In 1952, Chávez met Fred Ross, an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), who was allied with radical Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. There he met and married Helen Fabela in 1948, and together the couple had seven children. After his discharge, he returned to Delano, California, a community in the San Joaquin Valley famous for its table grapes. War ended the suffering of the Depression, and Chávez joined the U.S. Worse, although the Depression led to the creation of new labor laws, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, many of those protections did not apply to farm workers. Chávez’s childhood as a migrant farmworker would forever shape him as he experienced firsthand the injustices of brutally long hours, back-breaking labor, corrupt labor contractors who deducted high rents from workers’ pay, and extremely low wages.

Like thousands of others, his family lost their land during the Great Depression, forcing them to join throngs of itinerant laborers crowding California in search of work.

Use this Narrative with the Art as Protest: Images from the United Farm Workers of America, 1973-1978Primary Source while talking about the various civil rights movements occurring during the 1970s.Ĭésar Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona, in 1927, on the farm his grandparents had settled in the 1880s.

Dolores huerta united farm workers