ABSTRACT
Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was born in Yuma, Arizona, the second of five children in a close-knit, Mexican-American family. His parents owned a small farm which-due to unpaid bills in the Great Depression-was lost when Chavez was twelve years old. Compelled to become migrant farm workers, the family faced conditions in many ways similar to those movingly documented in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, but in important ways the conditions were different-especially owing to the deeply rooted racism facing Mexican-Americans (Chicanos), Filipinos, and other people of color working in the Western and West Coast fields, vineyards, and orchards. As one biographer notes, however, an awareness of class developed as “Chavez quickly learned that Chicano labor contractors and Japanese growers exploited migrants as readily as did Anglo employers.”
