The New Yorker:

In his fight for California farm workers, the labor organizer took on wage theft, racism, and the threat of automation. His activism changed everything.

By Peter Matthiessen
June 13, 1969

One Sunday morning last summer, I knocked on the door of a small frame house on Kensington Street, in Delano, California, that is rented by the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee for the family of its director, Cesar Estrada Chavez. It was just before seven, and no one came to the door, so I sat down on the stoop to wait. The stoop was shaded by squat trees, which distinguish Kensington Street from the other straight lines of one-story bungalows that make up residential Delano, but at seven the air was already hot and still, as it is almost every day of summer there in the San Joaquin Valley. On Kensington Street, a quiet stronghold of the middle class, the Chavez house drew attention to itself by worn yellow-brown paint, a patch of lawn between stoop and sidewalk that had been turned to mud by a leaky hose trailing away into the weeds, and a car, lacking an engine, which appeared not so much parked as abandoned in the driveway. Signs that said “Don’t Buy California Grapes” were plastered on the car, and “Kennedy” stickers, fading now, were still stuck to posts on the stoop. The signs suggested that the dwelling was utilitarian, not domestic, and that the Chavez family’s commitment was somewhere else.

In the time it must have taken Chavez to put on the clothes that are his invariable costume—a plaid shirt and work pants—and to splash water on his face, the back door creaked and he appeared around the corner of the house. “Good morning,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if surprised to see me there. “How are you?” Though he shook my hand, he did not stop moving; we walked south on Kensington Street and turned west at the corner.

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