Cesario Estrada "Cesar" Chavez (; Latin American Spanish: [ˈtʃaβes]; March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) was an American labor unionist and political activist. Along with Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Ideologically, his worldview combined leftist approaches with Catholic social teaching.
Born in Yuma, Arizona, to a Mexican American family, Chavez began his working life as a manual laborer before spending two years in the US Navy. Relocating to California, where he married, he got involved in the Community Service Organization (CSO), through which he helped laborers register to vote. In 1959, he became the CSO's national director, a position based in Los Angeles. In 1962, he left the CSO to co-found the NFWA, based in Delano, California, through which he launched an insurance scheme, a credit union, and the El Malcriado newspaper for farmworkers. Later that decade, he began organizing strikes among farmworkers, most notably the successful Delano grape strike of 1965–1970. Amid the grape strike, his NFWA merged with Larry Itliong's AWOC to form the UFW in 1967. Influenced by the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, Chavez emphasized direct nonviolent resistance, including picketing and boycotting, to pressure farm owners into granting strikers' demands. He imbued his campaigns with Catholic symbolism, including public processions, Masses, and fasts. He received much support from labor and leftist groups but was monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In the early 1970s, Chavez sought to expand the UFW's influence outside California by opening branches in other states. Viewing illegal immigrants as a major source of strikebreakers, he also pushed a campaign against illegal immigration into the US, which generated violence along the Mexico–United States border and caused schisms with many of the UFW's allies. Interested in cooperatives as a form of organization, he established a remote commune in Keene, California. His increased isolation and emphasis on unrelenting campaigning alienated many California farmworkers who had previously supported him, and by 1973 the UFW had lost most of the contracts and membership it won during the late 1960s. His alliance with California governor Jerry Brown helped ensure the passing of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, although the UFW's campaign to get its measures enshrined in the Constitution of California failed. Influenced by the Synanon religious organization, Chavez re-emphasized communal living and purged perceived opponents. Membership of the UFW dwindled in the 1980s, with Chavez refocusing on anti-pesticide campaigns and moving into real-estate development, generating controversy for his use of non-unionized laborers.
Posthumously, Chavez became both a revered and controversial figure. He became a "folk saint" among Mexican Americans, and an icon for organized labor and leftist groups in the US. His birthday was proclaimed a federal commemorative holiday in 2014 and is a state holiday in multiple states, many places are named after him, and he posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. UFW critics raised concerns about his autocratic control of the union, the purges of those he deemed disloyal, and the personality cult built around him, while farm owners considered him a communist subversive. In 2026, allegations surfaced that he sexually abused Huerta, other women, and minors, resulting in honorary tributes and celebrations being removed, renamed, or canceled.
Cesario Estrada Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, on March 31, 1927. He was named after his paternal grandfather, Cesario Chavez, a Mexican who had crossed into Texas in 1898. Cesario had established a successful wood haulage business near Yuma, and in 1906 bought a farm in the Sonora Desert's North Gila Valley. Cesario had brought his wife Dorotea and eight children with him from Mexico; the youngest, Librado, was Cesar's father.
Librado married Juana Estrada Chavez in the early 1920s. Born in Ascensión, Chihuahua, Mexico, she had crossed into the US with her mother as a baby. They lived in Picacho, California, before moving to Yuma, where Juana worked as a farm laborer and then an assistant to the chancellor of the University of Arizona.
Librado and Juana's first child, Rita, was born in August 1925, with their first son, Cesar, following nearly two years later. Chavez also had three younger siblings. In November 1925, Librado and Juana bought a series of buildings near the family home which included a pool hall, store, and living quarters. They soon fell into debt and were forced to sell these assets. By April 1929, they moved into the galera storeroom of Librado's parental home, then owned by the widowed Dorotea.
Chavez was raised in what his biographer Miriam Pawel called "a typical extended Mexican family"; she noted that they were "not well-off, but they were comfortable, well-clothed, and never hungry". The family spoke Spanish, and he was raised in adherence to the Catholic Church, with his paternal grandmother Dorotea largely overseeing his religious instruction. His mother Juana engaged in forms of folk Catholicism, being a devotee of Santa Eduviges. As a child, Chavez was nicknamed "Manzi" in reference to his fondness for manzanilla tea. To entertain himself, he played handball and listened to boxing matches on the radio. One of five children, he had two sisters, Rita and Vicki, and two brothers, Richard and Librado.
Cesario began attending Laguna Dam School in 1933; there, the speaking of Spanish was forbidden and Cesario was expected to change his name to Cesar. After Dorotea died in July 1937, the Yuma County local government auctioned off her farmstead to cover back taxes, and despite Librado's delaying tactics, the house and land were sold in 1939. This was a seminal experience for Cesar, who regarded it as an injustice against his family, with the banks, lawyers, and Anglo-American power structure as the villains of the incident. Influenced by his Catholic beliefs, he increasingly came to see the poor as a source of moral goodness in society.
The Chavez family joined the growing number of American migrants who were moving to California amid the Great Depression. First working as avocado pickers in Oxnard and then as pea pickers in Pescadero, the family made it to San Jose, where they first lived in a garage in the city's impoverished Mexican district. They moved regularly, and on weekends and holidays, Cesar joined his family in working as an agricultural laborer. In California, he moved schools many times, spending the longest time at Miguel Hidalgo Junior School; here, his grades were generally average, although he excelled at mathematics. At school, he faced ridicule for his poverty, while more broadly, he experienced anti-Latino prejudice from many European-Americans, with many establishments refusing to serve non-white customers. He graduated from junior high in June 1942, after which he left formal education and became a full-time farm laborer.
In 1944, Chavez enlisted in the US Navy, and was sent to Naval Training Center San Diego. In July, he was stationed at the US base in Saipan, and six months later moved to Guam, where he was promoted to the rank of seaman first class. He was then stationed to San Francisco, where he decided to leave the Navy, receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. Relocating to Delano, California, where his family had settled, he returned to working as an agricultural laborer.
In 1947, Chavez joined the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU), which, until its 1947 affiliation with the American Federation of Labor, was the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). (Later, the NFLU became the National Agricultural Workers Union.) That year, he was picketing cotton fields in Corcoran, near Delano, for the NFLU. The union had called a strike against the DiGiorgio grape fields in 1947. As in the STFU's strikes against cotton plantations in Arkansas, strikers formed "caravans" and marched around the perimeter of the DiGiorgio property, asking its workers to join them. Chavez led one of those caravans.