workers as submissive, many people today assume AAPIs come from a place which emphasizes obedience and passivity more than other cultures (Passivity is present in all communities). Community leader Myung Soo Seok once told me that defining Asian values as “not making waves” is an inaccurate “American” interpretation. (Cobble, 33-41)

b. Historical analysis of politics in California, i.e. fight for water, immigration, civil rights, north/south politics, etc.

Cesar Chavez, the son of Mexican American farmworkers, became a well-known labor leader, founding the United Farm Workers (UFW) union which led a massive grape boycott in the 1960s across the United States. Chavez won wage increases, benefits, and legal protections for migrant farmworkers in the western United States and fought to have dangerous pesticides outlawed for agricultural use. Chavez was exposed to labor organizing as a young boy when his father and uncle joined a dried-fruit industry union in the late 1930s. (Cobble, 33-41) The young Chavez was deeply impressed when the workers later went on strike. At age nineteen Chavez himself picketed cotton fields but watched the union fail in its efforts to organize the workers.

He inspired farm workers and millions of people who never worked on a farm to commit themselves to social, economic and civil ...