My dissertation offers an ethical, religious, and legal analysis of the United Farmworkers and its leadership, including such figures as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong. UFW organizing and activism are responses to exploitation, but it isn't clear how exploitation should be defined, how this particular case of exploitation came about, who bears what forms of responsibility for it, and how UFW actions should be understood and assessed. I analyze the relationships and institutions involved in the exploitation of farmworkers in order to determine responsibility for their disadvantaged position and what was owed to them. Concluding that agribusiness corporations in conjunction with government institutions actively sought to enable owners' exploitation of workers, I argue that obligations towards the workers were violated and therefore certain forms of resistance were justified. Whether or not violent resistance is justified is the threshold question. The history of labor movements is replete with violence. Social-contract theory rules such violence out of bounds, vesting in the state a monopoly on justified violence. I argue that the ideal presented by social-contract theory doesn't account for the historical exclusion and oppression of Mexican Americans and therefore doesn't bind them. Looking instead to Cesar Chavez and his appeals to Christian and Gandhian ideals, I argue for an alternative justification for non-violent direct action like strikes, boycotts, and marches. The coerciveness of direct action, however, runs afoul of free-market economic theory which holds that such actions are a source of market distortion. Social ethicists have also criticized the philosophies and theologies of non-violence as unable to reconcile non-violence with coercion. I attempt to provide a justification for non-violent direct action that is free of free-market assumptions and responsive to the criticisms of the potential violence of non-violent direct action.