To Cesar Chavez, they were never invisible.
"They" were farmworkers all over the country who saw inspiration and found dignity and relief through the life work of the humble labor organizer. And for his work, there’s little chance Cesar Chavez's name will ever be forgotten. It adorns buildings, books, parks andnational monument.
There is even a bust of Chavez behind the Resolute Desk in President Biden's Oval Office.
A Yuma, Arizona native, Chavez led his life as a champion and activist for a critical segment of the agriculture industry, farmworkers.
“I think he's one of the iconic figures and Mexican-American history and today Latino history” said Ignacio Garcia, a professor of history at Brigham Young University. “I think he set the context with what would be the modern Civil Rights movement among Mexican-Americans are what came to be known as that Chicano Civil Rights Movement.”
Chavez spent his early life as a farm laborer before co-founding the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, an organization that would later became the United Farm Workers (UFW) of America.
UFW advocates for better working conditions and pay for agricultural workers throughout the United States.
While Utah didn’t have a strong union movement, Garcia says Chavez's rhetoric inspired people all over the Beehive State.
“And so a lot of the advocacy, a lot of the ideas about how you treat farm workers," said Garcia, "the kind of conditions you provide wages and services, comes out in many ways from what he was doing at the in the United Farm Workers Union in California.
“The whole idea that farmworkers could actually negotiate collective bargaining, all of these things reverberated across the nation, including in Utah.”
The charismatic leader visited Utah in 1986 to promote legislation to protect the rights of Latinos working in the fields. During his visit, Chavez spoke at the Guadalupe Center, a haven for Mexican-Americans in Salt Lake at the time.
His main concern? To ban pesticides that, on average, were killing 900 farm-workers per year.
“[Chavez] was talking about work conditions," Garcia added. "He was talking about unions working across the nation and globally, to try to bring benefits to workers, whether they would be longshoreman or whether they were farm workers or domestic workers. It was the idea that, that these people deserve something."
Chavez fought for farmers until his final days before dying in 1993 at the age of 66 of natural causes, but his impact would forever be remembered.
“He was there till the end,” Garcia said. “And, and his life would always be representative, someone who gave his all for not only his people, but for anyone who confronted the same type of challenges that the farm workers did.”
Cesar Chavez Day is a U.S. federal commemorative holiday celebrated on the birthday of the famous labor rights activist, March 31. This day was proclaimed by President Barack Obama in 2014
