Pallbearers carry Rufino Contreras' casket through Calexico, Calif., on Feb. 14, 1979, leading a crowd of 7,000 mourners who walked three miles to the cemetery. Contreras had been gunned down four days earlier when he and others went into the fields to try to persuade strike-breakers to stop working.

Gov. Jerry Brown, far left, sits next to UFW leader Cesar Chavez at the graveside service for slain farmworker Rufino Contreras. Union co-founder Dolores Huerta is at far right in this 1979 photo.

Cesar Chavez and his wife Helen attend Rufino Contreras' funeral in 1979. Recriminations over the the farmworker's killing heightened tensions within the UFW leadership. Months later, Chavez pressed for a boycott and an end to the strike, but workers resisted and eventually won some of the best contracts in the union's history. In 1982, the UFW took in $2.9 million in dues, the most ever.

UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta dries the tears of Rosa Maximina Contreras at her husband's funeral. Rufino Contreras was killed during what has proved to be the UFW's last major strike.

Gilbert Padilla, shown at a funeral for a former UFW colleague in 2005, resigned as the union's secretary/treasurer in 1980, disturbed by changes in his longtime friend Cesar Chavez. "I knew Cesar was the man ... but I didn't think the movement belonged to him," said Padilla. "I thought it belonged to the workers."

Strikers await UFW leader Cesar Chavez's arrival in a field near El Centro, Calif., on Feb. 1, 1979. The strike ultimately divided UFW leaders when Chavez pushed for a boycott.

The strain of a hectic job shows in the face of UFW leader Cesar Chavez at the end of a long day in March 1979.

Monterey County sheriff's deputies struggle to keep UFW pickets out of a cauliflower field near Salinas, Calif., on Feb. 22, 1979. Two deputies were injured, and several of the picketers were arrested.

Dolores Huerta, 75, visiting the Cesar Chavez memorial, has started her own foundation and is no longer involved with the union. Huerta says Chavez, sometimes misunderstood, was fighting to save the organization.

Consuelo Nuño started as a grape picker at 15 in Delano, Calif. Now 63, she continues to work in a vineyard six days a week. She got a raise to $7 an hour last summer, and the bonus for each box picked is 2 cents more than in 1965. Around town, people still ask when her brother, Eliseo Medina, is coming back.

After working her regular Saturday shift picking table grapes, Consuelo Nuño, 63, greets her brother Eliseo Medina at an event marking the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Delano grape boycott. The children of a Mexican immigrant farmworker both embraced the UFW principles of decades past.

Eliseo Medina, left, and Dolores Huerta at a 1971 march in Chicago.

In 1976, Eliseo Medina works in an office with a picture of Emiliano Zapata, a central figure in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, hanging on the wall.