THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 61
grape boycott. Soon union contracts
started raining down. The victories of
these years form the basis for a new
movie, originally called “Cesar Chavez:
An American Hero” (it has since lost
its honorific subtitle), directed by Diego
Luna and starring Michael Peña. The
film, which was screened at the White
House last month, was made under
the gaze of Chavez’s family, and it draws
out a familiar hagiography. “I’m going
to see it all the way through,” Peña’s
Chavez vows during one of several
can’t-keep-a-good-man-down rumi-
nations. “Because if we lose I won’t be
able to look at my family in the eye.”
How honest is this portrait? Chavez
was a cipher even to colleagues, partly
because he didn’t seem to fit the role.
He was short, with a dad-on-Sunday
wardrobe and a gold-capped tooth.
Many found him notably ineloquent—
his verbal placeholder of choice was
“golly”—and his counsel, when it came,
could appear contradictory. In public,
Chavez professed gentleness, but he
had a quick, vindictive temper. As a
leader, he was sometimes insupport-
able; as a parent, he had trouble show-
ing up. (He skipped two of his chil-
dren’s births and left his daughter’s
wedding, for union business.) He was
the most vexing kind of workaholic, the
ascetic kind: hard-edged and self-pun-
ishing. Through most of his productive
years, he seems to have subsisted largely
on Diet Rite cola, matzoh, and prunes.
He often found himself on the
wrong side of a decision. In “The Cru-
sades of Cesar Chavez” (Bloomsbury),
a provocative new biography, Miriam
Pawel reassesses Chavez’s legacy under
a raking light. For years, the founda-
tional account of Chavez’s work was
an as-told-to narrative by Jacques E.
Levy, a deeply embedded writer who
just as deeply admired the cause. Pawel,
a former Los Angeles Times reporter,
offers a corrective to that starry-eyed
project. Her previous book, “The Union
of Their Dreams” (2009), explored the
United Farm Workers by focussing on
its seconds-in-command. After speak-
ing with those who helped build the
union, Pawel had a critical read on
many of Chavez’s moves.
Now she takes on the giant him-
self. “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez”
combines fresh reporting with spot-
checking of Chavez’s memories, as
gathered by writers such as Levy, and
the result helps flesh out Chavez as
more than a transcendent moral hero.
As he once put it, “There is a big differ-
ence between being a saint and being
an angel.”F
rom an early age, Chavez felt
thrown out of the garden. He was
born in 1927, in the North Gila Valley
of Arizona, to a comfortable family of
farmers. His grandfather had arrived
there from Chihuahua and set up a
thriving homestead. His father was a
profligate businessman, though, and in
the late thirties the county foreclosed
on the property. Chavez, then twelve,
watched a fleet of tractors tear the fam-
ily’s horse corral apart.
The Chavezes had already started
spending time in California, picking
avocados in Oxnard, north of Los An-
geles, and peas in Pescadero, up the
coast. Chavez later claimed to have
gathered wild mustard greens for food.
The family settled in a garage in a des-
titute part of San Jose known as Sal Si
Puedes (“Get Out If You Can”). In 1943,
Chavez met a young woman named
Helen Fabela at a malt shop in Del-
ano, and when she became pregnant,
five years later, they got married. Both
had worked for lousy wages under the
eyes of growers, and it was considered
a coup, within the family, when Chavez
and his brother got jobs hefting lum-
ber, far from the farm’s indignities.
That changed. A few years earlier,
in Los Angeles, an organizer named
Fred Ross had started a Mexican-Amer-
ican-advocacy group called the Com-
munity Service Organization, devoted
to small-scale activism: fighting racist
establishments, helping with immigra-
tion forms, challenging deportations.
When Ross came to San Jose to start
a chapter, Chavez, then twenty-five
years old, got involved, leaving his wife
and four children at home each night
to drum up members and register peo-
ple to vote. Ross left, in 1953, and Chavez
took over. Often, he’d work twelve to
fifteen hours a day, tracing a circuit
through the region’s agricultural capi-
tals. Just as often, he would make this
intense schedule known. “One of his
little techniques has always been to
shame people into doing something,”Ross observed. “To let them know
how hard he was working.” When his
bosses decided to organize field work-
ers in Oxnard, Chavez was sent to make
it happen.
He quickly discovered that a major
problem was the use of braceros: Mex-
ican nationals imported temporarily to
work in the fields, originally as an emer-
gency measure during the Second
World War. The supply of cheap for-
eign labor deprived native-born work-
ers of leverage; Chavez gathered data
on the program’s abuses and sent his
findings to the right agencies. He helped
to organize a strike and a march, mak-
ing the TV news and forcing a wage
increase. The bracero program came
under scrutiny; Chavez was promoted
to director of the national Community
Service Organization.
By then, he had hit on a new proj-
ect. Why not build a union for farm-
workers? He had no doubt of the need.
Since 1935, the National Labor Rela-
tions Act had set the framework for
labor disputes in the United States.
The law allowed collective bargaining
in the private sector, providing for trade
unions and strikes. Yet it did not apply
to field workers—the exception had
been politically necessary for South-
ern support—and, in the decades fol-
lowing, they’d accrued none of the
benefits that other labor forces enjoyed.
Salaries were depressed. Work-site
housing was grim. Health care was vir-
tually inaccessible.
In the spring of 1962, Chavez broke
from the Community Service Organi-
zation and returned to Delano, where
he printed registration cards for a “Farm
Workers Association.” At that point, an
aspiring union already existed in the
California fields. Something called
the Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee had been chartered by the
A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1959 and was popular
with Filipino-American farmworkers.
Chavez, wanting to run his own oper-
ation, convened a meeting of a hundred
and fifty workers and their families in
Fresno on September 30, 1962. In a press
release, he called himself a war veteran—
he had worked on the Navy’s ship-repair
team from 1946 to 1948—and announced
the union’s founding. He became its
general director and, by lunch, was join-
ing in a chant of the new union’s slogan: