Cesar Chavez: He Was Born Here

On March thirty-first, nineteen twenty-seven, Cesario Estrada Chavez was born on a small family farm outside Yuma, Arizona, the second of five children. His family had been in the Southwest for two generations. His grandmother had come from Mexico. His father had homesteaded the land. The family grew vegetables and kept a small grocery store. For the first twelve years of his life, the family had a place.

In nineteen thirty-nine, the Depression took it. Yuma County foreclosed on the property for back taxes. Cesar was twelve years old. What came next was a childhood of migrant farm labor moving between Arizona and California, following whatever crop was in season. He attended more than thirty schools in eight years and never finished eighth grade. He slept in labor camps, picked cotton in Arizona, worked lettuce fields in California, lived the seasonal rhythms of a workforce that had no legal protections and no stable address from which to organize.

He later said that this biography was not background to his work. It was the work.

Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association in nineteen sixty-two in Delano, California, which became the United Farm Workers of America. He organized grape and lettuce boycotts that drew national attention. He used hunger strikes as a public witness to conditions that few Americans understood. The conditions he was describing were the conditions he had lived in those Arizona cotton fields as a child.

The Cesar E. Chavez National Monument is at the United Farm Workers headquarters in La Paz, California, where he lived and worked in his later years. His Arizona birthplace in Yuma carries a state historic site designation. The story that formed the movement started in this desert, on a farm that no longer exists, in a county where the family lost everything when he was ten years old.