60 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
ACRITICAT LARGEAPRIL14, 2014
HUNGER ARTIST
How Cesar Chavez disserved his dream.BY NATHAN HELLER
T
he history of California is a his-
tory of will grafted onto the land-
scape. First came missionaries, build-
ing churches out of clay and meting out
God’s kingdom to the native peoples.
Then came gold and silver, the pursuit
of which levelled hills, remade cliffs,
and built cities along the Pacific Coast.
Water was diverted. Sprawling fields
soon followed. By the time Cesar
Chavez organized a grape workers’
strike, in 1965, the agriculture business
was the largest in the state. People say
Chavez fought for justice, which is
broadly true. And yet that strike, like
many of his efforts, rose more from
scrappy pragmatism than from any ab-
stract ideal. “No one in any battle has
ever won anything by being on the de-
fensive,” he liked to tell his picketers.
High intent was a fine thing, but change
would come the way it always came in
California: by force of will.
Chavez’s own will was mammoth,
and his battle against agribusiness lasted
weeks, then months, then years. The
goal, he said, was to cost growers fifty
dollars for each dollar spent on the
strike. Ostensibly, field workers were
pushing for better wages and treat-
ment. But they also fought for recog-
nition of Chavez’s new field-labor
union, now called the United Farm
Workers, and the political authority of
a marginalized demographic. The strike,
which began and was headquartered
in Delano, a San Joaquin Valley town
that lay at the heart of table-grape pro-duction, grew to represent the fate of
a new national cause.
Along the way, Chavez helped re-
invent the picket. At one point, he
shouted rallying cries over the fields
from a low-flying airplane. At another,
his colleagues founded a Teatro Cam-
pesino to perform skits on the backs
of pickup trucks. The strike “appeared
to have no kinship with the institu-
tionalized formalities of most contem-
porary labor disputes,” John Gregory
Dunne wrote in his book “Delano”
(1967). “There was no ritual of collec-
tive bargaining, no negotiating table
around which it was difficult to tell
the managers of money from the hew-
ers of wood and the carriers of water,
no talk of guidelines and fringe benefits
and the national weal, no professional
mediators, on leave from academe at
a hundred dollars a day and all ex-
penses paid, plugged in by special tele-
phone lines to the Oval Room at the
White House.”
Instead, there were the pickets and
a narrative of heroism that aroused a
questing middle class. By late 1967,
Chavez had launched a widespreadMICHAEL ROUGIER / GETTY
Chavez—photographed with R.F.K. in March, 1968, during a fast—grew vindictive, even paranoid, in his later years.