64 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
us the number of the locker into which
he placed his clothes, but scarcely probes
into his state of mind. Sometimes Pawel’s
cool, recessive, just-the-facts narration
goes silent when we most require elab-
oration. After that incarceration, Pawel
writes that Chavez emerged “in the same
clothes he had worn ten days earlier
but”—bafflingly—“with considerably
longer hair.”
What Chavez seems to have lacked
most was self-awareness. Speaking pub-
licly about the challenges posed by the
union’s growth, he was sanguine. “When
you start organizing, it’s like a guy who
starts juggling one ball,” he explained
at a conference in New York, in the early
seventies. He went on:
After a little while, you got to get two balls,
and you start juggling two balls. Your own
speed. Because even up to that point, you’ve
got everything under control. Then after a lit-
tle while, more people come in, you’ve got to
take three balls. And then four and then five
and then six. And pretty soon you can’t deal
with it. And the organization breaks because
the guy who’s supposed to be leading wants to
juggle a lot of balls and he can’t do it. So he’s
got to make up his mind he’s going to let some
of the balls drop. But even more important, he’s
going to multiply himself to have more jugglers
to handle all the balls that are coming at him.
The analogy is strange, not least because
it depends on a mercenary calculus: since
the juggler has an insatiable desire for
new balls, he must constantly jettison
older ones. And why the obligation to
“multiply himself ”? Chavez seems to
have envisaged a moral movement of
which he was the essential nucleus. Yet,
for many union members, the U.F.W.
was simply a labor organization, and its
viability rested on the promise of fairer,
more profitable labor arrangements—a
goal of retaining benefits, not sustain-
ing heroism. Chavez championed peace-
ful practices but had a warrior’s taste for
incursion and righteous conflict. When
his followers required a governor, he’d
answer as a general, dismissing their
complaints and telling them to keep
their armor ready by the door.B
y 1988, it was clear that Chavez’s
dream of a vast national organi-
zation would go unrealized. Many of
the union’s best organizers had left.
Chavez had passed through obsessions
with “business” (he was an admirer of
the corporate-management guru Peter
Drucker) and with healing through
the laying on of hands (he’d taken asix-day mind-control workshop in Los
Angeles). In a low moment, the union
organized a protest against Time, which
had described Synanon, not unreason-
ably, as a “kooky cult.” Union leaders
marched around La Paz brandishing
the magazine and singing “Onward,
Christian Soldiers.” Everything de-
clined from there. A desperate Chavez
at one point proposed staffing an en-
feebled labor action with alcoholics.
(“A shitload of people are alcoholics
in this country,” he reasoned.) The
union was sued by a grower for incit-
ing violence during a strike, and re-
porters found it had misapplied more
than a million dollars in federal funds.
Just as Chavez had experimented with
pop communalism in the seventies, he
surfed the entrepreneurialism of the
eighties, developing housing with non-
union construction workers and co-
founding a corporation that built two
strip malls. Grower contracts, mem-
bers, and the dues they generated dis-
sipated all the while.
It was on the tail of these embarrass-
ments that Chavez undertook another,
very public, fast. In theory, he was pro-
testing the exposure of farmworkers to
pesticides—a long-standing cause of
his. After some unexplained cancer
clusters appeared in the Valley towns
of McFarland and Earlimart, he tried
launching a new grape boycott and,
when it fizzled, stopped eating in “pen-
ance for those in positions of moral au-
thority.” He was sixty-one.
His ordeal is the focus of “Cesar’s
Last Fast,” an illuminating new docu-
mentary directed by Richard Ray Perez
and Lorena Parlee, Chavez’s former
press secretary, who contributed origi-
nal footage but died before the film was
completed. The film, which opens in a
few cities later this month and which
will subsequently air on Univision and
Pivot, may be more helpful than Paw-
el’s account in assessing the lion-in-win-
ter phase of Chavez’s career, in part be-
cause it shows the imagery involved:
friends and followers clustered around
Chavez’s modest twin bed; Chavez him-
self hunched in the front row at Mass,
barely participating.
“Penance is a personal act,” Chavez’s
son Paul explains in an interview. “You’re
really speaking to yourself, and you’re
asking yourself to forgive you for your“For my next illusion, I shall convince young Steven that
he has control over the trajectory of his life!”