The legacy of Cesar Chavez is borne out of the injustices to his family he witnessed in his childhood. A landowner commissioned Chavez’s father to clear 80 acres of land, in exchange for which the family would receive forty acres near their home, enough for a small farm, but that never happened: the land was sold enough to another party. The family took out a loan to buy the land for themselves, but, unable to make the payments, had it repossessed. Chavez dedicated his adult life to fighting those injustices and exploitations faced by his family and all working-class farmers.

On this day, September 30, in 1962, Cesar Chavez organized the National Farm Workers Association. His union would later merge with one created by Dolores Huerta, another prominent activist for farmers’ rights, to create United Farm Workers.

The UFW’s first fight was against grape growers in California. In addition to subsistence pay and appalling living conditions of the workers by the two major growers, Schenley and DiGiorgio, Schenley began to indiscriminately spray pesticides over the workers next to the crops in the field. The UFW called for widespread strikes, and the growers were just about ready to settle when a rival union stepped in to propose themselves as an alternative to the UFW. Chavez fought back, organizing a boycott of the elections — the first of many such fights for the burgeoning union.