Cesar Chavez
Mills, Nicolaus
Had he been killed in midlife, as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were, Cesar Chavez would be one of those 1960s figures whose name brings instant recognition and a lump in the throat. We would...
...After Jerry Brown became governor of California, the union was the driving force behind the California legislature's passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first collective bargaining act, outside of Hawaii's, for farm workers, and arguably still the best state labor law in America...
...His answer rarely changed...
...Most significantly, under Cesar's direction the union itself changed dramatically...
...Like Bob Dylan or Eugene McCarthy or Eldridge Cleaver, he had turned into an embodiment of the past...
...He saw a sacred mission in tending to the ordinary...
...Why...
...The following week the Giumarra Vineyards succeeded in temporarily breaking the strike by bringing in nonunion crews from Texas and Arizona and border cities like Calexico...
...It was read for him at the end of his twenty-five-day fast in 1968...
...Cesar understood that the real work of organizing always comes down to one-on-one contact...
...What shapes my sense of Cesar's importance is not, however, the difference between the promise he offered agricultural workers and the contracts he delivered...
...We would speak of him today as the Chicano labor leader who was about to transform the lives of the nation's farm workers when an assassin's bullet intervened...
...That's what the conversation outside the Pink House, as well as the story of the whip and the bee, were about...
...That would be easy for someone like me,' he answered...
...So if I took my whip to this bee, there would be the whole hive to fight.' " Cesar paused for a moment...
...Our commitment to the union was so complete that once we had made it we could only joke about it...
...he was asked by people who knew how serious a Catholic he was...
...It's no bigger than any of the other things you've gone after.' But the man with the whip just smiled...
...Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent," George Orwell wrote in his famous "Reflections on Gandhi...
...Twenty-six years later it was hard to imagine Cesar having time for such a conversation or feeling as hopeful as he had in 1967...
...I first met Cesar Chavez on a hot June day in 1967...
...In a union in which Spanish was the first language and Chicanos made up the majority of the rank and file, it was a reply that said everyone was welcome...
...I had not expected him to be so approachable, but there he was, sitting on the grass outside the union's headquarters, a small stucco bungalow known as the Pink House...
...One of the man's workers was passing by at the time, and when he noticed what was happening, he was very surprised...
...But on the August morning when the strike began, our job was suddenly easy...
...The union had rented a large hall for the rally, and by the time it was Cesar's turn to speak, it was over 100 degrees inside...
...The Farm Workers were hurt by the Reagan era and by two conservative Republican governors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, who undermined the administration of California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act...
...Why don't you use your whip on the bee?' he asked...
...There could not have been more than a few seconds' pause before the crowd began cheering...
...The "Synanon Game" —group encounters in which individuals are subject to intense personal criticism—was introduced into the Farm Workers...
...There was, however, no such dramatic arc to Cesar Chavez's life...
...But it seemed to take forever, and I remembered feeling the silence was more important than the shouting that came after it...
...If you go after one, they all come after you...
...Cesar became friends with Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon, the drug rehabilitation program, and what followed from that friendship was a new authoritarian style of union leadership...
...The union is like the bees, and the man with the whip is like the grower...
...Since passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform Act, the union has also had to cope with record numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, who have been used by growers to bring down wages and blunt Farm Workers organizing...
...The speech of Cesar's that is most often quoted is one that he was too weak to deliver himself...
...He was wearing, as he usually did, an opennecked cotton shirt that hung outside his trousers, and although the union was in the midst of strike preparations, he gave the impression of being a man who thought the best use he could make of his time was to spend it listening to what those around him had to say...
...During that summer in Delano, we all grumbled about the $5 we were paid for a week's work, but FALL • 1993 • 553 Notebook the grumbling was ironic, not bitter...
...We always worried that when it came time to leave the fields fear might get the best of our crews...
...La huelga, the word for strike, had never crossed Cesar's lips...
...But for anyone who didn't come of age in the 1960s or wasn't involved with the United Farm Workers, Cesar's passing drew few tears...
...What he had talked about that afternoon was a coming together that would take the form of a strike, and the silence that followed his speech, like the silence that follows a prayer in church, was natural, a sign that everything he said had been understood...
...It was a first meeting that shaped my sense of how anyone who leads others, especially an organizer, should behave...
...Three decades from now I will be able to remember what I was doing when a friend called to say that Cesar had died in his sleep while on union business in the small border town of San Luis, Arizona...
...At its peak in the 1970s, the Farm Workers had over seventy thousand members, but today its membership has dropped to an estimated five thousand...
...He could flick the ashes off a man's cigarette while he smoked it, even pull a handkerchief out of a pocket with his whip, and because of his temper and his reputation, everyone was afraid of him . . . . "One day, as the man was sitting on his porch, a bee came buzzing around him...
...His death this past April at age sixty-six was front-page news...
...It flew in his hair and around his ears and didn't pay any attention when he tried to brush it away...
...Like everyone my age, I remember exactly what I was doing when John Kennedy was killed...
...Don't bother him...
...Because of his long fasts, the marches he led, the near poverty he chose, Cesar was treated as a holy man, and he struggled hard to make sure those around him realized that the self-discipline he practiced expressed not a desire for holiness but a will to control the moral and social outrage that fueled him...
...That is what the union means," he said...
...It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life...
...The Farm workers blazed brightly in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing the support of students and trade unionists...
...An estimated thirty five thousand people traveled to Delano, California, for his funeral, and by order of the governor state flags were lowered to half-mast...
...The union would finally need a national grape boycott to win the strike...
...But beyond that, it was a reply that made it clear that in Cesar's judgment Jesus wasn't preoccupied with his impending martyrdom...
...But I always believed the strike was won on that hot Saturday in Bakersfield...
...I was one of those for whom Cesar's death did cause tears...
...I can kill the bee all right...
...Well, Jesus never wore a cross," he deadpanned...
...Dissidents found themselves forced out of the union after they ran 552 • DISSENT Notebook their own slate of candidates for the board of directors...
...There was no need for him to say it...
...He seemed to illustrate nothing so much as how remote recent history can become...
...I can't imagine any current public figure who in the midst of such a trial would be so willing to give those around him a chance to acknowledge their doubts...
...He knew that the union battles he led could easily get out of hand, give in to violent shortcuts that might make a victory easier but would rob the union of the mission he saw at its core: that of transforming the lives of those who joined it...
...He's eating right now," Manuel Chavez, Cesar's cousin, would shout at visitors when too many of them came to see Cesar during his 1968 fast...
...I had the task, along with another organizer, of keeping them out of the grape fields when a strike began...
...In a conversational tone he said simply, "I want to tell a story about a man with a whip...
...He was someone who understood the humiliation of being poor and made it possible for others to imagine themselves overcoming that humiliation...
...But the words of Cesar that I remember best came in a story I heard him tell in 1967 in a rally in Bakersfield for the grape workers who would soon find themselves locked in a strike against Giumarra Vineyards...
...He cannot do anything to one of us without having all of us come after him...
...But in recent years the union was a shadow of its former self...
...By the middle 1980s the union had lost its core of veteran staffers as well as much of its ability to organize effectively...
...In one period of his life he took to wearing a mezuzah around his neck...
...Nothing made Cesar so uneasy as the idea that the admiration he drew might paralyze others...
...At six o'clock, when the fields should have been filled with workers, nothing was going on...
...The union had come a long way since 1962, when Cesar first arrived in Delano to begin organizing it...
...So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are...
...But bees are different from anything I've whipped before...
...As a result of the union's national grape boycott, an estimated seventeen million Americans stopped buying grapes...
...A good organizer in Cesar's eyes wasn't a salesman or a person who performed superhuman feats...
...When we are really honest with ourselves," he wrote, "we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us...
...It was an irony that Cesar, who combined Catholicism and Gandhian nonviolence, would have appreciated...
...I had come to Delano, California, to work for the United Farm Workers...
...What shapes it is my memory of how Cesar bore the demands hero status created for him...
...Most of that summer I got up at three each morning to drive to Bakersfield to meet with several work crews...
...Cesar was already a legend, the leader of a union whose struggle, La Causa, seemed straight out of the 1930s...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
