“Richard Chavez, brother of Cesar Chavez, and a founder of the farmworkers movement, passed away yesterday (July 27) from complications following surgery in Bakersfield, CA. Richard never stopped his lifelong campaign to bring respect and justice for those who pick the crops that feed this nation, and the world. A great man.” – Enrique Morones, Border Angels
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“Michelle and I were saddened to learn of the passing of Richard Estrada Chavez yesterday. Richard spent his life in the service of others alongside his brother Cesar and his wife, Dolores Huerta, co-founders of the United Farm Workers. It was Richard who designed the UFW’s iconic eagle, a symbol of hope that has helped carry the struggle for the rights of farm workers forward for almost five decades.
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Our thoughts and prayers are with Richard’s family and loved ones.” – President Barack Obama.
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“Richard Estrada Chávez was a true and profound inspiration to a generation of labor and civil rights activists, including me. His role in the farm worker struggle in the fields taught thousands of us, motivated and hungry for justice, how to organize and work for a better community. The original ‘Yes, We Can!’ – ‘Sí Se Puede!’ – was born from this struggle, and Richard was at the forefront. I was fortunate to call him a mentor and a friend. We marched together in Yuma, San Luis, and in Tucson, and he was always motivating, helping and encouraging the rest of us. Richard Chávez was a tremendous advocate for working Americans and a real icon to many of us. He was true salt of the earth. I will miss him.” – Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva
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“There are people who touch the lives of others inreal and unique ways and no one knows it.These ‘angels on earth’ do big and small things everyday on behalf of their fellow man in quiet, unassuming ways. Most of their work goes unnoticed — but their impact is felt by countless people, sometimes for generations.When they leave this world, we mourn our loss and pray that someone else picks up their cause, fills the tremendous gap their passing leaves, and carries on their work.
“Richard Estrada Chavez was one of those angels.” – Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis
Remembering Richard Chavez:
Richard Chavez, 81, Cesar’s younger brother, helped build the UFW from its earliest days.
They grew up during the Depression, inseparable and as close as brothers can be on their small family homestead in the North Gila River Valley outside Yuma, Ariz. When the family lost the farm, they became migrant farm workers and labored beside each other as children in California’s fields, orchards and vineyards in the 1930s and 1940s. By the early 1960s, Richard Chavez, then a journeymen carpenter, was dedicating most of his free time after work and on weekends helping his brother, Cesar Chavez, organize what would become the United Farm Workers of America.
Richard Chavez spent the next three decades working full time with the farm worker movement. He suddenly passed away at 81, of complications from surgery in a Bakersfield hospital on Wednesday, July 27, 2011.
He designed the stylized black Aztec eagle that later became the union’s world-renowned symbol in 1962. The next year, Cesar convinced Richard to put up his house as collateral for a loan to start a credit union for farm workers. In 1966, Richard gave up carpentry to dedicate all of his time to the movement, earning $5 a week like Cesar and other movement staff. He was the first full time staff person for the non-profit organization that is now the Cesar Chavez Foundation, providing extensive social services to farm workers.
Richard was born in 1929, two years after his brother, Cesar, on the family homestead near Yuma. The two brothers left farm labor in 1949, spending a year working together in lumber mills around Crescent City, Calif. In 1950, Richard moved back to San Jose, where in 1951 he entered the carpenters union apprenticeship program. He worked as a framer building suburban housing tracks before moving to Delano. There he worked on both commercial and residential projects, including schools and freeway overpasses. Richard began his activism with Cesar in the Community Service Organization, then the most effective Latino civil rights group in California, in 1952, and was president of the Delano CSO chapter, which he also helped form.
His varied duties with the UFW over the years included long stretches organizing the farm workers’ successful boycotts of California table grapes and other products in New York and Detroit during the 1960s and ’70s. He was in charge of administrating union contracts in 1970, and later negotiated UFW agreements and oversaw union bargaining. Richard was first elected to the UFW executive board in 1973. In the ’60s and ’70s, he also oversaw construction and helped build most of the major structures on the farm workers’ “Forty Acres” complex outside Delano, including its coop gas station, union office and hall, and health clinic.
Richard retired from the union in 1983, but always remained very active with the movement, fulfilling public speaking engagements and serving as an active board member of both the Cesar Chavez Foundation and Dolores Huerta Foundation. He also worked building and rehabilitating multi- and single-family housing, including affordable housing projects for the Chavez foundation, in the 1980s. He obtained his state contractors license and built a large housing community in Tehachapi and custom homes in Los Angeles during the 1990s. A dedicated researcher of his family’s history, Richard was the driving force behind a two-day Chavez family reunion that in October 2010 gathered more than 300 family members from across the nation and around the world at the National Chavez Center at Keene, Calif., where his brother is buried.
Chavez foundation President Paul F. Chavez and UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez expressed shock and condolences to all members of Richard Chavez’s family.
Richard had six children with his first wife, Sally Chavez: Richard Jr (who preceded him in death), Frederico, Dorothy, Rebecca, Susana and Guadalupe. He had four children with his long-time partner, Dolores Huerta: Juana, Ricky, Maria Elena and Camilia.