Cesar Chavez Founds NFWA, Begins Farmworker Organizing Campaign

In September 1962, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to organize California’s agricultural workers, who had been systematically excluded from New Deal labor protections and faced conditions resembling debt peonage. Farmworkers endured poverty wages, exposure to dangerous pesticides, lack of sanitation facilities in fields, and housing in labor camps controlled by growers. The NFWA built its foundation through patient grassroots organizing in California’s Central Valley, holding house meetings to build trust among workers whom growers had deliberately divided along ethnic and racial lines. Chavez’s organizing philosophy emphasized nonviolent direct action, inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, combined with Mexican-American Catholic social justice traditions.

The NFWA’s organizing challenge was immense: agricultural workers had been explicitly excluded from the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, meaning they lacked legal protections for union organizing, collective bargaining, and strikes. This exclusion was not accidental but reflected the political power of agricultural corporations and the racist assumption that farmwork was temporary labor performed by migrants rather than an industry requiring permanent workers deserving rights. Growers exploited divisions among Filipino, Mexican, and Anglo workers through racist hiring practices and segregated labor camps, while using the threat of deportation to suppress organizing among immigrant workers.

Chavez and Huerta’s NFWA represented a crucial challenge to agricultural corporations’ complete control over one of California’s largest industries. By building solidarity across ethnic divisions and employing innovative tactics including consumer boycotts and public pressure campaigns, the NFWA laid groundwork for the September 1965 Delano grape strike and the formation of the United Farm Workers in 1966. The farmworker movement demonstrated that even the most exploited and legally vulnerable workers could build collective power when organizing transcended the divisions that corporations weaponized to prevent unionization—offering a model for organizing marginalized workers that directly threatened corporate agriculture’s extractive labor practices.