On this day in vegan history · April 23, 1993
Cesar Chavez Dies Still Calling Nonviolence a Whole-Life Practice
The farmworker organizer who built a union on fasting and nonviolence died in his sleep in a borrowed bed in Arizona, having spent his last years arguing that kindness to animals was the same fight as kindness to people.
The facts
- Died
- April 23, 1993, in San Luis, Arizona
- Age
- 66
- Cause
- Died in his sleep; found by union colleagues the next morning
- Context
- In Arizona to help the UFW defend against a lawsuit from a vegetable producer
Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, died in his sleep on April 23, 1993, at age 66, in San Luis, Arizona, where he was helping the union defend itself against a lawsuit brought by a large vegetable grower. He was found the next morning by colleagues after he failed to come out of his room. Chavez had spent decades weakening his own body on purpose, using multi-week water-only fasts, including a 25-day fast in 1968 and a 36-day 'Fast for Life' in 1988, to draw attention to farmworkers and pesticide poisoning. In his later years he became a vegetarian and began speaking about animal welfare in the same terms he used for labor rights, treating cruelty to animals as one more form of the exploitation he had organized his whole life against.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we (humans) do.
Cesar Chavez, as quoted in Lumen (1986) by G. J. Caton, p. 133
Source: Wikiquote -
We need in a special way to work twice as hard to make all people understand that animals are fellow creatures; that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves.
Cesar Chavez, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from In Defense of Animals, 1992
Source: In Defense of Animals
Why it still matters
Chavez gave the modern vegan movement an early, credible bridge from labor and civil-rights organizing to animal welfare, arguing they were the same nonviolence rather than competing causes.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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