Helen Fabela Chavez Research Paper

Helen Fabela Chavez’s parents were Mexican immigrants who worked as migrant farmers. At the age of seven, Helen started to work in the fields, and after her father died, she dropped out of high school to support her family. In 1948, Helen married a man named Cesar Chavez and moved to Delano, where they raised eight children.
In the late 1950s, the couple’s local priest introduced Helen and Cesar to the Community Service Organization(CSO) organizer, Fred Ross. In the beginning, Cesar did not want to join, but Helen convinced him to join the CSO and to become an organizer. This was the beginning of a new activist’s journey to change the life of migrant farmers. Furthermore, Helen maintained the household and took care of the children, which

allowed Cesar to work in the CSO without worrying about maintaining the family, but this was not the only task Helen had. She would help the CSO by helping migrant farm workers gain a US citizenship, teaching migrant workers literacy, and revising Cesar’s reports. Then in 1962, Cesar left the CSO and started the farm workers union, which later grew into the National Farm Workers Association(NFWA) and then the United Farm Workers Organization Committee(UFWOC). As the organization started to grow, Helen started to get more involved into the activities that helped support migrant farmers and the organization.
Focusing on this big organization caused the family to live in poverty, thus Helen returned to the fields to support the family. As Helen worked in the fields, she re-experienced the difficulties migrant farm workers have to go through. This inspired her to do more for the organization, so she helped the UFWOC by attending the meetings, signed new members up, and managed the union’s finances, which is a very important task in order to keep the organization running.
Helen and Cesar worked to improve the lives of farm workers and stop unfair labor practices. They would not do this with violence but with peaceful protests like marches and helping the farm workers. From these protests the most famous one is in 1966, when Helen was arrested for shouting “Huelga!” (Strike!),a prohibited Spanish word, at a San Joaquin Valley ranch. Although Helen wasn’t as widely known as her husband, she was a great person who played an important role in changing the lives of migrant workers.