THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 65
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
VOLUME XCVI, NO. 21, July 27, 2020. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 8 & 15, July 6 & 13, and
August 3 & 10) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Eric Gillin, chief business
officer; Piper Goodspeed, head of brand revenue strategy; James Guilfoyle, executive director of finance and business operations; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast Global: Roger Lynch,
chief executive officer; Wolfgang Blau, chief operating officer and president, international; Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer and president, U.S. revenue; Anna Wintour, U.S. artis-
tic director and global content advisor; Mike Goss, chief financial officer; Samantha Morgan, chief of staff. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods
and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.
POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE NEW YORKER, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE
INQUIRIES: Write to The New Yorker, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, call (800) 825-2510, or e-mail [email protected]. Give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers:
If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If during your subscription term or up to one year after the
magazine becomes undeliverable, you are dissatisfied with your subscription, you may receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of
order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For advertising inquiries, e-mail [email protected]. For submission
guidelines, visit http://www.newyorker.com. For cover reprints, call (800) 897-8666, or e-mail [email protected]. For permissions and reprint requests, call (212) 630-5656, or e-mail [email protected].
No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s name and logo, and the various titles and headings herein, are trademarks of Advance Magazine Publishers
Inc. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines, visit http://www.condenast.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would
interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, or call (800) 825-2510.
THE NEW YORKER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS,
UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED
MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS
SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.
own shortcomings.” Of course, not ev-
erybody makes a public performance
of private sacrifice. “This is a man who
refuses to eat so that all of us can con-
tinue to eat,” Luis Valdez, a colleague,
says in the film. In other words: feel
the guilt and take note. Grassroots
protest did not feature in the middle-
class world view of the Reagan era
as it had in the late sixties; the 1988
sacrifice sought to show that la causa
was more than just an artifact of those
crazy times. By the thirtieth day of the
fast, Chavez had lost thirty pounds.
He had renal problems and muscle
wasting. His doctors urged him to
break his fast.
When he wouldn’t, Dolores Huerta
and the Reverend Jesse Jackson de-
vised an endgame. Chavez’s friends
would pass the fast along: they’d each
do three days or so, and the sacrifice
would continue. Chavez agreed, and
on the thirty-sixth day, a Sunday,
he appeared at Mass. He was carried,
limp, between the shoulders of his
sons. Jackson and Martin Sheen were
there, along with the family of Bobby
Kennedy. Ethel Kennedy broke off a
morsel of blessed bread, and Chavez
finally ate. His mother sat beside his
nearly lifeless body, weeping and strok-
ing his face.
Did Chavez have a Christ complex?
The question looms behind Pawel’s
biography and Perez and Parlee’s film.
“How did Cesar become such a pow-
erful, brilliant organizer and leader?”
the Reverend Chris Hartmire, of the
National Migrant Ministry, asks in the
documentary. “I think it was funda-
mentally his Catholic upbringing and
his mother’s teachings.” Chavez’s ea-
gerness to take on moral responsibil-
ity through physical sacrifice, to lead
an expanding moral movement, to be
both humble and irreplaceably author-
itative has its roots in the founding
tropes of the Church. These affinities
strengthened his project, as Hartmire
suggests; they also slowly eroded it.
Through the hard postwar years, farm-
workers needed a political and cultural
leader. Chavez’s faith helped make his
ethical and organizational ambitions
clear. But he also aspired to be a spir-
itual leader, and his efforts there had
less stirring effects. Workers, in the
end, already had a holy figure they
could trust.T
he United Farm Workers is now
a shadow of the union that Chavez,
in his finest hour, led to glory in the
fields. Its membership lingers at a frac-
tion of its peak constituency, and much
of its essential work remains undone.
“The conditions for farmworkers today
are unfortunately very much as they’ve
been throughout the decades,” Arturo
Rodriguez, the current president, tells
Perez. Pawel’s account suggests that
Chavez disserved his cause, by failing
to strengthen and preserve what he’d
created. Yet his work, even now, reaches
beyond the union’s fate.
Chavez died in 1993, possibly of an
arrhythmia precipitated by fasting. At
his request, he was buried in a casket
of unvarnished pine. Fifty thousand
mourners paid tribute. Pawel is fair on
the subject of Chavez’s broader leg-
acy: “The good outweighed the bad,”
she agrees. But Perez’s film frames his
importance more acutely. Though the
documentary includes glosses on Cha-vez’s organizational purges and his
Synanon interlude, it is mostly flat-
tering, emphasizing his contributions
to Chicano culture. “The conscious-
ness and pride that were raised by our
union are alive and thriving inside
millions of young Hispanics who will
never work on a farm,” Chavez said
in a 1984 address that closes the film.
“If it could happen in the fields, it
could happen anywhere—in the cit-
ies, in the court, in the city councils,
in the state legislatures.”
In the vernacular of rights and op-
portunity, we often speak of ceilings:
limits on how high a person can ex-
pect to rise before barriers intervene
and everything beyond appears mys-
terious and obscure. When Chavez
started organizing, Chicano farmwork-
ers were trapped in a claustrophobic
space: poor and voiceless at work, out
of range of cities and their power, end-
lessly replaceable. Chavez knocked
through this ceiling, but he did some-
thing more important, too. He brought
into focus the bright, dizzy world of
life beyond. In his wake, it was fath-
omable that a dark-skinned field worker
could earn urban esteem, break bread
with governors and Kennedys and movie
stars, fall victim to the grand delusions
of his age, and take great leaps and tum-
bles in the public eye. The barriers were
gone; the system, for the first time,
flowed upward. The original subtitle
of Luna’s movie may have been more
apt than the filmmaker realized. Chavez
set out to be a moral leader, but, by
the end of his life, that possibility had
faded, and he had ended up something
more interesting and compromised:
an American hero.