THE NEWYORKER, JULY 27, 2020 63
Pawel writes. As early as the fifties, he’d
kept records of his associates’ failures
and his disappointments. By the late
sixties, his frustration was ingrained. He
was beset by back pain, and he spoke
of quitting. If he didn’t leave, he ex-
plained, he’d need to toughen up to
make things run. “I’ve got to become a
real bastard,” he said, in 1969. “Just go
around and crack the whip and get peo-
ple out of the union. In other words, I
got to pull a Joseph Stalin, to really get
it. And I don’t think I want to do that.
By the time I do that, then I’ll be a
different man.”
He didn’t leave. But, beginning in
1971, Chavez began to step away from
the union’s daily operations. Alarmed
by tales of an elaborate grower-backed
assassination plot and feeling heckled
by Delano workers, he moved the union
headquarters to a former sanatorium
that he called La Paz, in the Tehachapi
Mountains. Discontent increased, and
the Teamsters, who hoped to move into
the fields, scented blood. Early in 1973,
they descended on the Coachella Val-
ley, offering growers contracts that al-
lowed direct hiring. Chavez, fighting
back, began a strike that turned into a
showdown. His union lost thirty-one
contracts in Coachella and more in
Lamont and Fresno. Soon it had lost
members, too.
Chavez was undaunted. He put his
trust in the growing profile of the move-
ment. The union raised $4.3 million that
year, and its boycotts continued to be a
cause célèbre. But it didn’t win back its
negotiating clout. After a year, it had
failed to regain most contracts. Chavez’s
long-term tactics changed. As part of a
1973 funding deal with the A.F.L.-C.I.O.,
he agreed to push for legislation—leg-
islation he’d previously balked at, wor-
rying that it would neuter his guerrilla
tactics. The result was California’s Ag-
ricultural Labor Relations Act, signed
into law by Governor Jerry Brown, se-
curing collective bargaining for farm-
workers. Chavez had continued to bris-
tle at suggestions that he delegate some
of his responsibilities. “I doubt anyone
else but me can do it,” he said.
Few people got the chance. Chavez
became openly paranoid during the sev-
enties. Increasingly seized by what Pawel
calls a “basic mistrust of almost anyone
with outside expertise,” he began purg-
ing associates from the upper ranks of
the union—quietly at first, and then in
public confrontations. In 1977, taking a
cue from Mao, he staged shouting
matches at meetings to drive out col-
leagues. Sometimes he accused them of
being spies for the Republicans or the
Communists. (“You’re a fucking agent,”
he seethed at a confused plumber.) The
paranoia was not baseless—Chavez, like
many figures on the left, was under F.B.I.
investigation—but the reaction was ex-
treme. When some he expelled tried to
use the phone, La Paz security threat-
ened to eject them forcibly.
By the late seventies, the union’s Cal-
ifornia roots were bearing pop-psych
fruit. Chavez was much taken with Syn-
anon, a rehab center turned life-style
cult, originally based in Santa Monica.
Synanon’s lucrative work revolved
around an activity called the Game, in
which community members attacked
one another with true or invented ac-
cusations. Therapeutic work or even en-
lightenment—Synanon had already de-
clared itself a religion—progressed by
lobbing the hot potato of blame to some-
one else. Chavez loved the Game and
wanted to start practicing it at La Paz.
The problem with the union, he said,
was that the Labor Relations Act had
robbed it of its enemies, the growers; it
had nothing to fight against. If La Paz
could be turned into a model commu-
nity like Synanon, it could sustain some-
thing bigger than a mere administra-
tive body. Chavez said, “If this union
doesn’t turn around and become a move-
ment, I want no part of it.”W
hen Chavez’s behavior starts to
grow peculiar, Pawel’s narrative,
a little pallid until then, lights up. Was
he the loving parent, disciplining his
children to keep order and nurture au-
tonomy, or the despot, punishing from
fear? His private contradictions, through-
out his life, were notably hazy. Unfor-
tunately, on this front so is “The Cru-
sades of Cesar Chavez.” Pawel’s book
hews close to her archival research, avoid-
ing dramatization and extensive expo-
sition. The approach gives her criticism
teeth—she lets the record speak for it-
self—but it does little to illuminate the
dim corners of Chavez’s inner life. When
Chavez spends ten days in jail, for con-
tempt of a boycott injunction, she tellsWear our new
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