Dramatizes the early years of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the grassroots movement that fought brutal working conditions faced by Mexican and Filipino farmworkers in California. Directed by Diego Luna, it shows how the UFW built power through deep community organizing, disciplined nonviolence, and national—and eventually international—solidarity.

The film highlights the essential leadership of Dolores Huerta, whose strategic negotiating, relentless organizing, and public advocacy shaped the union’s most important breakthroughs, as well as Helen Chavez, whose steady behind-the-scenes work and sacrifices kept the movement going through long strikes and financial strain. Chavez’s fasts and the movement’s nonviolent discipline helped maintain unity as growers used violence, strikebreakers, and political allies to crush the union.

When President Nixon intervened on behalf of growers by sending non-union grapes to Europe on military planes, Chavez and Huerta expanded the boycott overseas. Their direct organizing with European unions and consumers proved decisive, turning global opinion against the growers. By 1970, after five years of marches, strikes, fasts, and the international grape boycott, the UFW won contracts that secured higher wages, safer conditions, health benefits, and protections from pesticide exposure—one of the major labor victories of the era.

Today, the UFW’s legacy continues in campaigns for overtime protections, heat safety, immigrant-worker rights, and pesticide regulation. Many recent gains in California trace directly back to the model of organizing, moral pressure, and worker leadership that the film portrays.