Cesar Chavez: A remembrance

Cesar Chavez fasted this year for 36 days. Vice President Dolores Huerta was beaten by
San Francisco police during a protest of President George H. W. Bush.

(United Farm Workers union founder and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez died 20 years ago today. This is an essay I wrote after his death for the California Farm Bureau's newspaper where I worked; I'm still a bit surprised the Farm Bureau published it.

(All it takes is a sore back after just 10 minutes of edging the front lawn to begin to imagine the sunup-to-sundown toil and courage and pain of the farmworkers he fought for):

Cesar Chavez was a fiction when I was growing up. He was as distant and mythical as any of the dusty heroes who peopled the John Steinbeck novels I loved.

He was a symbol, a poor man daring to stand up for the workers from which he sprang, to speak for them, and I liked the symbol.

Out of school and looking for a job, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, a place as mythical as Cesar Chavez had been in my youth.

In this place, both became real for me. Cesar Chavez was a shorter man than I expected, the thick black hair I saw in old photographs having turned a thatch of gray, the lines on his face having deepened. The San Joaquin Valley, a vast smoky place scored with a gigantic grid of perpendicular roads, took its shape from farmers and a history unknown to me as the child of an itinerant Air Force Mechanic.

Something else became real for me at that place and time: The hatred farmers held for Cesar Chavez.

He was the devil. He was "that goddamned Cesar Chavez." People mispronounced his name Chu-VEZ. One former assemblyman who battled Chavez used to spell his first name C-E-A-S-E-R in press releases.

I heard he was the man who stirred up trouble for farmers by causing unrest among farm workers. I heard he intimidated farmers into signing labor contracts with his union, threatening violence and using it. I heard he threatened to destroy the industry with wild claims that farming poisoned workers and consumers.

I heard all of these and then I met the man. In his death I'm left with a cloudy soup of feelings.

He was rallying workers at a large farming operation in the south San Joaquin Valley when I first saw him. Some workers were trying to win United Farm Workers Union representation and Chavez had come to spur the effort toward an election.

A knot of maybe 200 people, waving red banners bearing the Aztecan eagle symbol for the union, filled a small community hall to hear him. They didn't represent all the workers at this operation, but their shouts of fierce passion made them seem more numerous.

Chavez spook briefly to the crowd in Spanish, raised its spirits, and departed. The election took more than a year to decide. The union lost.

Chavez came again to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the union's radio station in Woodlake. When he arrived at a nearby fairground for the day-long party, people quickly surrounded him, stretching their hands to him. He clasped the outstretched hands and embraced the small children who pressed close to him, and the crowds fell in behind him like a boat's wake as he walked about the fairgrounds that day.

I waited until late in the afternoon for an interview, when finally his bodyguards — including some off-duty city police — ushered me into a makeshift courtyard.

Chavez sat across from me in a folding chair, his sat eyes nearly hidden behind folds of skin, and challenged every one of my questions. With a wave of his hands, a firm shake of his head, the smile of a prosecuting attorney discovering an opening, he turned each question into a clumsy attack on his union and his causes.

He made each question an opportunity to attack farmers and the pesticides they used. Cesar Chavez put the blame for cancer in young children on all farmers.

In the course of a few brief moments, the man I once thought was a myth made me his real enemy.

Chavez dismissed me, the bodyguards closed ranks, and the union leader returned to the throngs of people who thanked him for dinner and a party.

After I came to work at Ag Alert, Cesar Chavez made a stop at California State University, Sacramento, to build support for a boycott against table grapes. He still regarded virtually every question from the press as a thick-headed accusation of his cause. But he had won over another fiercely passionate knot of people at the univerity, and leaders of major cities, including San Francisco, pledged to support the boycott.

Farm Bureau and other major agricultural organizations retaliated by boycotting San Franci
sco.

Over the years, I have read death notices for the union. Some former UFW officials left because they said Chavez refused to delegate authority, made no plans to pass his power on, and wouldn't consider changing the union's strategies to match the times.

Chavez and the union denounced the state Agricultural Labor Relations Bord he helped create, saying former Gov. George Deukmejian turned it into an advocate for farmers rather than farm workers.

Membership plummeted, labor contracts dissolved, the union built luxury homes with non-union labor as investments and it lost millions of dollars in court damages from labor strikes it waged.

Chavez' 36-day hunger strike in 1988 to advance the grape boycott failed to ignite the emotional fire of the hunger strikes that launched his union in the 1960s.

Most recently, UFW Vice President Dolores Huerta, Chavez' sister-in-law who founded the union with him and marched beside him for more than three decades, left the organization (editor's note: Huerta had taken a leave of absence to focus on women's rights).

He was an icon for another age, a folk hero, a malcontent. He led with, as someone said, quiet charisma, but he distrusted criticism. Perhaps the United Farm Wrokers union has die
d with him.

But for me, Cesar Chavez stopped being a myth and became human.

It is as John Steinbeck wrote of Cannery Row: "Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'Whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole, he might have said: 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."

Unfinished business

A work in regress …

Monday marked John Steinbeck's 110th birthday, churning up bittersweet memories.

The unfinished illustration at left, which would have been for self-promotion, represents a wave of wistfulness that crested over the weekend when I read a backhanded celebration of Steinbeck's life and work.

Posting the unfinished work breaks an internal cardinal rule of my blog, but feeds another purpose, which is from time to time to open a vein and bleed a bit.

John Steinbeck remains my favorite writer, since a high school English teacher first made me read him. I'd love to say I've traveled the world of literature page by page, from the hooves of Chaucer's horse to Cormac McCarthy's road laid waste (just two disparate examples), and returned to Steinbeck even after such a considered journey.

The uneasy truth is I don't read much. Aside from Kurt Vonnegut or William Saroyan or J.R.R. Tolkien or Garrison Keillor, I have not pursued writers through their collections.

I read anymore for need, not want, corralling and consuming the small and weak snippets of information that have eluded me all these years. Even so, reading is a chore, a fight against a Pavlovian predilection to fall asleep. 

Still, what a time reading Steinbeck! Good readers often say words transport them, and so Steinbeck did for me. He took me to the nearby Salinas Valley north of my hometown, to a place that no longer exists if it ever did, a romantic and worn-smooth place. He took me to the steep and hot and unforgiving canyons above Big Sur, (a Steinbeck style affectation I stole, replacing commas with "and" between items in a series) to the quiet gurgling bends of the Salinas River, perfumed with sycamores, to a miserable sodden rail car, full of miserable people going nowhere.

He made me want to try a beer milkshake, as Doc did in Cannery Row, in Santa Maria, a half hour from my hometown; or taste the regular irregular concoction Eddie made when he poured unfinished drinks from La Ida Cafe into a jug and took it back to share with Mack and the boys at the boiler-strewn lot known as the Palace Flophouse.

Steinbeck informed my thinking, to which these editorial cartoons attest. It set up awkward moments when I twice met Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union, and he regarded me as a member of the hostile press.

I felt like I was living — and truly living — in Steinbeck's books, which is probably any writer's desire. I'd fall short describing that tingle, that sense of the earth falling suddenly away, when a college friend and I drove up to Cannery Row early one morning and I saw for the first time many of the places Steinbeck described. Until that moment, I thought them purely made up.

On rare occasion a piece by Aaron Copland will pop up on the radio, and suddenly I'll be flying noiselessly over the golden foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a source for many Steinbeck stories. It'd be small surprise that Copland is my favorite composer, so tied was he to Steinbeck's work and era. Though Copland wrote scores for movie versions of The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men, even his signature pieces — especially Appalachian Spring — take me straightaway to the settings of Steinbeck's stories.

I remember how reading Steinbeck describe the chapparal vibrating with insects on a hot afternoon, or hearing Copland's The Red Pony quickly sweep into the joyful gallop of a boy and horse, and I'd catch my breath, lost in reverie. It was magic that doesn't happen very often anymore, and I wonder why; my guess is age has rubbed off many of the edges.

At one time I was on fire to complete the portrait of Steinbeck above, itself inspired by a photographic portrait. I was building Steinbeck with symbols of him; his shoulders the furrows of the farmland that figured into so many of his stories; assorted splotches and lines suggested a map of his characters' journeys; the curve of nose and plane of shadow on his right check somehow to comprise the Route 66, the path of his Joad family from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the poisoned bounty in California. Probably in the struggle of getting the sign to become the nose, I stopped, and never returned.

I post it now as a Post-It® note to self: Get moving on all the good stuff left unfinished. Succumb to the magic more often.

Whenever I read about Steinbeck anymore, someone is trying to punch him in his dead nose. He was a lightweight West Coaster, shoulda never won the Nobel, let alone a Pulitzer. That kinda stuff. Even a fan such as Joe Livernois, former executive editor of the Monterey Herald, used his Sunday essay of celebration to call two of my favorite Steinbeck books "stinkers" — singling out In Dubious Battle as maybe "the greatest disappointment to ever smudge a printed page."

Let critics talk, and jump on Steinbeck's bones. He will always remind me the good stuff is not entirely lost.