César Chavez and Dolores Huerta led a movement that won better wages and conditions for farmworkers

Dolores Huerta and the late César Chavez are both labor rights icons, recognized for leading a movement that pushed producers to negotiate better wages and working conditions for farm workers.

Their legacy is receiving new attention after allegations emerged that Chavez, who died in 1993, sexually abused Huerta and other women and girls. Several celebrations honoring Chavez planned across the country later this month have been canceled.

Chavez and Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which a few years later became the United Farm Workers of America when it merged with the Farm Workers Organizing Committee.

The rise of the movement is one of the most important events in U.S. history and the most important event in Latin American history, said Paul Ortiz, a professor of labor history at Cornell University. The United Farm Workers made the most significant lasting changes in working conditions for farmworkers in the nation’s history, he said.

Farmworkers “from Hawaii to Florida to New York to Southern California have tried to organize to improve their wages and working conditions, literally for centuries, dating back to the days of slavery,” Ortiz said. “And almost every effort has failed, some catastrophically. »

Chavez and Huerta are credited for efforts that prompted California to pass the first state law recognizing farmworkers’ rights to collective bargaining.

Both have streets and schools named after them. Several states designated March 31, Chavez’s birthday, as a day to commemorate him, and former President Barack Obama declared it a federal memorial holiday in 2014.

Here’s a look at their lives and legacy:

Chavez is known for his early organizing activities in the fields, his hunger strike, his grape boycott, and his eventual victory in urging growers to negotiate with farmworkers for better wages and working conditions.

Born in Yuma, Arizona, Chavez grew up in a Mexican-American family that traveled across California to pick lettuce, grapes, cotton and other seasonal crops.

Chavez protested low wages and often miserable working conditions. There were no toilets in the fields for the workers and they had to weed the fields with short-handled hoes, requiring them to bend over for hours.

The farmworker movement raised workers’ wages, banned small-handed hoes and created clean water and toilets in the fields, according to a National Park Service document supporting the creation of a national monument in Chavez’s honor.

In 1966, he led a march that began with a few activists in Delano, Calif., and ended in Sacramento with 10,000 people, according to Obama’s 2014 proclamation. Some 17 million people participated in the grape boycott, which forced growers to accept some of the first farmworker contracts in history, according to the proclamation.

Chavez launched the first farmworker credit union, health clinics, daycares and job training programs, the Cesar Chavez Foundation said on its website.

“He was, to his own people, a Moses figure,” then-President Bill Clinton said in 1994, posthumously awarding Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Chavez died the previous year in California at the age of 66.

The labor and civil rights leader won higher wages, health benefits, pensions and pesticide protections for farmworkers during her decades of organizing and advocacy on their behalf.

Now 95, Huerta helped organize the strike of 5,000 grape workers in Delano in 1965 and was the lead negotiator of the labor contract that followed, according to the National Museum of Women’s History.

A single mother, Huerta gave up a stable teaching career to get organized. She was jailed more than 20 times for protesting and seriously injured in 1988 while protesting. She went on to advocate for women’s rights, encourage Latinas to run for office, and found the Dolores Huerta Foundation to fight discrimination, poverty, and inequality.

She coined the iconic slogan “Sí, se puede” – meaning “Yes, we can” – in 1972, while rallying Arizona farmworkers against a law banning boycotts and strikes. She challenged claims that it was impossible to organize there.

Huerta received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and in 1993 became the first Latina inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

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Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan and Fernanda Figueroa contributed to this report.