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- Born in Yuma, Arizona, to migrant farmworkers, César Chávez became an agricultural laborer as a child. He received a limited education, having dropped out of school in the seventh grade to work in the fields full-time. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and returned to work in the fields at the end of the war. In 1952 he joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), encouraging Mexican Americans to register to vote, helping farmworkers with welfare forms, and petitioning for fair working conditions for migrant workers. In 1958 he was named general director of the CSO in California and Arizona. Four years later he founded the National Farm Workers Association, which was chartered as the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA) by the AFL­CIO in 1966. Chávez led many strikes and boycotts on behalf of farmworkers in the grape industry. He helped secure passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, and he remained the leader of the UFWA until his death in 1993.
