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Download Chapter (PDF) FOREWORD Once upon a time there were duels; nowadays there are clashes and pitched battles. -MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, "On Cowardice" "tE rich have money-and the poor have time." Those were the words of Cesar Chavez in 1991, two years before his death. Is it sheer fancy to suggest that this sen- tence alone summarizes the dominant concerns of his life? Chavez's life was defined by patience. Patience was his weapon against the grape owners and the Teamsters, against the abuse of the downcast. He had plenty of patience, much more than a normal person, and it was proven in his nonvio- lent marches, fasts, and petitions. "We don't have to win this year or next year or even the year after that," he told his fol- lowers. 'We'll just keep plugging away, day after day....We will never give up. We have nothing else to do with our lives except to continue in this nonviolent fight." Of course, there is such a thing as too much patience. How long will it take for Chavez's message to penetrate the American psyche? He's been dead for almost a decade. His name and face adorn schools and public parks. He pops up in advertisements for Macintosh computers, along with John :xxxvii Lennon and the Dalai Lama-"Think Different"! But these ghostlike appearances are empty of all ideological signifi- cance: it's a tame Chavez, not the quixotic knight he was; a brand name, as disposable as any celebrity in Hollywood. My generation is too young to have witnessed Chavez's odyssey from obSCUrity to legend. My appreciation for his courage and forbearance came indirectly. I learned about him from books and documentaries. Every reference to him was cloaked in an aura of sanctity. But as with most saints, it was hard to figure out exactly what he had done on the road to beatitude. No doubt Chavez was the most important His- panic American political figure of the twentieth century. But for someone like me, born at the apex of his career, outside the United States, it was almost impossible to lift him from the junk box where icons are stored away and reinsert him into history. Somehow Chavez the man had become Chavez the statue: pigeons sat motionless on his nose and hands, his beautiful bronze skin corroded by the passing of time. How can he be rescued from this eclipse? Do his words still have an echo? Have we lost the capacity to appreciate not just a fighter but also a true duelist, a crusader capable of reevaluating our preconceptions of the world? What is meaningful about him today? Can his message still speak to us? Americans are obsessed with the radicalism of the 196os, as epitomized by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. This obsession is concurrent with a Latin boom, a sudden em- brace of Latino music and culture, north of the Rio Grande. And yet most Americans couldn't care less about Chavez- especially Latinos. The new Hispanic pride is a profoundly middle-class product. It replaces radical politics with con- sumerism, the gun with the Gap, hunger strikes with Taco Bell. Chavez's face on a billboard goes down easier than any :xxxviii of his injunctions about courage, resilience, commitment. Chavez is not alone: other Latino activists have been shelved, as well, from Bernardo Vega and Jesus Colon to Dolores Huerta, Rudolfo "Corky" Gonzalez, and Reies Lopez Tijerina. Even Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, the black historian whose Puerto Rican identity was crucial to his work and his life, re- mains a forgotten oddity. 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 comers of libraries. Why has no one published a Portable Cesar Chavez? Are his poli- tics 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 it's clear that it wasn't colored by nostalgia. Arizona was his home. His father was a businessman. The second of five children a11d his dad's right hand, Chavez made himself use- ful 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 :xxxix 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 re- called. "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 itiner- ant life that field labor carried with it. He once said he at- tended 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 Mex- ico 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 :X 1 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 phi- losophy of struggle. Many had already tried to organize the Mexican migrant workers to improve their miserable work- ing conditions. But it took Chavez's charisma-su simpatia- to move mountains. By the time he was thirty-three, he was organizing families in the grape fields and persuading grow- ers to increase wages. His strategy was simple: straight talk and honesty. If he was to become a spokesman for the work- ers, he would also be a model for them. And role models re- quire commitment and sacrifice. The National FarlTI 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 no- tably 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 pol- iticians-especially Governor Ronald Reagan. Unlike many other leaders of the Civil Rights era, Chavez combined ac- tivism 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: : xli 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 rela- tions in America. He lived life spontaneously, and he re- sponded to every occasion with speeches that were neither preconceived nor sophisticated. Yet he was eloquent, pre- cisely 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.
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