Ms. Yarborough joins us this week for an Hispanic Heritage Month history lesson:
“Thinking back to last year’s HUM III unit on Civil Rights, the Spanish IV and V project on the Braceros Program, the Physics First focus on environmental sustainability, and the Chemistry focus on environmental disasters, Hispanic Heritage Month 2025 seems like the perfect time for a deeper dive into the table grape boycotts of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and the labor leaders who initiated this social movement–César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, founders of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and United Farm Workers (UFW).
“When the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering, and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick.”–César Chávez (“Cesar Chavez: Labor Leader Born”)
“The history of our struggle against agribusiness is punctuated by the continued violations of health and safety codes by growers, including many table grape growers. . . . If the federal government and the DOD [Department of Defense] is not concerned about the welfare of farm workers, they must be concerned with protecting our servicemen from contamination and disease carried by grapes picked in fields without toilets or washstands. Recent laboratory tests have found DDT residues on California grapes. Economic poisons have killed and injured farm workers. Will they also prove dangerous to U.S. military personnel?”–Dolores Huerta’s address to Congress about the DOD’s purchase of table grapes during the boycott
Together, Chávez and Huerta negotiated better contracts for the agricultural working class, while protecting these same workers and the natural environment by publicizing and pushing back against unsafe agribusiness practices, like the use of harmful pesticides.
To learn more about their fight for workers’ rights, check out one of the books or investigate some of the library’s digital resources listed below!”
Digital Resources
- Access short biographies, magazine and news articles, and podcasts about these worker’s rights activists through the library database, Biography In-Context:
- Learn about the table grape boycott in the chapter, “Strike in Delano” from the ebook Dolores Huerta in the American History database. To sign in and access the chapter, use the username and password below.
- User name: ohrstromlib; Password: digital
- Using the Newsbank Hispanic Life in America database, view the newspaper article, Huerta cited in her address to Congress on July 15, 1969, “Eight Pounds of Grapes Per Man.”
The cover images of Chávez and Huerta come from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
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