The Cesar Chavez Day celebrates a life struggle for justice for agricultural workers: NPR

The last day of March commemorates the work activist and the CESAR Chavez civil rights icon, whose struggle to improve the life of agricultural workers of the nation helped improve the inhuman working conditions of the vital industry, but often neglected.

President Barack Obama proclaimed the day of vacation in 2014, and he was observed in a handful of states, including California, where Chavez began his mission to challenge the way the workforce was treated.

Chavez was born on March 31, 1927 in Yuma, Arizona, farmers of Mexican origin. When he was a child, his family lost his farm during the great depression, leading Chavez to what was going to become his long -standing career on the migrant field.

Noting the brutal conditions of the industry, where families and their own had to work exhausting hours under the warm sun for simple sous, forcing them on living conditions which would be considered largely inhuman, Chavez began to study the work of non -violent activists like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

After leaving the navy in 1946, Chavez finally adopted The causa – The cause – to unionize the largely immigrant workforce and to put pressure for fair wages and better conditions.

In 1962, Chavez left the comfort of an employee position to organize community services and moved his family to Delano, California, where, alongside his wife and their eight young children, the National Farm Workers Association launched.

Without a salary but dedicated to the unionization of agricultural labor, in 1965, Chavez traveled through the imperial valleys and San Joaquin de California to recruit new members for the movement which would eventually become the United Farm Workers Union. During this recruitment period, Chavez relied on donations to get out of it.

Although he would remain voluntarily poor all his life, Chavez managed to unite the workers on the ground, in the direction of non -violent movements such as the boycott of the table grape market, his famous 340 miles of Delano in Sacramento, and a fast of 25 days in 1968 which left him too weak to read a speech he had prepared.

The speech, read in its name, said in part: “It is my deepest belief that it is only of life that we find life. I am convinced that the most true act of courage, the strongest act of virility, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a completely non -violent struggle for justice. Being a man is to suffer for others. God helps us to be men.”

While Chavez faced threats of police violence and cruelty on the part of agricultural owners, while being spied on for years by the FBI under the suspicions of being an extremist, his heritage was adopted in popular culture.

In 1994, the year after Chavez’s death, he was posthumously awarded by President Bill Clinton the Liberty Medal.