But none of these figures is more emblematic than Chavez. Rumors of a full-length biography surface and then disappear. Very few of his countless speeches have been transcribed, and his occasional writings remain scattered, lost in remote, often inaccessible corners of libraries. Why has no one published a Portable Cesar Chavez? Are his politics still too dangerous? Or are they simply irrelevant?
Chavez came from a humble background. He was born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927, and his family lived on a 160-acre farm not far from town. His grandfather was from Hacienda del Carmen, in Chihuahua, Mexico. He had a slave-like life under authoritarian landowners close to dictator Porfirio Diaz. He was rebellious. The fate of those workers unwilling to cooperate was the draft. But Papa Chayo ran away and crossed the border in El Paso, Texas, eventually moving to the North Gila Valley along the Colorado River. Chavez never quite spelled out his relationship with Mexico, but its clear that it wasn’t colored by nostalgia. Arizona was his home. His father was a businessman. The second of five children and his dad’s right hand, Chavez made himself useful with the crops, chopped wood, and helped with the animals. As he recounted his childhood in the early 1970s, it was a life under pressure from heavy taxes and hard work. Parents and siblings were close. But things turned for the worse when Chavez’s father lost his holdings during the Depression.
Like many other families, the Chavezes eventually moved to California in search of better opportunities, only to find jobs picking cotton, grapes, and carrots, following the sun and the season from one migrant camp to another. Chavez never finished high school. Segregation was a fixture in the landscape. “We went this one time to a diner,” he once recalled. “There was a sign on the door ‘White Trade Only’ but we went anyway. We had heard that they had these big hamburgers, and we wanted one. There was a blond, blue-eyed girl behind the counter, a beauty. She asked what we wanted—real tough you know?—and when we ordered a hamburger, she said, ‘We don’t sell to Mexicans,’ and she laughed when she said it. She enjoyed doing that, laughing at us. We went out, but I was real mad. Enraged. It had to do with my manhood.”
The education he got was unstable because of the itinerant life that field labor carried with it. He once said he attended some sixty-five elementary schools, some “for a day, a week, or a few months.” At the age of nineteen, he joined the Agricultural Workers’ Union. The Union existed in name only—the organizing drive to create it was unsuccessful—but the struggle gave him a taste of the challenges ahead. After a couple of years in the Navy during World War II, Chavez returned to California, where he married Helen, whom he met in Delano—her parents had come from Mexico and one of them had fought in the revolution of 1910—and with whom he eventually had eight children. He returned to the migrant’s life but also found the time to read about historical figures. It was around 1952 that he met and was inspired by the work of organizer Fred Ross, a leader of the Community Services Organization, whom he met in 1952 and who was supported by the Chicago-based Saul Alinsky. Ross and Alinsky channeled important ideas and concepts to Chavez, from which he developed his own philosophy of struggle. Many had already tried to organize the Mexican migrant workers to improve their miserable working conditions. But it took Chavez’s charisma—su simpatía—to move mountains. By the time he was thirty-three, he was organizing families in the grape fields and persuading growers to increase wages. His strategy was simple: straight talk and honesty. If he was to become a spokesman for the workers, he would also be a model for them. And role models require commitment and sacrifice.
The National Farm Workers Union was created in 1962, with Chavez as its president. It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and U.S.—Latin American relations were in peril. The organization grew quickly and changed its name a few times in the 1960s before christening itself the United Farm Workers. Chavez solidified the organization’s Chicano base, opened up membership to the Filipino community, and forged links with other like-minded groups, most notably the small community of black farm workers. By the midsixties, he had become a beloved folk hero to the poor and to the boisterous student movement, and public enemy number one to conservative California businessmen and politicians—especially Governor Ronald Reagan. Unlike many other leaders of the Civil Rights era, Chavez combined activism with environmentalism—a combination that would make him a darling of the contemporary environmentalist movement, if only they cared. His struggle to improve labor conditions was also a fight against pesticides.
It has often been said that Chavez wasn’t a rhetorician: unlike Martin Luther King Jr. or Julian Bond, Chavez had little talent for highbrow oratory. Still, he had an astonishing ability to redefine audiences, to make them act in a different way. He had an inspired message, a clear vision of his place in history, faithful listeners to whom he gave a sense of shared history. With the listeners he embarked on a crusade, idealistic yet practical, that attempted to redefine labor relations in America. He lived life spontaneously, and he responded to every occasion with speeches that were neither preconceived nor sophisticated. Yet he was eloquent, precisely because his improvisational, pragmatic mind always found what was needed. “[You] are looking for a miracle, a leader who will do everything for us,” he once said. “It doesn’t happen. People have to do the work.” Elsewhere, he said: “Nothing changes until the individual changes.” And indeed, Chavez was an astonishing teacher, a true role model of the kind that comes along only once in a generation.
Chavez’s strategic approach to leadership was symbolized by his confrontation with the Teamsters. The Teamsters and the UFW had forged an uneasy peace: in 1970, they signed a pact that gave Chavez jurisdiction over the fields, while the teamsters had control over the packing sheds. But in 1973, when Chavez was at the height of his powers, the liaison collapsed: the teamsters signed a contract with growers for lower wages in the field. It was a major blow to the Chicano leader; his support fell precipitously, from some fifty thousand followers to fewer than fifteen thousand. Suddenly, Chavez’s simple, honest speeches seemed empty. There was talk of financial mismanagement; conventional wisdom held that the UFW was finished. Chavez himself was losing hope—he referred to those years as “the worst of our times.” But he was nothing if not determined. The smaller UFW continued to march, and the grape boycott began to make an impact. Within a few years, Jerry Brown was the progressive governor of California, and Chavez was again a hero.
Chavez’s patient heroism struck a chord in America, a nation that loves underdogs. He once received a telegram from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: “As brothers in the fight for equality,” it read in part, “I extend the hands of fellowship and good will and wish continuing success to you and your members. . . . We are together with you in spirit and in determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized.” But Chavez’s heroism did not win him much of a following in Mexico, where militancy of any sort makes the government nervous. Of course, Mexicans love revolutionaries, and there were those among the left-wing intelligentsia who idolized Chavez. They saw him as a guerrilla leader on the order of Emiliano Zapata, a man of the people, a prophet—North America’s Mahatma Gandhi. Yet most Mexicans—especially those in the middle and upper classes—never thought much about Chavez; the UFW was simply irrelevant, a footnote in the history books. No attempt was made to reclaim him as a Mexican. Chavez was a leader of the Chicano movement of the 1960s, the first sustained bout of Hispanic activism in American history, but Mexicans have never really identified with Chicanos. Chicanos are traitors: they are the Mexicans who left and never looked back, the ones who put themselves, their ambitions, before everyone else. This attitude toward Chicanos is hypocritical—Mexico’s economy depends heavily on its emigrants. Where would the country be without that endless flow of precious U.S. dollars?
Why didn’t we embrace him? It wasn’t just apathy: the rise of Chavez on the world stage coincided with the rise of the Mexican counterculture—and the government’s fumbling yet brutal attempts to subdue
it. In 1968 thousands of students were massacred in Tlatelolco Square. The American civil rights movements, black and brown, received an icy reception from official Mexico. As for the Mexican people, our attention was focused locally, on the events that were tearing our own country apart.
It was only in my early twenties, after I came to the United States, that I began to understand Chavez’s urge to change the world. In streets and public schools along the Southwest, his name was ubiquitous: a legend, a myth. I wanted to get to know him, to recognize the scope and nature of his revolution. I read everything about him I could find. Sometimes, I saw myself in the pages, and sometimes I found myself overwhelmed by a sense of detachment. An outsider looking in, a north-bound Spanish-speaking Caucasian: Could I see myself reflected in Chavez’s eyes? Or was he an icon for another Mexico, another me? Why hadn’t I learned more about him in school?
I was glad to find that the story of Chavez and La Causa, as his movement became known, had been chronicled dozens of times, by any number of interpreters. Many of these books felt disjoined, though, even apathetic. Several authors scrutinized the Chicano leader with academic tools that turned him into an artifact. Then there was John Gregory Dunne’s Delano: Story of the California Grape Strike, a highly informed if somewhat detached portrait; Jacques E. Levy’s pastiche of memories and anecdotes, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa; and Richard B. Taylor’s mesmerizing Chavez and the Farm Workers. But the book that brought Chavez home to me, the one that allowed me to share his dreams, was Peter Matthiessen’s Sal Si Puedes—an honest, lucid picture of the internal and external upheaval that marked the Chicano leader in his most influential years. In later accounts of La Causa, Matthiessen’s journalistic portrait is held in high esteem: panoramic yet finely detailed, knowing and elegant. Nat Hentoff said the book offered a view of a battlefield where the fight is “not only for the agricultural workers but for the redemption of [the whole] country.”
Lately I reread Sal Si Puedes and felt a sense of exhilaration. The book is a kind of aleph that allows the Chicano movement to come alive again, and it gives Chavez’s message a much-needed urgency. Somewhere in its early pages Matthiessen admits that he knew he would be impressed by Chavez, but he didn’t foresee how startling their encounter would prove to be. After a few weeks in his company, Matthiessen realized the organizer was also organizing him. The author has the same feelings the reader does: first admiration, then awe.
It was the summer of 1968 when Matthiessen first visited Chavez. They were the same age: forty-one. Matthiessen lived in New York City, and he was introduced to Chavez by a common friend, Ann Israel, who had been helping to organize East Coast farm workers. At one point, Israel asked Matthiessen to copyedit an advertisement about pesticides: not only what they did to crops, but also what they did to the people who worked in the fields. The ad was for the New York Times, and Israel wanted to make sure the English was perfect; she was very pleased with Matthiessen when she saw his draft. They struck up a friendship, and one day, she mentioned Cesar Chavez. Matthiessen said he was a great admirer, so Israel took him to Delano, California, where Matthiessen met the Chicano leader. Chavez’s grace and intelligence were seductive. It turned out that both men had been in the army around the same time. They shared many passions, including boxing; they both favored Sugar Ray Leonard. Matthiessen would later write a description of Chavez that has become a landmark:
The man who has threatened California has an Indian’s bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open smile that is shy and friendly; at moments he is beautiful, like a dark seraph. He is five feet six inches tall, and since his twenty-five-day fast the previous winter, has weighed no more than one hundred and fifty pounds. Yet the word “slight” does not properly describe him. There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted, an effect of density; at the same time, he walks as lightly as a fox. One feels immediately that this man does not stumble, and that to get where he is going he will walk all day.
Upon his return to New York, Matthiessen got in touch with William Shawn, the editor at the New Yorker, and suggested a profile on Chavez. Shawn had sponsored Matthiessen’s earlier trips to South America and Alaska; he was receptive to the idea. Matthiessen returned to California, this time to Sal Si Puedes, the San Jose barrio where Chavez lived and where his career as a union organizer took off. The result was a two-part article, published on June 21 and 28, 1969. It was one of the first pieces on social justice ever to appear in the New Yorker and one of the first articles in a national magazine about Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers’ movement. When Matthiessen gave his New Yorker fee to the UFW, Chavez was deeply grateful.
I felt inspired when I first read Matthiessen. For some years I had been infatuated with the California counterculture of the 1960s—the hippie movement of the Haight Ashbury, Carlos Castaneda’s fascination with peyote and his quest for Don Juan Matos, the music of the Beach Boys. Through Sal Si Puedes I discovered the seething political underground, the world in which Cesar Chavez came into his own. It was a revelation to me: California was not all about alternative states of mind but, more emphatically, about courageous political alternatives and attempts to redefine the social texture, about racial and class struggle. From there, I was able to trace other radical figures in the Chicano community, such as Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, who appears as a three-hundred-pound Samoan in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Of course, there is a huge gap between Chavez and Zeta. It may even be sacrilegious to invoke the two in unison. Physically and mentally unstable, Zeta was a lawyer and activist, the author of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People, a brilliant outlaw, a forajido never quite ready to put his cards on the table. He might have done more harm than good to the Chicano movement. Chavez, whom he paid a personal visit, was a full-fledged revolutionary, the true fountainhead of the Chicano movement.
For Cesar Chavez, patience and sacrifice are siblings. He pairs them in a way that only American prophets can, mixing utopian vision with an enviable sense of practicality. The essayist Richard Rodriguez once described Chavez as “wielding a spiritual authority.” It is that spirituality—his use of prayer in marches, the realization that the power of his followers’ faith is stronger than anything else—that is so inspiring. When his betrayal by the Teamsters brought him low, Catholics around the country rallied for Chavez; church leaders supported him. What did they see in Chavez? A Christ figure, perhaps; a modest man of overpowering charisma; a man unafraid to speak the truth. In 1974 a reporter for the Christian Century wrote that she was “puzzled at the power of such an uncompromising person to command so much loyalty from so many.” The entire quest for social justice and commitment, for patience and honesty, cannot but be seen in these terms. Chavez came from a devout Catholic background, and he often invoked Christ in his speeches. “I can’t ask people to sacrifice if I don’t sacrifice myself,” he said. Or: “Fighting for social justice is one of the profoundest ways in which man can say yes to man’s dignity, and that really means sacrifice. There is no way on this earth in which you can say yes to man’s dignity and know that you’re going to be spared some sacrifice.”
That Chavez allowed a perfect stranger like Peter Matthiessen to enter his life for a period of almost three years—making room at his own dinner table, bringing him along to union meetings, introducing him to friends—is proof of his generosity. But there was also self-interest: Chavez saw an opportunity to compound his notoriety and consolidate his power. Matthiessen did not disappoint: he portrays Chavez critically but responsibly; the leader is seen as enterprising, the owner of an unadulterated vitality, capable of minor lapses but overall a prophet ahead of his time.
More than thirty years later, Sal Si Puedes is less reportage than living history; a whole era comes alive in its pages: Black Power, backlash, the antiwar movement, the browning of the labor movement, the greening of the browns. Taken with Joan Didion’s The White Album
, it’s an indispensable guide to the sixties, when America was changed forever. The eighties were difficult for Chavez, who had grown weary and depressed. The media alternately ignored him and attacked him. He still lived in the Gila River Valley. The grape strike and the confrontation with the teamsters were buried deep in the past. People in general had grown impatient with activism. Chavez’s home was with the migrant workers, to whom he had devoted his life, but the heyday of the labor movement was over, overwhelmed by the conservative avalanche that brought Reagan and Bush to power. Scholars such as John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen define that last period as “the unfinished last boycott.” The cultural climate was different. Chavez ceased to be a leader speaking to his constituency and assumed the role of lecturer. In speeches given in the college circuit, he emphasized the power of teaching and amplified his message to encompass not only Chicanos in the Southwest but people from all racial backgrounds, anywhere in the country, as well. In doing so, though, he watered down the message. “How could we progress as a people,” he claimed in a 1984 speech, “even if we lived in the cities, while farm workers—men and women of color—were condemned to a life without pride?”