On September 30, 1962, activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta establish the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Their organization becomes a successful labor union for Mexican American and Filipino farmworkers, and a nationally-recognized Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
Chavez formed the association after the grassroots Community Service Organization—where he trained community members to become politically active—rebuffed his push to organize farmworkers and create a union. Huerta, a leader of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) co-founded the NFWA with Chavez. It later merged with another organization to form the United Farm Workers of America.
From the association’s base in Delano, California, Chavez spent three years going door to door and speaking at house meetings to get farmworkers involved. At summer’s end in 1965, AWOC-organizer Larry Itliong led a farmworkers strike across 20 vineyards. They demanded wages be raised from $1 an hour to $1.40. When their efforts were countered with strikebreakers, several thousand Mexican American workers from the NFWA joined to support the cause across 48 ranches.
Facing a shortage of workers to block strikebreakers at all the fields, Chavez, Huerta and United Farm Workers leaders called for a national boycott of table grapes without a union label. Using the slogan “Sí se puede” (“Yes we can”), they sent volunteers to Detroit, Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Toronto and other cities across the country to rally support.
The Civil Rights Movement had fueled a growing public awareness about racism, discrimination, worker exploitation, poverty, shoddy housing and deficient schools for Black Americans. News of the struggles of the Mexican Americans and Filipinos toiling in the California fields rang true to millions of consumers who stopped buying table grapes. Activists in the Civil Rights Movement also traveled to Delano, California, to support and train the farmworkers in nonviolent protest methods.
The Delano grape strike officially ended in 1970 when more than 30 grape growers signed three-year contracts with the union. The UFW was chartered into the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1972. In the following two decades, the UFW clashed with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who teamed up with lettuce growers to block recognition of the union and take over expiring contracts.
More clinics opened for farmworkers, along with boycotts, lawsuits and strikes that tested the UFW leadership. Chavez fasted for 36 days in 1988 to protest the use of pesticides. This led California’s Legislature to encourage organic farming and push for pesticide-free produce.
In a March 2026 New York Times investigation, several women, including Huerta and others who were connected to the movement in their youth said Chavez had, for years, had sexually abused them years earlier. In response, the Cesar Chavez Foundation said it “is working with leaders in the Farmworker Movement to be responsive to these allegations, support the people who may have been harmed by his actions, and ensure we are united and guided by our commitment to justice and community empowerment.”
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