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April 12,
2003
Render
Unto Cesar
Songs
and Dances From the Fields of Pain
by
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
I first came across the name Cesar Chavez in Peter
Matthiessen's book,
Sal Si Puedes: César Chavez and the New American Revolution.
It was 1972 and I was an idealistic and sheltered malcontent
living in the farmlands of Indiana. Matthiessen, on the basis
of his haunting novel At
Play in the Fields of the Lord, was my favorite writer. And
through the magic of his lucid prose, Chavez became a heroic
figure for me. Right up there with Che, Roberto Clemente and
Muhammad Ali: the four idols of my lost youth.
I still recall Matthiessen's vivid description
of Chavez back in that turbulent summer of 1969:
"The man who has threatened California
has an Indian's bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and
an open smile that is shy and friendly; at moments he is beautiful,
like a dark seraph. He is five feet six inches tall, and since
his twenty-five-day fast the previous winter, has weighed no
more than one hundred and fifty pounds. Yet the word "slight"
does not properly describe him. There is an effect of being centered
in himself so that no energy is wasted, an effect of density;
at the same time, he walks as lightly as a fox. One feels immediately
that this man does not stumble, and that to get where he is going
he will walk all day."
I was 14 when I helped to organize the
grape and lettuce boycotts in Indianapolis. We were not an overwhelming
force by any means. There were five or six of us at most meetings.
We targeted a different store each weekend. On my first picket,
I parked myself in front of a Kroger's on the south side of Indianapolis--the
albino suburb of a city that's whiter than Carrera marble. I
harangued housewives about the conditions of farmworkers on their
way in and on the way out. They looked at me as if I was a lunatic,
horrified at the prospect that I was one of their neighbor's
children. Would one of their own come home one day in the grip
of a similar fever?
They had good cause to think I'd gone
around the bend. I'd never met a migrant farmworker. I had only
one Hispanic friend. I didn't really know the first thing about
the struggle. But I'd been seduced by the Chavez mystique. I
heard him speak in Indianapolis in 1970, mourning the assassinations
of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, venting against the war, calling
for an economic revolution. I followed his 1972 fast, which lasted
for 25 miserable days, with the devotion of a soap opera addict.
After about thirty minutes the store
exhausted its patience with my pestering of its shoppers. The
sheriff arrived. He told me to pack up and leave. I refused.
He carted me off to jail, locked me in the bathroom so as not
to put me in with "the drunks and child abusers" and
called my parents. It was my first arrest. There would be others
in the months and years ahead. The usual story of an obnoxious
child. Thank you, Cesar Chavez for giving me my start in a life
of political crime.
Chavez was born in 1927 on the family
ranch near Yuma, Arizona. He's grandfather had fled the shackles
of peonage in 1880s and homesteaded this tract of Sonoran desert
into a profitable venture.
Cesar's father, Librado, ran a small
general store and served as postmaster. In 1938, the family lost
the ranch and the store to drought and the aftermath of the depression.
Like thousands of other Mexican-Americans, they hit the road
to California, looking for work in the brutal fields of the Central
Valley. They landed in a barrio of San Jose, known as Sal Si
Puedesget out if you can.
When he turned 18, Chavez enlisted in
the Navy, serving in the western Pacific through the end of the
war. When he got out he went to work in the dusty vineyards of
Delano, where he met Helen Fabela. They married in 1948. Later
that year, Chavez helped organize his first strike, protesting
meager wages, cruel bosses and other inhumane conditions in the
fields. The strike lasted for nearly a week, but eventually police
and the field bosses bludgeoned the striking laborers back to
work.
But Chavez had made a name for himself.
In 1952, he was recruited by Fred Ross to become an organizer
with the Community Service Organization, the civil rights group
started by Saul Alinski. During his early days with CSO, Chavez
spent much of his time organizing in urban areas of California,
spearing heading voter registration campaigns and other kinds
of basic political footwork. In 1958, he rose to the position
of national director of the CSO.
For the next few years he pushed hard
for the organization to take on the task of organizing California's
exploding population of migrant workers, ruthlessly exploited
by the vineyards and vegetable growers. But the board of the
CSO wanted Chavez to stick with more urban issues. Frustrated,
he resigned in 1962, went back to Delano and founded the National
Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm
Workers of America.
The first major strike against the grape
growers occurred on September 8 1965, when Filipino workers in
Delano walked out of the fields to picket for better wages. A
week later Chavez and his young union joined the strike. To support
the strike, Chavez along with the firebrand Dolores Huerta launched
a series of marches on the state capital in Sacramento. By May
of 1966, more than 10,000 people followed Chavez to the statehouse.
And there was a victory. Later that year,
Chavez and his union negotiated the first collective bargaining
agreement between farmworkers and growers in the continental
United States. It's provision included higher wages, contracts
requiring rest periods, clean drinking water, hand-washing facilities,
protective clothing against pesticide spraying while workers
are in the fields and the banning of DDT.
The feds took notice, too. In 1965, the
FBI opened a file on Chavez. The initial letter to Hoover noted
that he "possibly had a subversive background" and
that field agents suspected him of having ties to communist agitators.
It was an old canard. But over the next twenty years the spooky
scribes at the FBI amassed more than 2,500 pages on Chavez and
the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee. Much of the information
came from local cops, Republican politicians and field bosses
for the agriculture giants that rule the Central Valley. One
FBI memo notes that the feds' relations with the companies had
"always been cordial."
I lost touch of Chavez's work through
much of the 1980s. Then shortly after we moved to Oregon I ran
into him at a migrant worker rally in the Willamette Valley.
He looked tired, the years of ceaseless struggle, internal battles
and fasting had taken its toll. Another boycott of grapes had
been launched, this one targeted at the growers' indiscriminate
use of pesticides as workers labored in the fields under toxic
clouds. The predictable results: childhood cancers and public
indifference.
A few years later Chavez was dead, felled
by a heart attack while he slept in his hotel room in San Luis,
Arizona-only miles from where he was born. He was waiting to
testify yet one more time against the vegetable growers.
A few days later more than 50,000 people
took to the streets to mourn him at his funeral in Delano. One
of them was the actor and environmentalist, Ed Begley, Jr., who
helped carry Chavez's coffin down the streets of Delano.
Begley, who grew up in Van Nuys as the
son of Hollywood actor Ed Begley, followed Chavez's work much
as I had as a teenager. He supported the boycotts of grapes and
lettuce. Then in 1985 Begley ran into Chavez by accident.
"I was at a coffee shop on Sepulveda
having a bowl of oatmeal and a guy pulled up in a car with another,"
Begley recalls. "I thought that guy looks a lot like Cesar
Chavez, but I knew it couldn't be him. It was a tiny little car.
There was only one guy, no entourage. There was no security team
that any labor leader of the time would have had. This was a
guy like Jimmy Hoffa, a big labor leader. But when he walked
by, there was no mistake. It was Cesar Chavez. I walked up to
him and asked him if the grape boycott was still on. He said,
"Yes, because of the pesticides'. I offered to help and
he said, 'Give me your number.'"
In 1987, Begley began working with the
United Farm Workers on the use of chemical pesticides. He donated
money and helped organize the Hollywood political community behind
the cause. In 1990, Begley met Chavez for the final time at an
environmental film festival in Colorado.
"He invited me to take a walk with
him," Begley says. "We went to a church. He lit a candle.
And we talked about the sanctity of live and the creation. He
talked about how environmentalists must not only have respect
for nature, but also for the workforce that puts food on the
table and how they should be protected from hazardous chemicals.
The next time I saw him I was carrying his casket down the streets
of Delano."
Ten years have passed since Chavez's
death and his life story has yet to be told on film, TV or the
stage. Perhaps this is not an entirely unhappy circumstance given
the ludicrous nature of the usual Hollywood biopic.
But now Begley comes along with Cesar
and Ruben, a musical tribute to the life Chavez and his friend
Ruben Salazar, the Mexican-American reporter for the Los Angeles
Times who was slain by LA Sheriff's Deputy Tom Wilson in 1970.
Salazar is one of the great unknown heroes
of the 1960s. In addition to writing searing reports on the struggles
of Hispanics for the LA Times, he served as news director for
KMEX, the Spanish-language television station in southern California.
He was murdered on August 29, 1970. He'd slipped into the Silver
Dollar Bar in East LA after covering a Vietnam War protest that
had been brutally put down by LA cops. Deputy Wilson entered
the bar with a shotgun, aimed it at Salazar and, despite protests
from two women in the bar, fired. Salazar was hitt in the head
with a teargas canister and died instantly. A coroner's inquest
ruled Salazar's death a homicide, but no charges were ever filed
against the maniacal Deputy Wilson.
The play opened at the El Portal Theater
in North Hollywood on March 14. The war on Iraq opened only days
later. There's a strange symmetry at work here. The heyday of
Chavez's campaign coincided with the Vietnam War and he never
shied away from uniting the struggle for racial and social justice
with the goals of the anti-war movement.
But this is Los Angeles, a city that
has been mired in a kind of dazed paranoia since 9/11. Angelinos
can't understand why New York and DC were attacked and they weren't.
Was there some oversight at Bin Laden HQ? Surely they must be
next. So as the cruise missiles streaked toward Baghdad, Los
Angeles bunkered down, sure that they would be the victims of
a counter-attack. That means that so far Cesar and Ruben hasn't
gotten the audience it deserves. Tuesday and Wednesday night
performances had to be cancelled because fewer than 10 people
showed up. That's a shame because the play deserves to be seen.
But things are beginning to pick up.
The night we saw the Cesar and Ruben the gorgeous old theater
was nearly full and we were sandwiched between Harry Dean Stanton
and Harry Shearer.
Cesar and Ruben is a discussion between
ghosts. It opens in some purgatorial bar soon after Chavez's
death. Salazar leads Chavez, back through his past, with a string
of popular song and dance routines to keep things moving along.
Begley skillfully deploys songs by Ruben Blades, Santana, Sting,
Don Henley and David Crosby to speak to the struggles of racism,
cop abuse and the backbreaking tedium of fieldwork: tough issues
to depict in a musical. In fact, Cesar and Ruben provides the
first beneficial use of an Enrique Iglesias song I've yet heard.
Roberto Alcaraz gives a vivid portrayal of Chavez, in a demanding
role that requires him to go from giving lofty speeches to singing
a niftily reworked version of Sting's Fields of Gold. A native
of East LA, Alcaraz followed Chavez's career throughout his youth,
adhering to the boycotts with a religious passion. "When
I was in college in the 80s," Alcaraz says. "The Farmworker's
Movement was a way of discovering my own Chicano identity."
Delores Huerta is played by the feisty
Danielle Barbosa, who bears a striking resemblance to the fearless
organizer. Begley's beautiful wife, Rachelle Carson (great name),
is deliciously menacing as the schoolteacher who berates a young
Chavez, played with gusto by Evan Saucedo, for making the unforgiveable
mistake of speaking Spanish in her classroom.
But the play is dominated by a harrowing
performance from Eddie Albert, Jr., who portrays the vicious
field boss Naylor. The character of Naylor is a composite of
several notorious field bosses from the valley, who became even
more sadistic as the roots of Chavez's movement began to take
hold. "Naylor and those guys were panicked because all of
a sudden these people who they depended on to be malleable were
suddenly organizing and coming back at them. That struck at the
core of any self-confidence they had and who they were and what
they did."
These master's of misery still out there,
plying their merciless trade. Today, there's a Naylor running
Nike sweatshops in Indonesia.
Begley's play flirts with hagiography,
and navigates around Chavez's unsavory ties to the Synanon cult
and its mad leader Charles Dederich, but never fully surrenders
to it. That's a good thing. Chavez's life and career are instructive,
but not unblemished. There were plenty of wrong turns, internal
feuds and petty betrayals. He neglected his family and nearly
destroyed his union. It's the familiar story of the destructive
monomania of the professional activist.
But you can't discount Cesar Chavez's
achievement. Over his three decades of work, there were fasts,
arrests, strikes, setbacks, nasty battles with the Teamsters
and one boycott after another. The union won some exceptional
victories, including the replacement of employment contractors
with union hiring halls; union contracts regulating safety and
sanitary conditions in farm labor camps, banning discrimination
in employment and sexual harassment of female workers; and the
banning of the infamous short-handled hoe that maimed generations
of farmworkers. It's a record few labor leaders can match. And
Ed Begley's play helps breathe life into that legacy ten years
after Chavez's death.
Sal Si Puedes. Escape if you can. Words
to live by.
Yesterday's
Features
Zoltan
Grossman
The Perils of Occupation: the Easier
the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
Avnery
The Night After
Wayne Madsen
The Telltale Signs of Empire
David Krieger
Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
Abbas
Jeremy
Brecher
What Can the World Do Now That Tanks Prowl Baghdad?
Robert
Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
A Patriot Attack on America
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
Website
of the Day
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