1948 
Chavez joins an automobile caravan of support for a strike against the mammoth DiGiorgio Fruit Company by the National Farm Labor Union, led by Ernesto Galarza. The union collaborates with Hollywood unions to make a documentary about the strike, Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, but is ultimately bankrupted when the Company successfully sues for libel and the film is banned.  

1952—1962 
Chavez becomes a community organizer in San Jose, near what is becoming Silicon Valley. At the end of this period, he returns to Delano and, along with Dolores Huerta and others, founds the National Farm Worker Association, the immediate precursor to the UFW. 

During the same years, Lucas reads comic books and ultimately tinkers with cameras and cars on his family’s walnut farm.

1963 

A teenage Lucas begins to frequent bohemian San Francisco, including counter-cultural film screenings at City Lights Bookstore and San Francisco State. The following year, after two years at Modesto Junior College, he transfers to USC, where he studies film. 

1965
The Delano grape strike begins with farm workers demanding they be paid the federal minimum wage. It lasts five years and results in agreements with major growers. 

1966 
Farm workers walk three hundred miles north from Delano, through Modesto, to the state capitol in Sacramento as part of a pilgrimage that ends on Easter Sunday. Seemingly overnight Chavez becomes a huge media celebrity and the first documentary about the UFW, Huelga, is produced and broadcast on public TV.

In the same year Lucas returns to USC as a graduate film student and begins making short experimental films.

1967 
Striking farm workers and supporters begin a national boycott of California table grapes. The pro-UFW documentary Decision at Delano is released and plays on college campuses and in public schools. 

Lucas completes several student films including The Emperor, which is about an LA radio disc jockey who, at one point, delivers an ad for the United Fruit Company that leads to a surreal scene in which two Latino characters, “Rodriguez” and “Dominguez,” prepare to execute a third man in a cornfield. Rodriguez is dressed as Che Guevara, while Dominguez is dressed like Pancho Villa.  

1968 
In the face of suggestions from some strikers that the union consider adopting violent tactics, Chavez rededicates the movement to nonviolence by fasting for twenty five days. When he finally breaks his fast he is joined by Robert Kennedy, who hands him a piece of bread, resulting in some of the most iconic visual images of the 1960s. 

1969 
Francis Ford Coppola founds the production company American Zoetrope in San Francisco. Imagined as an alternative to the Hollywood studios, this film making commune is where Lucas will do post production work on his first feature film, THX 1138.  

1970 
Chavez is jailed for fourteen days in Salinas, California, for refusing to obey a court order to end a boycott, an incident that is widely reported in the media. He is visited in his cell by Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy. While leaving, Kennedy is surrounded and physically threatened by opponents of the boycott, including a group from the local John Birch Society—all captured for broadcast on the national evening TV news. At the same time, the growers and their allies, the Teamsters, employ thugs to menace and beat picketers and their supporters. Released after winning an appeal, Chavez tells NBC that the prison was a “disgrace” that reminded him of farm-labor camps. 

1971 
Lucas releases THX 1138, a futuristic drama about a white man named THX who rebels against a totalitarian society and ultimately escapes from one of its prisons. Lucas says it is about situations where people are “in cages with open doors” and that its theme is “the importance of self and being able to step out of whatever you’re in and move forward rather than being stuck in your little rut.”  

In June, the UFW establishes a film department and begins plans to build its own film and video-production facilities. They also help produce the film Nosotros Venceremos (We Shall Overcome) about the Delano grape strike, the march to Sacramento, Chavez’s first fast and the union’s first victorious contracts.

1972 
Chavez once again fasts for twenty-five days in Phoenix, Arizona in opposition to an Arizona law that effectively prevents farm workers from organizing, striking, and boycotting. During the fast he utters the now famous phrase “si se puede” (yes it can be done), which Huerta takes up as a rallying slogan in the concurrent protests.  

1973 
The UFW releases two films, Si Se Puede and Fighting for Our Lives. The sound for FFOL is mixed at American Zoetrope and the film includes dramatic footage of police beating farm workers in scenes that echo images from THX 1138. The UFW also launches a highly publicized boycott of the Gallo Wine Corporation of Modesto. 

Lucas releases American Graffiti, a nostalgic film about white teens cruising the streets of Modesto in 1962, the year Chavez and Huerta established their first union in the Central Valley. Lucas says that the film celebrates “all that hokey stuff about being a good neighbor, and the American spirit” and that the heroes of both THX 1138 and AG show that “anybody who wants to do anything can do it. It’s an old hokey American point of view, but I’ve sort of discovered that it’s true.”

1975 
In order to pressure Gallo to come to the bargaining table, a few thousand UFW members march from San Francisco to Modesto. By the time they arrive, they have been joined by over  fifteen thousand people. The march is widely covered in the media, including the national TV news, and helps to build support for passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA), which establishes the right of farm workers to engage in collective bargaining.  

Lucas founds Industrial Light and Magic and writes the first draft of the Star Wars trilogy.