Cesar Chavez

Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927 to a Mexican American family. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946 and worked as a farm laborer. In the 1950s he joined the Community Service Organization, registering voters, and became its national director in 1959. In 1962 he founded the National Farm Workers Association with Dolores Huerta, later the United Farm Workers. He led the Delano grape strike and national boycott from 1965 until growers signed contracts in 1970, and helped pass California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. He died in 1993 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

For decades Chavez was celebrated as the most important Latino leader of the 20th century, credited with bringing national attention to farmworkers' conditions and winning the first lasting union contracts in American agriculture. His birthday became a federal commemorative day in 2014. Critics pointed to his autocratic control of the union and internal purges, and his 1970s campaign against undocumented workers caused violence along the border and rifts with allies. In March 2026 The New York Times reported allegations from multiple women that he sexually abused them in the 1960s and 1970s, including girls as young as 12, based on more than a dozen women's accounts corroborated by dozens of others; one account was from UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta. The Chavez family did not deny the reports. Chavez died in 1993 and cannot respond; since the reports, many schools, streets and commemorations have been renamed or reconsidered.