Chicano Leader

...While he was CSO director, Chavez began to realize that correcting superficial abuses and helping a few individuals was not assisting the community at large...

...That often bloody confrontation, which the Teamsters have misleadingly tried to designate a jurisdictional dispute, goes on...

...By taking away the best and brightest and removing some eyesores, his work may actually have retarded Chicano development...

...But if they tried to break out—even in such unimportant matters as dress and hair sytle—that peace was likely to be shattered...

...It was a way of proving himself...

...Thereafter, he hustled at a variety of jobs until he ended up as national director of the Community Service Organization (CSO), an assistance group directed at the Mexican- Americans of California...

...Cesar Chavez was one of the intelligent and ambitious young men whose future would have been thwarted had he not had the opportunity to transform himself—and in the process the Chicano farm workers' community from which he sprang—through La Causa...

...His education was difficult and cut short prematurely...

...In Chavez's case, he created the opportunity for himself...

...Levy might well have added a critical essay of the sort Joseph Lash wrote to accompany his edition of the diaries of Justice Felix Frankfurter...

...they were resigned to a situation where they were acceptable only if they continued to b e unobtrusive, defenseless, and shame-faced about their cultural heritage and way of life...

...So long as the Chicanos remained separate and unequal from the dominant culture, segregated in their barrios, they were allowed to exist in relative peace and occasionally limited prosperity...

...There was virtually no way out...

...Yet, although Levy has given Chavez and his achievements no critical evaluation and provides no perspective, his book is powerful...

...The result is a moving book, easy to read, and often reminiscent of John Steinbeck...

...At great personal cost, Chavez succeeded in organizing the workers and wrenched contracts from the growers for his AFL-CIO affiliated United Farm Workers of America...

...However, in Levy's book, based on Chavez's reminiscences and those of his friends, the UFW leader emerges as a bit too sweet...

...Assisting t h e farm workers, whose situation he knew intimately, offered him the opportunity to come to grips with basic Chicano difficulties—the lack of economic power, organization, and job security...

...It also matched him against a tremendous problem that would severely test the talents he often doubted he had...

...But the picture that emerges of Chavez is scarcely unbiased...

...He finished eighth grade only after he had attended more than thirty elementary schools...

...Chavez's achievements are considerable, and he has done wonders in the face of extraordinary difficulties...

...JEFFREY LANT When Cesar Chavez was a young man growing up in the Southwest during the Great Depression, the Chicanos in the country were not only poor and disenfranchised...

...For those who were young, ambitious, and intelligent, there was little possibility of advancement, except within the limited confines of the Chicano community itself...

...Chavez was hardly an inevitable candidate for greatness...

...Levy is unashamedly awed by Chavez, and this awe hampers his ability to judge his hero...

...Sal sipuedes—get out if you can—was advice often given, but it was always ironic...

...This perception came at a crucial moment in Chavez's career, for he had begun to b e restless in what was essentially a position of limited potential...

...Journalist Jacques Levy spent five years interviewing Chavez and t h e more prominent members of his entrourage in gathering material for his book, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa...

...On the edge of success, he then was forced to confront the intimidation, goons, and bribery of the Teamsters who came in to take over the fields of California (in which they had shown no previous interest), assisted by high-ranking officers of the Nixon Administration...

...His findings are presented in t h e form of conversational recollections...

...Jeffrey Lant is a tutor in history at Harvard College...

...The riots in the 1940s in San Jose, Oakland, and Delano are good example of what could happen...

...He began to perceive the need for more basic reform...

...It had security but did not offer him a future commensurate with his talents...