Cesar

Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) along with Dolores Huerta was founder of the pioneering National Farm Workers Association in 1962--later reorganized as the United Farm Workers five years later. He adapted activist tools of both labor unions and the civil rights movement: strikes, organized boycotts, marches, and public information campaigns. Against the opposition of farmers, he was successful in negotiating a union contract that included pay raises, health care, and improved safety conditions.

In this painting we see Chavez at the center of more than forty farmworkers, some of them working in the diagonally composed field rows and other in the foreground surrounding him. The specificity of these larger faces suggests they may have been portraits of people Cavazos knew. Regardless, a farmworkers union working primarily in California is shown to speak on behalf of them everywhere.

Juan Cavazos is an originally self-taught painter working as a migrant farmworker in Western New York. With support from the Geneseo Migrant Center and the MollyOlga Art Center of Buffalo, Cavazos began showing his art in several shows beginning in the late 1980s. Note: this item consists of both a smaller and larger file of his painting.

Cavazos, Juan

Painting

24 x 36 in.