Anyone who drives down California's Highway 99 is familiar with the vast and alien tracts of farmland that constitute our state's richly profitable agricultural industry. Portrayals of farming in popular film in the U.S. usually conjure up bucolic images of red barns, rows of corn, and warm, friendly farming families. However, agriculture in California largely skipped this yeoman farmer stage so ingrained in American mythology, and went straight to large-scale, one-crop agri-business on an industrial scale. Director Diego Luna sets his new film, Cesar Chavez, against the backdrop of this harsh, beautiful, and intimidating landscape.

Cesar Chavez tells the important details of the life of the inspiring hero of labor and social justice for Chicanos. The filmmakers also utilize care and attention to the labor movement and its history in the U.S. to create a detailed portrait of the birth of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union in Delano, Calif.

Farm work in California was a pitchblende of all the worst aspects of unorganized labor: child workers, long hours, starvation wages, and grim armed encampments, with no rest, water, shade, or bathrooms provided to pickers. Carey McWilliams' Factories in the Field, published in 1935, describes the unique labor needs that an agricultural industry largely dominated by fruit cultivation required, and the tactic of the large growers in recruiting waves of workers of different nationalities so as to derail any nascent organization against the brutal conditions. Growers fostered racial animus between the workers, and this combined with their political hegemony in the towns, helped prevent the formation of a farm workers union until Cesar Chavez began his grassroots efforts nearly three decades after the passage of the Wagner Act.

The biopic begins by describing the sea change that the Wagner Act and the NLRB brought to workers during the worst throes of the Great Depression. A green light was given to laborers to organize in nearly every industry-but not for farm workers.

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