Cesar Chavez organized the most successful farmworker movement in American history, led the grape boycott that changed how America thought about the people who picked its food, and became a civil rights icon whose birthday is a state holiday. But the later years of his leadership tell a more complicated story — one of authoritarian control, loyalty purges, and an organization that increasingly resembled the very power structures Chavez had spent his life fighting.

This episode traces Chavez from his migrant childhood through the Delano grape strike, the national boycott victories, and the troubling final chapter that forced a reckoning with the gap between the icon and the man.

• Chavez’s migrant farmworker childhood and his early organizing with the Community Service Organization
• The founding of the National Farm Workers Association and the Delano grape strike
• The national grape boycott and the political victories that made Chavez a civil rights icon
• The loyalty purges, the Synanon influence, and the authoritarian turn of Chavez’s later years