César Estrada Chávez was born to the children of Mexican immigrants in a small Arizona town in 1927. He experienced discrimination from an early age. In school his teachers punished him for speaking Spanish, and his classmates teased him because of his ethnicity. At age ten he moved with his family to California, where they and hundreds of thousands of others sought work as migrant laborers. After serving in the U.S. Navy for two years during World War II, Chávez returned to California. In 1952 he began working for the Community Service Organization, where he gained his first experiences working with striking agricultural workers. In 1962 he left the Community Service Organization and formed the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA).