A Crusader For Change

Miriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez paints the labor leader as “a media-savvy pragmatist not averse to dealmaking”:

Yet unlike the hard-headed Anglos who ran the industrial unions, he saw himself more as a spiritual guide than a labour leader. He despaired of the tendency among poor workers he helped to desire colour televisions and golf clubs as they grew richer. He distrusted colleagues who sought pay rises, and rejected them for himself; sacrifice, he urged, must be the mark of the movement. He embarked on regular fasts, both to draw attention to the cause and, in trying times, to strengthen his own fortitude. Gandhi, rather than King, was the role model.

Peter Dreier considers Chavez’s legacy, particularly with regard to the United Farm Workers union:

The UFW served as an incubator of movements. It trained thousands of organizers and activists — boycott volunteers as well as paid staff. Many became key activists and leaders in the labor, immigrant rights, feminist, antiwar, consumer, and environmental movements. There is no progressive movement in the country today that has not been influenced by people whose activism began with the UFW.

Another legacy is the nationwide upsurge of cultural pride and political action by Latinos, most of whom were not farmworkers, that was inspired by Chavez and the UFW. The fruits of Latino activism can be seen in the growing voting power of Latinos in American politics, the thousand of Latino and Latina elected officials at all levels of government, and the growing immigrant rights movement, especially among young people.

But Liza Featherstone is less happy about the effects of Chavez’s work:

[A]s labor writer (and former UFW staffer) Michael Yates has suggested, the most important question should be: Is life for farmworkers in California any better today than it was before Cesar Chavez and the UFW came along? The answer to that, sadly, is no. As Chavez himself acknowledged, during the waning years of the UFW’s power, farmworkers’ children were 25% more likely than other American kids to die at birth. Their parents’ life expectancy was two-thirds that of the rest of the population. Laws protecting their union organizing rights were not enforced. Some drank water from irrigation pipes and lived under trees.

Citing the new documentary Cesar’s Last Fast as well as Pawel’s book, Nathan Heller explores Chavez’s 1988 fast in protest of farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides:

By the thirtieth day of the fast, Chavez had lost thirty pounds. He had renal problems and muscle wasting. His doctors urged him to break his fast. When he wouldn’t, Dolores Huerta and the Reverend Jesse Jackson devised an endgame. Chavez’s friends would pass the fast along: they’d each do three days or so, and the sacrifice would continue. Chavez agreed, and on the thirty-sixth day, a Sunday, he appeared at Mass. He was carried, limp, between the shoulders of his sons. Jackson and Martin Sheen were there, along with the family of Bobby Kennedy. Ethel Kennedy broke off a morsel of blessed bread, and Chavez finally ate. His mother sat beside his nearly lifeless body, weeping and stroking his face.

Did Chavez have a Christ complex? The question looms behind Pawel’s biography and [Richard Ray] Perez and [Lorena] Parlee’s film. “How did Cesar become such a powerful, brilliant organizer and leader?” the Reverend Chris Hartmire, of the National Migrant Ministry, asks in the documentary. “I think it was fundamentally his Catholic upbringing and his mother’s teachings.” Chavez’s eagerness to take on moral responsibility through physical sacrifice, to lead an expanding moral movement, to be both humble and irreplaceably authoritative has its roots in the founding tropes of the Church. These affinities strengthened his project, as Hartmire suggests; they also slowly eroded it. Through the hard postwar years, farmworkers needed a political and cultural leader. Chavez’s faith helped make his ethical and organizational ambitions clear. But he also aspired to be a spiritual leader, and his efforts there had less stirring effects. Workers, in the end, already had a holy figure they could trust.

Listen to an interview with Pawel here.

(Video: Trailer for Cesar’s Last Fast)