Resources for Teachers and Students
Prepare: César Chavez is best known for founding
the United Farm Workers union (UFW), an effort that began
with concerns about workers rights and situated him in the
middle of the nonviolent political and social protests of
the 1960s. The UFW maintains a great deal of historical
material dealing with these times on their website. To learn
more about Chavez, please view his online biography.
Read:
César Chavez's Architects
of Peace essay is excerpted from a speech, "He
Showed Us the Way," delivered in April of 1978 to honor
the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. In it, he outlined
how King's thoughts on nonviolence had become a paradigm
for the struggles of the United Farm Workers union.
Explore: The California Department of Education
maintains a model
curriculum regarding César Chavez on their website.
Of particular interest on this site are the transcriptions
of many of Chavez's speeches.
Write: In his Architects of Peace essay, César
Chavez hypothesized, "The greater the oppression, the
more leverage nonviolence holds." This hypothesis put
him at odds with many Latin American theorists of the 1960s
and 1970s, who advocated liberation or Marxist philosophies,
which insist that armed revolution is often the only adequate
response to severe oppression. Realizing the discrepancy
of approaches, Chavez insisted that those who espouse violence
exploit people. Write a three-to-five page reflection paper
on whether Chavez's hypothesis is still valid in today's
world, at a time when the "oppression" seems to
be less widespread, but when the gap between the wealthy
and the poor seems to be increasing.
Extend:
The United
Farm Workers continue to boycott sections of the agricultural
industry that the union considers unfair or unsafe for farm
workers. They invite the public to take action in support
of their campaigns. Current "Take Action" issues
can be found on the main page of their website.
Additional Resource: The Walter
P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University maintains
an archive of UFW papers and oral histories, as well as
a UFW bibliography.
Biography of César
Chavez
