Cesar Chavez (2014) on Netflix
Cesar Chavez organizes California farm workers into the United Farm Workers. The large growers fight the union, and Chavez weighs the campaign against his duties to his wife and children.
- Netflix2.6/5
- IMDb6.4/103,857 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes38%
Trailer
Plot summary
Cesar Chavez works to organize the farm workers of California, roughly 50,000 of them, including braceros, temporary laborers from Mexico who must return home if they stop working. Wages are low and conditions are poor, and the workers face racism and violence from employers and local residents. With Dolores Huerta, Chavez builds a union, the United Farm Workers, and commits it to nonviolence. The owners of the large industrial farms resist, sometimes violently. Chavez's organizing brings him into the Delano grape strike and other campaigns for a living wage and dignity, while at home he is a husband to Helen and a father, pulled between the movement and his family.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cesar Chavez (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Filming the Sonoran grape-field scenes was brutal: dust storms and hordes of insects hit the production, the heat was terrible, and several actors collapsed on set from dehydration.
- Several Hermosillo locations were stand-ins in Chavez: Chinese-restaurant workers were recruited to play the Filipino farmworkers Chavez sought to organize, the city's Art Deco library served as a large farm company's headquarters, and a 40-acre field outside town was a farm near Delano, California.
- Many writers and producers had tried for years to secure the rights to Chavez's life story and failed; screenwriter Keir Pearson negotiated for two years with Chavez's heirs before he and television producer Larry Meli secured them in 2011.
- Although many books, magazine articles and scholarly studies had been written about Cesar Chavez, the film was the first feature made about the labor leader.
- Grape-field scenes were shot in Sonora vineyards, where growers still drape vines over wooden crosses as Californians did in the 1960s, and the production built shacks there to copy the housing of California's 1960s migrant workers.
- John Malkovich was already a producer on Chavez when Diego Luna convinced him to play the abusive grape-grower; he took the role because he admired Luna's previous film and wanted to tell a story about fairness.
- Chavez was only Diego Luna's second film as director and his first in English; he said directing the main actors in English and the extras in Spanish was a struggle.
