Cesar Chavez’s widow Helen Chavez dies in California at 88

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – Helen Chavez, widow of civil rights and labour leader Cesar Chavez, has died at age 88.

A family statement released through the United Farm Workers says Helen Chavez died Monday at a hospital in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by many of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. No cause of death was given.

Born in the town of Brawley in the California desert near the Mexico border, she met Cesar Chavez in the mid-1940s and married him in 1948. In the early 1960s, the couple left a comfortable middle-class existence in East Los Angeles to organize farm workers in California’s Central Valley.

They had eight children, and Helen Chavez had to care for them alone for long stretches while he was travelling.

Cesar Chavez died in Arizona in 1993.