BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CNS) — Helen Chavez, whose late husband, Cesar, co-founded the United Farm Workers union, died June 6 at a Bakersfield hospital after battling an unspecified infection. She was 88.
Born Jan. 21, 1928, in Brawley, California, to parents who fled Mexico at the time of the Mexican Revolution, Helen Fabela started working in the fields herself at age 7. She met Cesar Chavez when he was working as a migrant in the fields in Delano — the epicenter of early farmworker struggles — and they married there.
At one point at the beginning of the National Farm Workers Association — precursor to the UFW — despite Cesar’s Sunday ditch-digging jobs and Helen’s own work in the fields, there was not enough money to feed them and their family, which eventually numbered eight children. Cesar had to resort to begging the very workers he was trying to organize during the week for food, but they responded positively to his plea for food as well as to his entreaties to join the union.
Cesar and Helen Chavez also co-founded a credit union for National Farm Workers Association members in the early 1960s.
At the time of the California grape boycott in the late 1960s, reporters described Helen as “remarkably stalwart.”
As Cesar’s profile grew through his activism, which included organizing, marches, picketing, boycotts and fasts, Helen stayed out of the spotlight to support her husband in his cause and to raise their children.
One of the relatively few times she was in the spotlight was at a 1968 outdoor Easter Mass in Delano during which Cesar ended his first fast, a 25-day water-only fast to bring attention to the grape boycott and the situation of the workers in the fields. At the Mass, celebrated in Spanish and attended by 5,000 farmworkers, Helen and Cesar flanked Robert F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, all of whom sat in front of the altar. Two days later, Kennedy announced his decision to enter the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
After her husband’s death in 1993, Chavez rarely emerged from the shadows.
In 1994, Chavez, her daughter Linda, and Linda’s husband, Arturo Rodriguez — who succeeded Cesar Chavez as UFW president — came to Washington for a tribute to Cesar at the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering. During a memorial Mass for Cesar, Helen was honored for her behind-the-scenes work with her husband.
The state of California recognized the first state holiday honoring Cesar Chavez in 2001, which falls on March 30 each year. That year, Helen took part in a Mass celebrated in Cesar’s memory at St. Vincent Church in Los Angeles, with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles celebrating.
In 2012, Helen took part in a ceremony dedicating a monument to her husband at the UFW’s headquarters in Keene attended by President Barack Obama and Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the UFW with Cesar Chavez.
Helen was seen in the 1994 documentary “The Fight in the Fields,” and she was portrayed by America Ferrara in the 2014 movie “Cesar Chavez.”
Linda Chavez Rodriguez died in 2000. Helen Chavez is survived by seven children, 31 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
Funeral details had not yet been released.