Swallow, Shirley

This collection contains contains a great deal of information about the United Farm Workers and the organizations that supported its efforts to alleviate the plight of the farm workers.

The National Farm Workers Association was established in Delano, California in September 1962 by Cesar Chavez. In 1966 the NFWA changed its name to the National Farm Workers Union and later that year merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form a new union affiliated with the AFL-CIO. This new organization was called the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, and Cesar Chavez was named the director. "The grinding cycle of poverty that is handed down from generation to generation exists because the employers will not let the workers organize," Chavez said. Now, as head of a larger and more powerful organization, he worked tirelessly to change this situation, using his charisma to persuade farm workers to band together to support strikes and boycotts, including the famous national grape and lettuce boycotts, which eventually forced to growers to sign contracts with the union. Chavez himself endured fasts, death threats and even a jail sentence to advance La Causa.

During the early years of the union, Chavez had to work in a politically hostile environment. With the election of Edmund Brown, Jr. as governor of the state of California in 1974, all this changed. One of the stellar achievements of Brown's administration was the passage of a farm-labor law in 1975 and the creation of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board that gave farm workers their first collective bargaining rights. As a result of this legislation, the union (which changed its name in 1973 to the United Farm Workers of America) was able to enter into a legally binding agreement with the Teamsters in 1977, ending a decade of hostility between the two unions. The collection contains material describing the aggressive and sometimes violent tactics of the Teamsters and the sweetheart contracts that the union signed with some of the growers in an unsuccessful effort to destroy the UFWA.

While the various support groups ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the impoverished farm workers, the union brought the workers together and helped unify them so that they could bargain for better wages and working conditions. But towering, over them all was Cesar Chavez, the man whose spirit and dedication and humility dominated the farm worker movement. Cesar Chavez, who died on April 23, 1993 at the age of sixty-six, was as the late Senator Robert Kennedy said, truly "One of the heroic figures of our time."