Who was Cesar Chavez — and who will he become?

Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican-American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument.