César Chávez

Chávez picked crops from the age of ten, after his family lost their farm in the Depression. In 1965 he led a grape strike in Delano that became a five-year boycott: at its height some seventeen million Americans stopped buying table grapes, and the growers signed.

He fasted for twenty-five days in 1968 to hold the movement to non-violence when some of its members wanted otherwise. He is buried in the garden of the union's old headquarters in the Tehachapi hills.