The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  “How necessary the fast was to prevent the court hearing which could have exposed union violence and marred our image,”19 Chatfield noted in his journal. Chavez said, however, that he had planned the fast long before he was served with the contempt citation. He consistently denied any link between the court hearing and the timing of the fast.

  The nation’s leading proponent of nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr., sent a telegram to Chavez: “You stand today as a living example of the Gandhian tradition with its great force for social progress and its healing spiritual powers. My colleagues and I commend you for your bravery, salute you for your indefatigable work against poverty and injustice, and pray for your health and your continuing service as one of the outstanding men of America.”

  Chavez knew he would experience pain during the first week because he had experimented twice with unpublicized fasts. The first was in the summer of 1962, soon after he moved to Delano and started his farmworker census. As he had written to Ross at the time, Chavez worried he had become too impatient. “I knew inside of me that it was going to take a long time, it had to be done slowly in order to be done at all, and you couldn’t rush it. Yet, I wanted to keep rushing it,” he recalled. “I was fouling things up . . . I was becoming too indecisive.” He had read that Gandhi, as well as some early Christian crusaders, would fast before they embarked on a march or battle, in order to think more clearly. Chavez fasted for four days at home. “I was trying to get the whole caboodle, everything had to be done, and I was trying to dissect it, to see how one piece fit into the other.” After the third day, his edginess dissipated. “All of a sudden, like when you’re driving over a ridge, your ears pop.”20

  Chavez’s second fast came at the end of the fight with the Teamsters at the Perelli-Minetti vineyard. When the agreement was reached, Chavez decided to fast in thanks while the contract language was finalized, a process expected to take only a few days. Snags tied things up and he ended up not eating for a week, and the fast did not go well.

  Those earlier experiments had helped him prepare psychologically for the first public fast. Chavez knew to expect bad leg cramps during the first week. He kept busy with meetings to distract himself, and the pain passed. “I went into a beautiful floating feeling,21 like I was in space,” he recalled. He watched others eat, and they reminded him of animals. Helen reminded him of something between a dog and a cat, and the children seemed like puppies. His back hurt, and one of the nurses offered to give him a back rub. He debated for a few days whether that comfort would violate the spirit of the fast. He decided to accept the massage.

  During the second week, Chatfield suggested they put up a large symbol to remind them of the fast in years to come. They settled on a cross. Richard Chavez scavenged old power poles from the utility and constructed a thirty-foot-high crucifix. They figured the solemn, white-washed cross would make a dramatic backdrop when Chavez finally broke his fast.

  As the days passed, Chavez grew weaker. He needed more support to walk to the bathroom. Richard could tell his brother was in great pain. He begged him to stop, to think of others, including his family. Librado Chavez also asked his son to end the fast, saying he had sacrificed enough. Helen Chavez, in typical fashion, had two reactions, one public and one private. In private, she was furious. She had argued with Cesar on the walk to Forty Acres and vented to friends throughout the fast about how angry she was at Cesar for jeopardizing his health. In public, she supported her husband unflinchingly, as he had known she would. She also knew that when he made up his mind, there was no point arguing.

  Cesar’s mother, Juana, had a similar response. Richard, apprehensive about his mother’s reaction, talked to her out of Cesar’s earshot and asked if she thought they should ask him to stop. Her response caught him by surprise: “She said, ‘No, he knows what he’s doing. Just pray to God.’”22 She told Richard she had confidence because of Cesar’s faith. “When he believes in something, you know your brother,” Richard recalled his mother saying. “He believes very strongly in things, and he knows that God is with him . . . I will not ask him to stop. This will be his own decision.’”

  As the fast neared the end of the third week, his doctor urged Chavez to stop and warned he risked serious damage to his kidneys and liver. After the twenty-first day, Chavez agreed to take light liquids in addition to water. On Wednesday night, March 6, 1968, Chatfield urged Chavez to end the fast. You can’t get the people here till Sunday, Chavez responded. As soon as he heard that, Chatfield announced the fast would end in four days. They began to plan for a mass event.

  One of the first calls went to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Drake had notified Kennedy’s staff when the fast began, before it became national news. Kennedy expressed concern23 about Chavez’s health and asked for updates each day. He knew he might be asked to fly out to Delano on short notice; as Chavez’s health worsened, his staff considered asking Kennedy to appeal to Chavez to stop. As soon as Chatfield set a date, Kennedy was invited to be the guest of honor at the celebration to break the fast on the twenty-fifth day.

  Chavez’s top aides had viewed King’s telegram as an overture indicating that the civil rights leader wanted to visit. They deliberately did not extend an invitation. As Cohen wrote in his diary, King was “someone on the way down24 trying to attach himself to someone on the way up.” Kennedy, widely rumored to be a presidential contender, would enhance the movement’s national stature.

  On Sunday morning, March 10, Kennedy flew into Los Angeles and dodged a dozen questions25 about his political plans from reporters who followed him onto the tarmac, where he boarded a private plane. Huerta and Jim Drake picked up Kennedy at the Delano airstrip and brought him to Forty Acres. Everyone was nervous. What do you say26 to a guy on a fast? Kennedy asked as he came in. He stayed with Chavez only a few minutes. Kennedy asked for a glass of water and a bathroom. They had no water, and no one could find the key to the bathroom. They were all embarrassed. Kennedy went to Drake’s house to wait for the ceremony. On the plane ride from Los Angeles, the senator had told his top three aides that he was going to run for president.27

  A rainstorm a few days earlier had turned the ground so soggy that the ceremony had been moved from Forty Acres to a city park. Chavez sat on a makeshift stage on the back of a flatbed truck, between his mother and Kennedy. Thousands of people poured into the park, and dozens of photographers and cameramen from around the United States jostled for space. Kennedy asked to move so that he did not have to speak on the truck decorated with crosses and the Virgen, but the crowds made it impossible to shift. Kennedy broke the tension when he began his speech in Spanish, acknowledged he was mangling the language, and drew tremendous applause.

  “When your children and grandchildren take their place in America, going to high school and college, and taking good jobs at good pay,” Kennedy said, “when you look at them, you will say, ‘I did this, I was there at the point of difficulty and danger.’ And though you may be old and bent from many years of hard labor, no man will stand taller than you when you say, ‘I was there. I marched with Cesar!’”28

  Chris Hartmire handed Chavez the bread to break his fast. Then Chavez reached out to share the bread with Kennedy. The photographs of Kennedy and Chavez became among the most enduring images of the movement.

  Chavez was too weak to talk and asked Drake to read a statement, which Drake had largely drafted. The text spoke of what the fast meant to Chavez, and concluded: “When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men.”

  The crowds mobbed Kennedy, reaching out to touch him, shake hands, and ask for his autograph. He took almost half an h
our to make his way eighty yards to the car where Drake waited to take the senator back to the airstrip. Drake started to leave, but Kennedy jumped out and climbed on top of the car, leaving a dent in the blue Chevy Nova’s roof that the Drake family treasured. In his Boston accent, Kennedy shouted the union’s battle cry: “Viva la huelga! Viva la causa!”

  Chavez was whisked away to recuperate at a twenty-five-hundred-acre ranch north of Santa Barbara, owned by Katy Peake’s sister, Helen Pedotti. Pedotti cleared out rooms for Cesar and Helen, six of their children, and a nurse. Chavez read Gandhi and recovered quickly in the crisp ocean air. In appreciation for the hospitality shown to her son, Juana Chavez sent29 Pedotti a set of hand-embroidered towels.

  Two days after Chavez ended his fast, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an anti–Vietnam War platform, nearly defeated President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, an upset that effectively forced the incumbent into retirement. Four days later, on March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president. When Kennedy called to ask Chavez to run as a delegate in the California primary, he convened a membership meeting to solicit the farmworkers’ approval. Putting the question of an endorsement up for a vote gave Chavez cover with the AFL-CIO, which supported Johnson and was displeased by Chavez’s decision. Presenting the endorsement as the members’ choice, like taking decisions “to the board,” was Chavez’s preferred form of democracy—a process where the outcome was never in question.

  Kennedy had a late start in California, a state whose large delegate bloc was crucial. Many liberals had already committed to McCarthy. The farmworkers union had never endorsed a candidate or worked on a political campaign. Chavez and Ross had never explicitly urged support for a particular candidate, but they had plenty of experience turning out the vote. Democratic registration30 had fallen dramatically in California, by a million votes in the previous year. Ross led a registration drive in Los Angeles that signed up eleven thousand Democrats in three weeks and about forty thousand across the state. They paid 25¢ per signature and gave cash prizes to those who signed up the most new voters.

  Chavez blocked out May31 to campaign and make speeches around the state. He traveled through cities in the San Joaquin Valley where just a few years earlier he had struggled to attract a handful of workers to meetings. He marveled to Drake as people turned out in droves. On college campuses, where McCarthy had strong support, Chavez told students that Kennedy was the candidate the farmworkers wanted. “And some people would say, ‘All right, if that’s what the workers want, we’ll work for Kennedy,’” Chavez recalled.

  In the final weeks, Chavez took a hundred farmworkers and volunteers to Los Angeles and ran the campaign in the heavily Chicano areas of the city. He divided East Los Angeles into precincts and assigned several workers to each precinct. They, in turn, were assigned to blocks, where they walked door to door, hitting every registered Democrat four times. The first visit was to test the waters, and they found strong support for Kennedy and for their own cause. “We were extremely popular,”32 Chavez said. “They knew all about the farmworkers and they liked them very much because they’re only about a generation removed from farm work.” The second visit was to ask for volunteers, the third to drop off literature, and the final visit, a few days before the election, was a reminder to vote.

  For Chavez, the only thing unusual about this campaign was that he did not have to worry about finding money for gas, food, or supplies. The career politicians running the Kennedy campaign, on the other hand, found his organization astonishing. When Walter Sheridan, a Kennedy campaign coordinator, first met Chavez, he had a typical reaction: Chavez did not look like a leader of anything. He was short and slouched over, with small hands and a weak handshake. Then Sheridan watched Chavez33 run a meeting. The discipline was complete. Whatever he told them to do, they did. At the end of every meeting, when he had carefully explained what they should do, Chavez put the plan up for a vote. Then they broke into the rhythmic applause that had become the farm worker movement clap—starting slow and gradually speeding up, growing louder and louder as the clapping grew faster and faster.

  On election eve,34 Chavez organized a fiesta with a mariachi band, which cost the Kennedy campaign $500. Sheridan invited Chavez to bring all the workers to the party the next night. Chavez said they would be delighted, and could they bring the mariachis as well? There was no room, the word came back. Well, then they would go someplace else, Chavez told Sheridan sweetly. It was no problem. It was just that the workers had voted, and they wanted the band. Sheridan told him to bring the mariachis.

  On election day, twenty cars with loudspeakers drove through the streets of East Los Angeles making announcements in Spanish while teams knocked on doors and offered rides. In some precincts, the turnout was 100 percent—more than twice the normal rate. Kennedy carried the city, and the results in Los Angeles propelled him to victory in the state.

  Chavez, a couple of hundred farmworkers, and the mariachi band all arrived at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard for the victory party. The candidate was still upstairs in his suite, but the results were already clear. Chavez was tired, and he slipped out early. Kennedy requested that Chavez be on the platform for the victory speech, but he was nowhere to be found. So Dolores Huerta took his place. She was just a few feet from Kennedy when he was shot.

  Within two months, two iconic American figures had been assassinated: King, already a legend, and Kennedy, heir of the Camelot dynasty. In Delano, they mourned the death of Robert Kennedy for political and personal reasons. And they began to worry about Chavez’s safety. As Jerry Cohen wrote to a friend: “The attitude now is that sooner or later35 Cesar or Ted Kennedy or anyone who speaks out for the poor will get it.”

  At Forty Acres, they wrapped the thirty-foot cross in black crepe paper.

  Chapter 16

  The Celebrity

  It got to where, you know, I was, well in many places I was introduced as a saint and it went on and really just went on and on . . .

  By the time he flew to New York to serve as a pallbearer at Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral, Chavez had been catapulted into the stratosphere. Nothing had prepared him for the leap from little-known, eccentrically charismatic labor leader to national celebrity.

  Journalists from around the United States began to make pilgrimages to a tiny city so remote they had trouble pronouncing its name (de-LAY-no, the New Yorker explained). Chavez had been conscious for some time of his place in history. Now he was in a position to be selective about how his story was told to a wider audience. He chose to grant extraordinary access to two chroniclers, both of whom became advocates and penned sympathetic, influential profiles.

  Peter Matthiessen, writer, naturalist, and cofounder of the Paris Review, knew of Chavez’s work and was happy to help1 when a friend asked Matthiessen to draft an anti-pesticide manifesto for a fund-raising appeal in the New York Times. Chavez liked the advertisement and asked to meet the author. Matthiessen traveled from his home on the East End of Long Island to Delano in the summer of 1968. The two men were born just months apart, and Matthiessen felt an instant kinship, though their worlds could not have been more different. Matthiessen spent weeks working on what became a lengthy two-part profile in the New Yorker, and later a book, Sal Si Puedes. He deftly captured Chavez’s humanity and the essence of his remarkable appeal as well as the euphoria of the young movement: “[Chavez] has an Indian’s bow nose2 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 . . . There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted.”

  The second journalist to whom Chavez entrusted his story was Jacques E. Levy, a reporter who had taken a leave from the Santa Rosa Press in Northern California. Levy had begun his writing career at the Harvard Crimson and worked for several papers before ending up in Santa Rosa. He had covered farm labor issues, become interested in Chavez, and persuaded hi
m to cooperate with a biography. Levy taped and transcribed hundreds of hours of conversations with Chavez’s family and closest advisers. Chavez steered Levy to the right people to interview and included him in strategy sessions. Often Levy interviewed Chavez on long car rides; Levy drove, while Chavez held the tape recorder.

  Levy was more intellectual than activist, but he admired Chavez and blended in well as he accompanied top union leaders to rallies and private meetings. Chavez trusted Levy, correctly, to omit material that might make the movement look bad or cast Chavez in an unflattering light. Chavez also knew he could review and censor the book before publication, so he allowed Levy unfettered access. At first Chavez kept the journalist somewhat at arm’s length. Their relationship deepened when Levy, an experienced dog trainer, presented Chavez with a German shepherd and showed the union president how to train the animal. Chavez loved Max, and several German shepherds that followed. The dogs created an emotional bond between Chavez and Levy.

  With Levy and Matthiessen, Chavez was warm, funny, low-key, and self-effacing. But beneath his patient demeanor, Chavez struggled to cope with enormous new pressures. The increased adulation brought heightened expectations to achieve victories in a war that had reached a stand-off. Describing the response when he made his first public appearances after the fast, he said: “It got to where, you know, I was, well in many places I was introduced as a saint3 and it went on and really just went on and on . . .” A priest wrote to Chavez that “Cesar” had become a popular confirmation name.4

  His fame generated reverence and resentment that deepened fissures in the union. He had less privacy and more demands. The fast had been not only a way to “zoom things up,” as Ross put it, but also in some sense the ultimate time-out. By the fall of 1968, Chavez needed another escape.