LOS ANGELES — Since his death in 1993, Cesar Chavez has become a national icon, his birthday is celebrated as a holiday in three states, thoroughfares in Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Portland, Ore., have been renamed in his memory.
The Keene, Calif., headquarters of the United Farm Workers, the union that Chavez founded with Dolores Huerta, is now the National Chavez Center, providing resources for community organizations “to meet and plan in the shadow of Cesar’s legacy,” and a new Hollywood biopic, starring Michael Peña as Chavez, depicts his battles with agribusiness in uniformly heroic terms.
“History is Made One Step at a Time” is the promotional tagline for the film, which was made with the help of Chavez’s family and has been getting special screenings in many of the farm towns where he agitated for workers’ rights.
Miriam Pawel, though, finds herself as the rain on this parade.
The former Los Angeles Times reporter is the author of “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez,” a new biography that takes a critical look at the activist’s life, portraying him as much more complex — and human — than the saintly figure of popular lore.
“My goal was to write about him ‘warts and all,’” Pawel, who had recently returned to Los Angeles from a book tour, told MintPress News in an interview.
Pawel’s Chavez is a charismatic visionary who used innovative tactics such as grape boycotts and “spiritual fasts” to publicize the plight of impoverished farm workers, efforts that helped to inspire the landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975.
But along the way, he supported the UFW’s “wet line” patrol designed to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into Arizona from Mexico, engaged in brutal purges of other union officials amid a growing cult of his own personality, experimented with the controversial management techniques of Synanon founder Charles Dederich, and ultimately failed in his goal of transforming the UFW into a broader movement for social justice.
“If I stay, I have to stay on my own terms and I have to fuck the organization to the extent that I become a real dictator,” Chavez said at a June 1977 meeting of the UFW board where he had planned to resign.
“I got to be the fucking king, or I leave,” he insisted.
“Crusades” has run into some criticism from Chavez loyalists and others. “It is sad that a person who had no connection to Chavez would attempt to write such a disparaging book,” a Los Angeles Times reader who said she knew Chavez lamented in a letter to the newspaper.
“Chavez’s work and the movement assured that workers would no longer be sprayed with pesticides and that a simple thing like having a bathroom was possible in the fields,” the letter noted.
A professor at California State University, Sacramento, accused Pawel in BeyondChron, a San Francisco alternative newspaper, of “individualist, personality-driven reporting” that “under- analyze[s] the nature of the racial state [in California] and the interaction of racial and economic oppression in the fields.”
But Pawel believes her book is a badly-needed antidote to all the Chavez hagiography.
“Like any other human being, he was not a perfect saint,” she said. “I think that helps people to understand him. It doesn’t harm his legacy to write about him in all his complexity.”
Missed opportunity
As Pawel shows, the mythologizing of Chavez began as early as 1968, when two writers spent time with him after he served as a pallbearer at Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral. Peter Matthiesen profiled him for the New Yorker and later in the book “Sal Si Puedes,” writing that “at moments he is beautiful, like a dark seraph … There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted.”
The other writer was Jacques Levy, a newspaper reporter whose admiring “Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa” would be published in 1975.
“Chavez trusted Levy, correctly, to omit material that might make the movement look bad or cast Chavez in an unflattering light,” Pawel writes in her book. “Chavez also knew he could review and censor the book before publication, so he allowed Levy unfettered access.”
According to Pawel, Chavez’s family, in particular, has been “very careful to portray his legacy in the way they see fit,” tweaking his biography where necessary to serve image-making purposes. His two years of service in the U.S. Navy, she said, were backdated to show that he enlisted in 1944 rather than 1946, by which time World War II was over.
Even the White House, in a press release last month announcing a presidential proclamation for Cesar Chavez Day, referred to him as “returning from naval service during World War II.”
The new “Cesar Chavez” film has been criticized as an oversimplification of the UFW’s fight to organize field workers, with the Los Angeles Times saying in a review that “the boycott is reduced to scenes of Chavez dumping grapes into the ocean and of union backers who turn out to help with phone banks and other support.”
“It’s a Hollywood movie … so I don’t have a problem with changing facts,” Pawel said. “But it’s a missed opportunity — given many people don’t know who he was — to introduce him to a much broader audience.”
Pawel, who covered the labor beat for the Times, previously authored “The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement,” which was published in 2010. In researching that book — in which, she noted, Chavez was “obviously a central figure” — she noticed “an absence of serious scholarship” about his life.
“Chavez’s place in history is secure; the route he traveled from migrant worker to national icon has yet to be explored,” she writes in her new book. “The path has become well worn, so strewn with flowers and encomiums that reality lies half buried beneath the legends.”
In trying to unearth that reality, Pawel, ironically, owes her largest debt to Chavez himself. He left vast archives of material to posterity, including hundreds of tape recordings of UFW meetings, in which, Pawel writes, “he carefully preserved the intimate details of his remarkable journey.”
“Clearly, this is someone who is aware of his own historical importance and wants to preserve much of that history,” Pawel told MintPress.
“A very lasting legacy”
One of the recordings is of the June 1977 meeting at which Chavez stated his terms for staying on at the UFW and ruminated about power.
“When I came here, I had absolute power,” he told the board. “That’s how it got done. The whole cake was mine.” With the growth of the union, the cake had expanded. Could he go from absolute power to more total power? “No. The only way to go is to go down. To go down, to have less power, is tough.”
At a meeting a few months earlier, Chavez had defied anyone to question his authority.
“We’ve got a responsibility to do something for the workers over there,” he said, “and the only way we’re going to do it is if we have some goddamn rules and when I give an order to [board member] Gilbert [Padilla] or Dolores [Huerta] or anybody in authority, you just do it … Beginning tomorrow, when you get an order, if you don’t carry it out, out.”
Pawel sees Chavez as making “a very conscious decision about what he felt he had to do [to be in] control of this organization” and struggling with how to maintain control as the UFW grew. “You have different people with different agendas, an enormous bureaucracy,” she noted.
That struggle led Chavez in February 1997 to visit Dederich at the headquarters of his Synanon drug-treatment empire near Fresno, Calif. “There is an experimental side” to Chavez, Pawel said, noting that he also practiced yoga.
Dederich, Pawel writes, offered Chavez the secret of how to manage change and “maintain firm control” — namely, “the Game, an encounter-group-type therapy that was at the center of Synanon’s daily life.”
Chavez wanted the Game to be mandatory at the UFW’s headquarters. “If this union doesn’t turn around and become a movement, I want no part of it,” he threatened board members after he returned from Synanon.
The UFW stopped using the cult-tinged Game somewhere around late 1978 after Dederich was arrested on charges of being an accessory to murder and more than 900 followers of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple committed suicide in Guyana. Chavez’s dreams of building a movement never came to fruition amid the internal turmoil within the union.
Pawel believes that he has still left an indelible legacy. “He inspired a generation of organizers and activists,” she said. “You see it in the immigrant rights movement today. That’s a very lasting legacy in terms of social justice.”
Additionally, she said, Chavez’s iconic status as America’s “most significant Latino” has advanced the cause of Hispanic empowerment.
As Chavez told an audience at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in 1984, “The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm.”