Cesar Chavez was an American labor leader and civil rights activist. Along with Dolores Huerta, 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) union. Ideologically, his worldview combined left-wing politics with Catholic social teachings.

Cesario Estrada Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona on March 31, 1927. He was named for 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, she had crossed into the U.S. 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. In November 1925, Librado and Juana bought a series of buildings near to the family home which included a pool hall, store, and living quarters. They soon fell into debt and were forced to sell these assets, in April 1929 moving into the galera storeroom of Librado's parental home, then owned by the widowed Dorotea.

When Chavez returned home from his service in the military in 1948, he married his high school sweetheart, Helen Fabela. The couple moved to San Jose, California. With his wife, he had eight children: Fernando (b.1949), Sylvia (b.1950), Linda (b.1951), Eloise (b.1952), Anna (b.1953), Paul (b.1957), Elizabeth (b.1958), and Anthony (b.1958). Helen avoided the limelight, a trait which Chavez admired. While he led the union, she focused on raising the children, cooking, and housekeeping. During the latter part of the 1970s, his infidelity with a range of women became common knowledge among senior UFW figures, who kept this knowledge quiet so as not to damage his reputation as a devoted Catholic family man. After Helen read a love letter written to Chavez by another woman, she temporarily left La Paz and lived with one of her daughters in Delano. Chavez's children resented the union and displayed little interest in it, although most ended up working for it. Of these children, Chavez's eldest son, Fernando, was the only one to graduate college; Chavez's relationship with Fernando was strained, as he was frustrated with what he saw as his son's interest in becoming middle-class.