Cesar Chavez: A Story of Overcoming Hardship and Achieving Victory
Learn about Cesar Chavez's journey from humble beginnings in the fields of California to becoming a prominent figure in the fight for labor rights. Discover how he overcame poverty and discrimination to bring about positive change for migrant workers through his activism and leadership.
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Video Transcript
We moved to California and it's, hey, you gotta go and hustle for your life.
Otherwise you don't survive. So it was hard. I mean it was very hard at the beginning.
They were called fruit traps. Mostly minorities, they flooded the fields in desperate search of work.
The Chavez family was not prepared for the humiliation and poverty of migrant life.
We lived under a tent.
We were lucky or not, we lived under a tree.
We would just put our under a tree there, you know, that's where we lived.
And because the growers didn't have houses for the people that worked.
Caesar watched as his father was turned away from stores and restaurants that would not
serve Mexican-Americans.
He saw his mother grow old in the fields.
And while the family harvested the food that fed others, they often went hungry.
He talked about growing up.
being a young man without any skills,
and really without much hope for the future.
And he talked about that feeling of uselessness,
you know, what am I gonna be?
At 17, he joined the Navy and served in the South Pacific.
After the war, Caesar returned to California
and discovered something far more interesting to follow
than the crocs, the big bands.
He sported a zoot suit, took up smoking,
and gained a reputation as a ladies' man
until he met Helen Fabella.
My mother was from Delano.
She was working at a gas station,
a people's market which is still there in Delano.
And my dad came in for gas
and that's when they first started meeting.
Now, from there, there's variations of the story.
My father swears that my mother used to give him free gas
so that he would take her out,
but she denies it to this day.
Helen and Cesar were married in 1948
and moved to a rough neighborhood
on the east side of San Jose.
With no other possibilities, Cesar went back to work in the fields.
He found himself in the same bleak conditions he had hoped to leave behind.
Cesar and I used to talk about this, that something had to be done about the situation of the Mexican-American.
You know, that we were in bad shape. We had no political power.
We had no voice, in other words. And somebody had to do something about this.
Cesar knew something had to be done, but he didn't know where to begin.
until he met Fred Ross.
We were a little skeptical about him, you know,
because any time that a white person came to us
is because he wanted to sell us something,
insurance or family portrait or a saint,
you know, statue of a saint or something like that, you know.
Fred Ross was to change Cesar's life forever.
He was working for the Community Service Organization,
