Influenced by the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, Chavez emphasized direct nonviolent tactics, including pickets and boycotts, to pressure farm owners into granting strikers' demands.

UFW critics raised concerns about his autocratic control of the union, the purges of those he deemed disloyal, and the personality cult built around him, while farm owners considered him a communist subversive.

[16] After Dorotea died in July 1937, the Yuma County local government auctioned off her farmstead to cover back taxes, and despite Librado's delaying tactics, the house and land were sold in 1939.

Among the books were biographies of the saint Francis of Assisi, the U.S. labor organizers John L. Lewis and Eugene V. Debs, and the Indian independence activist Mahatma Gandhi, introducing Chavez to the ideas of nonviolent protest.

[54] Amid the wider context of the Cold War and McCarthyite suspicions that leftist activism was a front for Marxist-Leninist groups, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began monitoring Chavez and opened a file on him.

[55] At Alinsky's instigation, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) paid $20,000 to the CSO for the latter to open a branch in Oxnard; Chavez became its organizer, working with the largely Mexican farm laborers.

[57] He repeatedly heard concerns from local Mexican-American laborers that they were being routinely passed over or fired so that employers could hire cheaper Mexican guest workers, or braceros, in violation of federal law.

[58] To combat this practice, he established the CSO Employment Committee that launched a "registration campaign" through which unemployed farm workers could sign their name to highlight their desire for work.

The California American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) for instance paid it $12,000 to conduct voter registration schemes in six counties with high Mexican populations.

[110] By 1965, Chavez was aware that the numbers joining the picket lines had declined; although hundreds of pickers had initially struck, some had returned to their jobs, found employment elsewhere, or moved away from Delano.

Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across [a] dry plain.

[141] Chavez hoped for it to be a "spiritual" center where union members would relax; he designed it to have a swimming pool, a chapel, a market, and a gas station, as well as gardens with outdoor sculptures.

"[147] In February 1968, the Giumarra company obtained a contempt citation against the union, claiming that its members had used threatening and intimidating behavior against its employees and had placed roofing nails at the entrances to its ranches.

[179] Chavez insisted that their negotiations also cover issues at the Delano High School, where several pupils, including his own daughter Eloise, had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for protesting in support of the boycott.

[199] To this end, the Hollywood movie producer Edward Lewis, a wealthy supporter of Chavez's, fronted the purchase of an old tuberculosis sanatorium in Keene, along the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, for the union.

[234] The AFL-CIO was concerned by this clash between unions, and Meany struck a deal with Chavez that they would provide the UFW with renewed financial support if it pushed for state legislation to govern the rights of farmworkers to organize.

[236] Amid the Delano strike, one of the UFW strikers, the Yemeni migrant Nagi Moshin Daifullah, died after an altercation with a police officer breaking up a bar-room fight.

[270] Chavez nevertheless worried that it would kill the movement's spirit, stating that the cause would now lose "the essential fight of recognition, which is the one that appeals to the human mind and the heart", instead focusing on more prosaic issues such as wages and benefits.

[329] Shortly after, the Peoples Temple run by the civil rights activist Jim Jones, a group which had been closely linked with California's leftist movement, committed mass suicide at their Jonestown community.

The executive committee split largely on generational lines, with older members backing Chavez's desire to remain a voluntary organization, and this attitude narrowly prevailed.

Obstruction by those evil forces visible and invisible who work at every chance to destroy us—the growers, the teamsters, disaffected former staff, scoundrels, and God knows who, some unwittingly trying to each the same goal—that is to bury our beloved union.

[374] At the Lobby's launch, addresses were given by the San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros and the newly elected president of the Mexican American Political Association, Chavez's eldest son Fernando.

[402] His standard speech at these events covered the problems facing farmworkers, the dangers of pesticides, the alliance of agribusiness and the Republican Party, and his view that boycotts and marches were a better means of achieving change than electoral politics.

[454] Chavez preserved many of his notes, letters, the minutes of meetings, as well as tape recordings of many interviewers, and at the encouragement of Philip P. Mason donated these to the Walter P. Reuther Library, where they are kept.

[450] Chavez utilized a range of tactics drawing on Roman Catholic religion, including vigils, public prayers, a shrine on the back of his station wagon, and references to dead farmworkers as "martyrs".

Nevertheless, through determination, grit, and a dogged will to win, he forged a movement that successfully challenged powerful entrenched economic and political interests and helped thousands of Mexican Americans to new cultural self-awareness.

[432] The historian Nelson Lichtenstein commented that Chavez's UFW oversaw "the largest and most effective boycott [in the United States] since the colonists threw tea into Boston Harbor".

[515] The scholar Steven Lloyd-Moffett argued that after Chavez's death, the "liberal intelligentsia and Chicano activists" came to dominate attempts to define his legacy and that they downplayed his firm commitment to Christianity so as to portray him as being motivated by "a secular ideology of justice and non-violence".

[533] On September 14, 2011, the U.S. Department of the Interior added the 187 acres (76 ha) Nuestra Senora Reina de La Paz ranch to the National Register of Historic Places.

[549] A three-dimensional mural by artist Johanna Poethig, Tiene la lumbre por dentro (He Has the Fire Within Him) (2000) at Sonoma State University, honors Chavez and the Farm Workers Movement.