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"Wrath of Grapes" Speech = La ira de las uvas

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"Wrath of Grapes" Speech = La ira de las uvas

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Speeches of Freedom: Cesar Chavez (1986)

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Why Braceros? (1962) Mexican Guest Workers - Reel America Preview

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The music of America’s farmworkers | American Masters | PBS

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When musician and composer Daniel Valdez first read the poem “Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun,” he was reminded of his parents, who were migrant farmers from Mexico. He was inspired to create a bolero, typically a romantic ballad, dedicated to farmworkers and their families.

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Skip’s ESL BITS - ESL English Listening Advanced - Intermediate - Songs - Audiobooks

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Video of Chavez's March to Sacramento, California capital

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Video of Chavez's March to Sacramento, California capital

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¡Huelga! Documentary: March to Sacramento

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Resource from Library of Congress on the Bracero Program with real images

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Resource from Library of Congress on the Bracero Program with real images

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Staff in the Hispanic Reading Room can provide access to these books at the Library of Congress. If you cannot visit the Library in person, please contact us using Ask a Librarian for assistance. In many cases, you can also find these materials at your local library.

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

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Research Guides: A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States: 1942: Bracero Program

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This Hispanic Reading Room research guide focuses on 20th and 21st century American court cases, legislation, and events that had important impacts on civil rights in Chicana/o/x, Hispanic, Latina/o/x, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican communities

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Filipino/Asian American Farm Workers Movements

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Filipino/Asian American Farm Workers Movements

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Home of the Official California Hall of Fame

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Latinas in the Labor Movement | The History You Didn't Learn | TIME

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Cesar Chavez was a labor leader and civil rights activist who cofounded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW) labor union, with Dolores Huerta. The Chavez family became migrant workers after his parents lost their farm during the Great Depression, and lived in a succession of migrant camps. Bearing firsthand witness to the poor treatment of migrant workers inspired Chavez's inception of the farmworkers union.

Music and the arts were instrumental to the success of the social movement Chavez helped found. In the 1960's and 70's, Chavez and farmworker activists formed an alliance with musicians and artists to help build a movement called "La Causa." The enthusiastic response of musicians and performers in fundraisers for the Farmworkers Union, the emergence of Chicano Art from the fields of Delano, California, the role of theater in the struggle, nonviolent action and the response to violence with art all helped form the legacy of a movement that joined social struggle and culture at the hip.

This timeline explores Cesar Chavez's life, the major milestones in his career and the advancement of the labor workers movement.

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Cesar Chavez biography and career timeline | American Masters | PBS

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This timeline explores Cesar Chavez's life, the major milestones in his career and the advancement of the labor workers movement.

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Also check out- https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/the-music-of-americas-farmworkers-9ott9t/28837/

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Por qué contamos la historia de César Chávez a través de una canción | American Masters | PBS

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Los directores Andrés Alegría y Abel Sánchez comparten la historia de la creación de A Song for Cesar (Una canción para César), una oda al movimiento de los trabajadores agrícolas y a César Chávez.

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Dolores Huerta, junto con César Chávez, cofundó la United Farm Workers

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Somos Hispanos | Cesar Chavez Solidarity Walk | Season 24

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Saginaw’s first annual Solidarity Walk honoring Cesar Chavez.

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En Espanol: https://www.pbs.org/video/latino-americanos-huelga-de-trabajadores-del-campo/

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The Farm Worker Movement | PBS LearningMedia

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Farm workers play a crucial role in feeding the nation and ensuring the viability of commodities, yet they have suffered extremely poor working conditions for many years. Explore the early days of the United Farmworkers under the guidance of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. See the conditions that led to the organization of a farm labor union and the initial challenges to its work.

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On September 8, 1965, Filipino American grape workers, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, walked out on strike against Delano-area table and wine grape growers protesting years of poor pay and conditions. The Filipinos asked Cesar Chavez, who led a mostly Latino farm workers union, the National Farm Workers Association, to join their strike.

Cesar and the leaders of the NFWA believed it would be years before their fledgling union was ready for a strike. But he also knew how growers historically pitted one race against another to break field walkouts. Cesar's union voted to join the Filipino workers' walkouts on Mexican Independence Day, September 16, 1965. From the beginning this would be a different kind of strike.

-Cesar insisted the Latino and Filipino strikers work together, sharing the same picketlines, strike kitchens and union hall.

-He asked strikers take a solemn vow to remain nonviolent.

-The strike drew unprecedented support from outside the Central Valley, from other unions, church activists, students, Latinos and other minorities, and civil rights groups.

-Cesar led a 300-mile march, or perigrinacion, from Delano to Sacramento. It placed the farm workers' plight squarely before the conscience of the American people.

-The strikers turned to boycotts, including table grapes, which eventually spread across North America.

But Cesar knew the strikers' greatest weapon was simply their decision not to quit, to persevere no matter what the odds or how long it would take. The strikers had to be prepared to risk everything-beginning with their financial security.
Two and a half years into the strike, during the winter of 1967-68, some strikers, especially some young men, were impatient. There was no hope of victory any time soon. Thick Tule fog shrouded the valley, making things seem even drearier.

Some young male strikers talked about violence, about striking back at the growers who abused them. By fighting back they could prove their machismo, their manliness. Cesar rejected that part of American culture that, he said, "tells our young men that you're not a man if you don't fight back." He had already begun boycotting table grapes, following the tradition of his hero, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Cesar also followed Gandhi and Dr. King's practice of militant nonviolence.

Some of the strikers equated nonviolence with inaction or even cowardice. Cesar believed exactly the opposite. He believed nonviolence is more powerful than violence, that it supports you if your cause is just. He believed nonviolence forces you to be creative-that it lets you maintain the offensive, which is crucial to winning any contest.

But for Cesar, nonviolence was more than a tactic or strategy that could be discarded if it wasn't working. He once wrote, "However important the struggle is and however much misery, poverty and exploitation exist, we know that it cannot be more important than one human life." Cesar also quoted Gandhi, who said, "Do something! Offer your life! If you really want to do something, be willing to die for it."

He didn't teach people by lecturing or by telling them what to do. He led by example. He planted little seeds of hope that sprouted into a renewed movement.

Again following the example of Gandhi, Cesar announced in February 1968, he was fasting to rededicate the movement to nonviolence. He went without food for 25 days, only drinking water. It was an act of penitence for those who advocated violence and a way of taking responsibility as leader of his movement.

The fast divided the UFW staff. Some didn't understand why Cesar was doing it. Others worried about his health. But the farm workers understood. A Catholic mass was said daily near where Cesar was fasting in a tiny windowless room of an adobe-walled gas station at the Forty Acres, the UFW headquarters outside Delano. Hundreds, then thousands, came.

In 25 days, Cesar lost 35 pounds. His doctors said his life was in danger.

But the fast worked. All talk of violence stopped. Dr. King wrote Cesar, expressing admiration and solidarity. The fast ended during a mass in Delano with thousands. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was there, he said, "out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time."

Cesar was too weak to speak, so his statement was read for him. It ended with, "It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives to we find life. The truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men."

The grape strike continued. So did the grape boycott.

For 100 years before Cesar Chavez, farm workers tried, and failed, to organize a union. Every strike was crushed. Every union was defeated.

Cesar knew the farm workers couldn't win with just a field strike. The growers controlled all the rural social and political institutions.

Cesar read about Gandhi's boycott of salt in 1930. He carefully followed Dr. King's Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s.

For the first time in American history, Cesar and the United Farm Workers (the result of a merger in 1966 between the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers Association) decided to use a boycott in a major labor dispute. The boycott changed the scene of the battle from the fields, where the odds were stacked against farm workers, to the cities, where farm workers could appeal for help to the American people, whom Cesar called "our court of last resort."

Hundreds of grape strikers traveled across the U.S. and Canada, telling their stories and organizing mass support for the grape boycott. The strikers were joined by thousands of supporters who helped tirelessly organize the boycott.

Cesar and the farm workers believed if consumers in communities throughout North America knew about the suffering of field laborers-and saw the grape strikers struggling nonviolently-they would respond. For Cesar, nonviolence couldn't be understood in the abstract. It could only be seen in action. He said, "the whole essence of nonviolent action is getting a lot of people involved, vast numbers doing little things."

He knew most people couldn't drop what they were doing and dedicate themselves completely to the movement like the grape strikers, most of whom lost their homes, cars and worldly possessions. But Cesar and the farm workers showed ordinary people that by making little sacrifices every day-by not eating grapes-they could directly help the poorest of the poor.

The boycott connected middle-class families in big cities with poor farm worker families in the California vineyards. Millions stopped eating grapes. At dinner tables across the country, parents gave children a simple, powerful lesson in social justice.

By 1970, the grape boycott was a complete success. Table grape growers at long last signed their first union contracts, granting workers better pay, benefits, and protections.

In the decades that followed, Cesar and the UFW continued using nonviolent strikes, boycotts, marches and fasts to help farm workers stand up for their rights and gather support from ordinary Americans to aid them in their efforts. Those efforts continue to this day through the work of the United Farm Workers of America and the Cesar Chavez Foundation.

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The 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike and Boycott

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On September 8, 1965, Filipino American grape workers, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, walked out on strike against Delano-area table and wine grape growers protesting years of poor pay and conditions. The Filipinos asked Cesar Chavez, who led a mostly Latino farm workers u

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Staff in the Hispanic Reading Room can provide access to these books at the Library of Congress. If you cannot visit the Library in person, please contact us using Ask a Librarian for assistance. In many cases, you can also find these materials at your local library.

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

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Research Guides: A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States: 1962: United Farm Workers Union

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This Hispanic Reading Room research guide focuses on 20th and 21st century American court cases, legislation, and events that had important impacts on civil rights in Chicana/o/x, Hispanic, Latina/o/x, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican communities

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Migrant Workers Movement | A Song for Cesar | PBS LearningMedia

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Learn about the farm workers movement in this media gallery with video from the American Masters films Song for Cesar and Jerry Brown: The Disrupter. Using video, teaching tips, and discussion questions, students explore the working conditions that led farm workers, with the leadership of Cesar Chavez and others, to nonviolent protest, the challenges of working with Governor Jerry Brown, and the legislation that was passed as a result of the movement.

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Cesar Chavez’s first major address after his 36-day 1988 fast over the pesticide poisoning of farm workers.

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* The Cesar E. Chavez Foundation is the intellectual property owner of Cesar’s name, voice, image, and likeness, speeches and writings. Permission to reproduce said intellectual property for publication purposes may be obtained by contacting the: Cesar E. Chavez Foundation,634 South Spring Street Su

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Collection of Farmworker's Movement Videos

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Collection of Farmworker's Movement Videos

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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More here- https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/how-the-farmworkers-movement-used-concerts-to-fundraise-3dgc/28852/

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Peaceful protest with Joan Baez | American Masters | PBS

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Members of the farmworkers’ movement were committed to nonviolence amidst danger on the picket lines. Singer-songwriter Joan Baez was one of those peaceful protesters. “I’ve always been the happiest when I was doing activism and music at the same time,” said Baez. “So that was an obvious place for me to be, with Cesar.”

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What is the Chicano Movement: English/Spanish

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What is the Chicano Movement: English/Spanish

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En Espanol: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/cheech-marin-explica-por-que-el-movimiento-chicano-sigue-avanzando/29972/

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Cheech Marin on why the Chicano Movement keeps moving | American Masters | PBS

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Comedian, actor and activist Cheech Marin talks about the art of the Chicano Movement and the time he first met labor leader Cesar Chavez.

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Robert F. Kennedy (Former Senator of NY) and Cesar Chavez: Political Movement

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Robert F. Kennedy (Former Senator of NY) and Cesar Chavez: Political Movement

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RFK and Cesar Chavez | American Experience | PBS

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RFK was so impressed with Chavez, that all doubts about getting involved with the farmworkers were erased.

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Labor Movement Was Critical Ally To Civil Rights Movement

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Robert Siegel talks to Thomas Sugrue, professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, about the history of labor unions and the civil rights movement and how that relationship compares to today.

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Article Series (U.S. National Park Service)

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Series: The Road to Sacramento: Marching for Justice in the Fields

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Cesar Chavez!

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Cesar Chavez!

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Cesar Chavez!

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Cesar Chavez!

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After the United States entered World War II (1939-45), there were not enough American workers to perform farmwork or other unskilled jobs. To fill those jobs the U.S. and Mexican governments created the Mexican Farm Labor Program (later the Bracero Program) in 1942. The program offered Mexican citizens short-term contracts to work in the United States. The workers were guaranteed the same pay as Americans working the same job and protection from discrimination. The braceros would also receive free housing, health care, and transportation back to Mexico when their contracts ended. The Mexican government agreed to the program because the braceros would bring new agricultural skills back to Mexico and because the money the braceros earned would help the Mexican economy.

The braceros were either single men or men who had left their families behind in Mexico. More than 4.5 million Mexican citizens were hired as part of the Bracero Program. They mostly worked in Texas and California, either in agriculture or on the railroads.

The program faced many problems. Mexican workers experienced racism and discrimination. Many restaurants and theaters refused to serve Mexicans or segregated them from the white customers. Employers did not follow the guidelines and paid less to Mexican laborers. In addition, undocumented (illegal) workers from Mexico began entering and working in the United States, which led to more issues. Many Americans claimed that the undocumented workers were affecting wages for American laborers. The U.S. government could not solve these problems and ended the Bracero Program in 1964. However, many of the braceros stayed in the United States after the program ended. Today people from Mexico continue to come to the United States to work in agriculture and other areas.

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The Bracero Program was a series of agreements between the U.S. and Mexican governments. The program allowed temporary workers from Mexico, known as braceros, to work legally...

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Cesar Chavez!

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Cesar Chavez!

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Go to Readworks.org to review an article  about the Braceros!

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Go to Readworks.org to review an article  about the Braceros!

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Marta Valier, with the assistance of Cindy Chavez and Ken Cheng

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Mapping Change, from Delano to Sacramento

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A visual journey of the 280-mile march that reshaped farmworkers’ rights in 1966

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"There's no turning back ... We will win. We are winning because ours is a revolution of mind and heart ... " Cesar Chavez

History of
¡Si Se Puede!

In May 1972, a decade after Cesar Chavez founded the union, the Legislature in his native state of Arizona pushed through a bill sponsored by agribusiness denying farm workers the right to strike and boycott during harvest seasons, and effectively making it impossible for them to organize.

The United Farm Workers asked to meet with Republican Governor Jack Williams, to appeal for him to veto the legislation. Instead, the governor ordered state troopers to bring him the bill and he signed it within an hour after passage. In response to a protest by farm workers, the governor remarked, " As far as I'm concerned, those people don't exist. "

When news of the law's enactment reached him, Cesar returned to Arizona and began a 25-day water-only fast. The fast quickly took a physical toll. After a few days Cesar was bedridden. Resting on his back in a small room, with UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta by his side, Cesar was briefed by a group of local Latino labor and political leaders about political realities in the state.

The leaders offered a refrain Cesar and Dolores heard many times: The grower lobby that dominated state politics, the Legislature and governor was so powerful, these Latino leaders declared, it couldn't be beaten. Cesar and Dolores silently listened while they explained why the fast and efforts by farm workers would be fruitless.
"No, no se puede!" ("No, no it can't be done"), they kept repeating in Spanish. Then Dolores responded, "Si, si se puede!" ("Yes, yes, it can be done").
Dolores immediately picked up the call and made the slogan the rallying cry for the farm workers' campaign in Arizona.

Following Cesar's 1972 fast, during which he became so weak he was hospitalized, the UFW mobilized thousands of labor, religious and community activists, and collected enough signatures to force an election to recall Governor Williams. The governor escaped the vote with a partisan ruling by the state attorney general.

At a Mass ending the fast, Cesar's said in a statement that was read for him, "The greatest tragedy is not to live and die, as we all must. The greatest tragedy is for a person to live and die without knowing the satisfaction of giving life for others."

The state's punitive anti-farm worker law is still on the books. Yet Cesar Chavez's historic fast, the UFW's activism and the message of Si Se Puede! have fundamentally transformed Arizona to the present day.

Cesar has passed, but his legacy of self-sacrifice-and the affirmation ¡Si Se Puede!-is alive wherever farm workers organize and wherever people anywhere stand up nonviolently for their rights.

¡Si Se Puede!

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History of ¡Si Se Puede! In May 1972, a decade after Cesar Chavez founded the union, the Legislature in his native state of Arizona pushed through a bill sponsored by agribusiness denying farm workers the right to strike and boycott during harvest seasons, and effectively making it impossible

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Dolores Huerta!

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Go to readworks.org or commonlit.org to review articles about Dolores Huerta!

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Lesson 06: ¡Sí se puede! Advocating for Farm Workers (w/ notes)

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Published on March 24, 2023 by Beatrice Alvarez

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Documentaries and information about five women who have worked toward justice for farmworkers and agricultural laborers