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Title
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The Background, Recruitment and Rise of César Chávez to the CSO
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Description
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César Chávez was born in 1927, the second of six children in an extended family of devout Catholics, and grew up on his grandparents’ family farm near Yuma, Arizona. In 1939, during the Depression, the farm was auctioned and sold to cover back taxes. César’s father had been diagnosed with a lung disease requiring a move to a cooler climate, and the family joined the growing number of American migrant workers in California. Unlike sister Rita, who quit school at 12 years of age to work in the fields full time, Césario (César) carried family expectations as the eldest boy and was allowed to attend school while working in the fields weekends and holidays. Eventually, he and his family worked across California from Brawley to Oxnard, Atascadero, Gonzales, King City, Salinas, McFarland, Delano, Wasco, Selma, Kingsburg, and Mendota. The essential injustice and underlying racism the family experienced during those years made a strong impression on César. Despite the numerous interruptions to his education, he graduated from the eighth grade in June 1942 and became a full-time farm laborer until he joined the Navy in 1945.
A Navy veteran by 1947, Chávez returned to working with the family as an agricultural laborer. He joined the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU), picking cotton in Corcoran, near Delano. Cesar and his brother Richard both worked briefly in the lumber yards of Crescent City. However, the distance was too far from the rest of the family in San José, so by the 1950s, their sister Rita encouraged César and Richard to relocate their families to San José. Richard became a successful union carpenter, and César continued working in the fields and local lumber yards when, at 25 years of age, he met Fred Ross, Sr., in 1952.
When Ross had begun to look for local organizers for the CSO, Alicia Hernández offered to introduce him to her friend Helen Chávez and her husband César, who had become active in social justice work through his association with Father McDonnell, pastor of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel. Through Fr. McDonnell, Chávez had learned the principles of nonviolent resistance and been introduced to Catholic teachings that emphasized social justice and challenged economic and social inequalities. With Father Mac, Chávez had visited labor camps and farmworkers living beyond the Eastside.
Fred Ross encouraged Chávez to become a full-time paid organizer for the Community Services Organization (CSO), and he soon began setting up chapters in the Bay Area and other towns across the state. Named executive director of the national CSO in 1959, Chávez moved to Los Angeles to work in the organization's main office. Though the CSO had become a successful advocate for communities of color, Chávez had not given up the idea of working with farmworkers and felt that the CSO was more focused on the problems of urban communities. In 1962 he left the CSO and moved to Delano, California, with his wife, their eight children, brother Richard Chávez, and Dolores Huerta, another CSO colleague from Stockton, in order to establish a union for farm laborers, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA)
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Identifier
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B4SV Exhibit Topic Five: Slide 018
