Cesar Chavez: The Grape Boycott That Built a Farmworkers' Union

On September 16, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, the members of the National Farm Workers Association packed Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano, California to vote on a strike Cesar Chavez had not planned and did not think his young union was ready for. Eight days earlier, Filipino grape pickers organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee had walked off the vines demanding a raise to $1.40 an hour. The NFWA’s own membership voted overwhelmingly to join them anyway, outvoting the man who ran it. Five years later the union that grew out of that vote put its name on the first real contracts California grape growers had ever signed.

Yuma, and the farm the county took

Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, on a small farm his family worked near Yuma, Arizona. In 1939, in the middle of the Depression, Yuma County sold the farm at auction to cover back taxes, and the Chavez family joined the migrant stream moving through California’s fields. In 1942 his father was injured in a car accident, and Cesar left school after the eighth grade rather than let his mother take his father’s place in the rows. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946, then came home to the same fields.

Fred Ross comes looking for him

In 1952, an organizer named Fred Ross came to Chavez’s door in San Jose. Ross ran the Community Service Organization, a Mexican American civil rights group founded in Los Angeles in 1947 that registered voters and challenged police abuse and school discrimination, and he hired Chavez to organize for it. Over the next decade Chavez rose to the CSO’s national directorship and trained two organizers of his own in Ross’s methods, Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. When he asked the CSO’s board to start organizing farmworkers directly, the board said no.

A union with no name recognition

Chavez resigned from the CSO on his 35th birthday, March 31, 1962, and moved his wife Helen and their eight children to Delano to organize farmworkers on his own. The National Farm Workers Association held its founding convention in a converted Fresno movie theater on September 30, 1962. By August 1965 it had signed up 1,700 dues-paying members and a symbol to go with them: a black Aztec eagle on a white circle and red field.

Delano, September 1965

The AWOC’s Filipino organizers, led by Larry Itliong, had already walked off ten Delano vineyards when the NFWA voted to join them. Neither union could have won alone. The AWOC had the numbers on the picket lines the growers could otherwise fill with NFWA members, and the NFWA had numbers the AWOC lacked. In 1966 the two merged into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. The Filipino side of that strike, and how its role later got written out of the popular version of the story, is its own article, at /causes/delano-grape-strike.

Federal labor law excluded farmworkers from its protections, so the union’s real strength turned out to be consumer boycotts, not the picket line. A national boycott of Schenley Industries, a distiller with vineyard holdings, brought the company to the table for the first genuine farm labor contract in the continental United States, signed in April 1966. That same spring Chavez led nearly a hundred strikers on a roughly 300-mile march from Delano to the state capitol, arriving in Sacramento on Easter Sunday, April 10, in front of a crowd of thousands.

Twenty-five days on water

By early 1968 some union members were talking about sabotage against strikebreakers, and Chavez, worried the movement would lose its nonviolent footing, stopped eating. Starting in mid-February he kept to water only for twenty-five days at the union’s Forty Acres complex outside Delano. Doctors warned his kidneys were failing, and he lost 35 pounds. He broke the fast on March 10, 1968, at an outdoor mass in a Delano park, too weak to speak, so Rev. James Drake read his statement to the crowd while Senator Robert F. Kennedy sat beside him. The statement said what the fast had been for:

It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life … To be a man is to suffer for others.

Contracts, and a law behind them

The strike ran five years before it produced what a union actually needs, which is a signature on paper. On July 29, 1970, twenty-six Delano-area grape growers signed agreements covering wages, health coverage, and pesticide limits, a kind of contract American agriculture had never before put its name to. California followed in 1975 with the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law in the country giving farmworkers the right to hold union elections. The state Supreme Court cleared the way that same year, ruling on January 13 in Carmona v. Division of Industrial Safety that regulators could treat the short-handled hoe, a twelve-inch tool that had caused lasting back injuries across generations of California field workers, as an unsafe hand tool, and the state’s regulators went on to ban it outright.

The union turns on itself

The union that had out-organized California’s growers spent much of the next decade organizing against its own people. In 1977 Chavez visited Synanon, the California drug-rehabilitation commune turned closed community, and brought back its confrontation exercise, called the Game, to root out anyone at the union’s La Paz headquarters he decided was disloyal. That same year he accepted an invitation from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos over the objection of the union’s own Filipino vice president, Philip Vera Cruz, who had organized the original 1965 AWOC walkout. Vera Cruz later wrote that Chavez had toasted Marcos’s own hand-picked labor leaders while the country’s real union leaders sat in prison, and called the visit plainly: “What Cesar did there in the Philippines is the saddest day in the history of the farm workers movement in this country.” He resigned that year. Organizing director Marshall Ganz left in 1981, alongside other resigning members of the executive board. Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s cofounder, did not leave in the 1970s purge. What she said about her own years in the union decades later is a different, harder story, below.

San Luis, 1993

Chavez was in Yuma County, near where he was born, testifying in a lawsuit a lettuce grower had brought against the union when he died in his sleep on April 23, 1993, at 66. Six days later, mourners walked for miles behind a plain pine casket to the old Forty Acres headquarters; the union put the crowd at 30,000, and grower publications insisted it was under 10,000, a dispute that says its own thing about how the fight never ended. At the funeral mass, Chavez’s grandchildren carried a UFW eagle flag and a short-handled hoe to the altar.

What Dolores Huerta said in 2026

Thirty-three years after Chavez died, the record changed again. In March 2026 a New York Times investigation reported that Chavez had sexually abused minors during the years he led the union, and Dolores Huerta, then 95, said publicly that he had assaulted her twice, in 1960 and 1966. In her own statement, she said:

I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor,of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.

The full account of what Huerta said, and when, belongs to her own biography.

The institutional response was immediate. The United Farm Workers canceled its Cesar Chavez Day events, and within the week California’s legislature, which had marked his birthday as a state holiday since 1995, voted 37-0 in the Senate to rename the day Farmworkers Day. Los Angeles and Phoenix renamed their own local observances. Texas directed its state agencies to stop commemorating him.

What’s left

Clinton awarded Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1994. The union itself never fully recovered from the 1970s purges and is smaller today than it was at its peak, and as of 2026 its founder’s name is coming off the streets and buildings that carried it. What is not in dispute is the paper: the 1966 Schenley contract, the 1970 Delano contracts, the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, and the ban on the short-handled hoe that had bent generations of California field workers over the rows.