Listen Now Access the recordings of Cesar Chavez's program. Club Introduction Read the transcript of the club introduction of Cesar Chavez. Club Speech Read the transcript of Cesar Chavez's speech. Club Q & A Read the Q & A for this program. Related Links Our guide to the best links related to this program.

Club Introduction

Welcome to The Commonwealth Club of California. I am Michael Lee, your quarterly chairman. Our speaker today is the head of the United Farm Workers of America, Cesar Chavez. Mr. Chavez founded and still leads the first successful farm workers union in United States history. He is the man the late Senator Robert Kennedy called one of the heroic figures of our time and who many credit with the passage of the historic California Labor Relations Act of 1975.

Mr. Chavez was born in 1927, near Yuma, Arizona. At age ten, his family lost its land to the Depression and began a bleak life as migrant farm workers. Mr. Chavez himself left school after the eighth grade to help support his family. In 1952, after serving in the Navy, getting married and settling in the San Jose area, Mr. Chavez met an organizer for the Community Service Organization, a barrio-based self-help group, and as they say, the rest is history. Within months, Mr. Chavez was a full-time organizer with the CSO, coordinating voter registration, battling racial discrimination and forming new chapters across California and Arizona.

Eventually Mr. Chavez served as CSO's national director, but his dream was to create an organization to help migrant farm workers. So, in 1962, he moved to Delano, California, and founded the National Farm Workers Association. Next followed years of difficult and dangerous organizing efforts as he built up his union, but build it up he did. Beginning in 1965, he led a successful five-year boycott against California Grape growers that rallied millions of supporters to the UFW and forged, perhaps, the broadest coalition in labor history. As a measure of its effectiveness, by 1975, a nationwide Harris Poll showed that 17 million American adults had stopped buying grapes.

Today, although the farm worker is far better off than he was when Mr. Chavez started his organizing efforts, life is still hard. But he remains a revered, almost mystical figure who will continue to have a profound impact on the future of farm workers and Hispanics in California, the topic of his address today. Please join me in welcoming him.

Read the Speech >>

Generously funded by: