"[2] His personally symbolic portraits, public murals, and "funny-grotesque" paintings[3] reflect the multicultural landscape of Los Angeles.

Chavez and his seven siblings were raised in the Maravilla neighborhood in East Los Angeles, which at the time was inhabited by a mixture of working class families, mostly Latino, but also Jewish, Mexican, Armenian, Italian, Russian and Japanese emigres.

[4] Chavez earned his Master of Fine Arts in 1961 at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he met and worked alongside Charles Garabedian, Gordon Rice, Eduardo Carrillo and Maxwell Hendler.

[7] In the mid-1970s, Chavez began painting public murals[8][9] throughout the city of Los Angeles, especially East L.A. where the La Raza political movement was gaining ground.

In 1974, Chavez painted The Path to Knowledge and the False University, a 200-foot mural on the East Los Angeles Community College campus,[12] where he worked as an arts educator and chair of the Chicano Studies department.