Cesar chavez biography migrant workers strike

Early Life and Work as a Community Organizer

Cesar Estrada Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, on March 31, 1927. In the late 1930s, after losing their homestead to foreclosure, he and his family joined more than 300,000 people who migrated to California during the Great Depression and became migrant farm workers.

Chavez dropped out of school after eighth grade and began working in the fields full time.

In 1946, he joined the U.S. Navy, serving for two years in a segregated unit. After his service was over, he returned to farmwork and married Helen Fabela, with whom he would eventually have eight children (and later, 31 grandchildren).

In 1952, Chavez was working at a lumberyard in San Jose when he became a grassroots organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group.

Over the next decade, he worked to register new voters and fight racial and economic discrimination, and rose to