Cesar Chavez

Cesar Chavez knew farmwork from the inside. He had spent his childhood as a migrant laborer in California's fields after his family lost their Arizona home during the Depression, moving from camp to camp, picking whatever was in season. That experience shaped everything that followed. In 1962, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Dolores Huerta in Delano, California, organizing workers who had been excluded from the labor protections won by industrial unions in the 1930s — no minimum wage guarantees, no right to organize, no overtime.

His most powerful weapon was the boycott. When California grape growers refused to recognize the union after a 1965 strike, Chavez took the fight to dinner tables across America, calling on consumers to stop buying table grapes. The boycott lasted five years. By 1970, an estimated 17 million Americans had stopped buying grapes, and major growers signed contracts with the United Farm Workers. Chavez amplified the campaign with fasts — the longest ran 36 days in 1968 — that drew national attention and linked the farmworkers' struggle to the broader civil rights movement.

Chavez spent the last decades of his life fighting to protect the gains the UFW had won and battling the political headwinds of the 1980s. He died in 1993 at 66, in his sleep, near the Arizona town where he had been born. The United Farm Workers he founded still operates. California made his birthday — March 31 — a state holiday in 2000, and President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. "Si se puede" — the farmworkers' chant — lived long enough to become a presidential campaign slogan.