Render Unto Cesar

I first came across the name Cesar Chavez in Peter Matthiessen's book, "Sai Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution." It was 1972 and I was an idealistic and sheltered malcontent living in the farmlands of Indiana. Matthiessen was my favorite writer. And through the magic of his lucid prose, Chavez became a heroic figure for me. Right up there with Che, Roberto Clemente, and Muhammad Ali. They were four idols of my lost youth.

Here's how Matthiessen described Chavez back in that turbulent summer of 1969:

"The man who has threatened California has an Indian's bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open smile that is shy and friendly; at moments he is beautiful, like a dark seraph. He is five feet six inches tall, and since his 25-day fast the previous winter, has weighed no more than 150 pounds. Yet the word "slight" does not properly describe him. There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted, an effect of density; at the same time, he walks as lightly as a fox. One feels immediately that this man does not stumble, and that to get where he is going he will walk all day."

I was 14 when I helped to organize the grape and lettuce boycotts in Indianapolis. We were not an overwhelming force by any means. There were five or six of us at most. We targeted a different store each weekend. On my first picket, I parked myself in front of a Kroger's on the south side of Indianapolis--the albino suburb of a city that's whiter than Michael Jackson. I harangued housewives about the conditions of farmworkers on their way in and on the way out. They looked at me as if I was a lunatic, horrified at the prospect that I was one of their neighbor's children. Would one of their own come home one day in a similar fever?

They had good cause to think I'd gone around the bend. I'd never met a migrant farmworker. I had only one Hispanic friend. I didn't really know the first thing about the struggle. But I'd been seduced by the Chavez mystique. I heard him speak in Indianapolis in 1970, mourning the assassination of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. I followed his 1972 fast, which lasted for 25 miserable days, with the devotion of a soap opera addict.

After about 30 minutes the store exhausted its patience with my pestering of its shoppers. The sheriff arrived. He told me to pack up and leave. I refused. He carted me off to jail, locked me in the bathroom so as not to put me with "the drunks and child abusers" and called my parents. It was my first arrest. There would be others in the months and years ahead. The usual story of an obnoxious child. Thank you, Cesar Chavez, for giving me my start in a life of political crime.

Chavez was born in 1927 on the family ranch near Yuma, Arizona. His grandfather had fled the shackles of peonage in the 1880s and homesteaded this tract of Sonoran desert.

When he turned 18, Chavez enlisted in the Navy, serving in the western Pacific through the end of the war. When he got out he went to work in the dusty vineyards of Delano, where he met Helen Fabela. They married in 1948. Later that year, Chavez helped organize his first strike, protesting meager wages, cruel bosses, and other inhumane conditions in the fields. The strike lasted for nearly a week, but eventually police and the field bosses bludgeoned the striking laborers back to work.

But Chavez had made a name for himself. In 1952, he was recruited to become an organizer with the Community Service Organization, the civil rights group started by Saul Alinsky. By 1958, he rose to the position of national director of the CSO. For the next five years he pushed hard for the organization to take on he task of organizing California's exploding population of migrant workers, ruthlessly exploited by the vineyards and vegetable growers. But the board of the CSO wanted Chavez to stick with more urban issues.

Frustrated, he resigned in 1962, went back to Delano, and founded the National Farm Workers of America.

The first major strike against the grape growers occurred on Sept. 8, 1965, when Filipino workers in Delano walked out of the fields to picket for better wages. A week later Chavez and his young union joined the strike. Chavez, along with the firebrand Dolores Huerta, launched a series of marches on the state capital of Sacramento. By May of 1966, more than 10,000 people followed Chavez to the statehouse.

I lost touch with Chavez's work through much of the 1980s. Then, shortly after we moved to Oregon, I ran into him at a migrant worker rally in the Willamette Valley. He looked tired, the years of ceaseless struggle, the internal battles and fasting had taken its toll. Another boycott of grapes had been launched, this one targeted at the growers' indiscriminate use of pesticides as workers labored in the fields under toxic clouds. The predictable results: childhood cancers and public indifference.

A few years later Chavez was dead, felled by a heart attack while he slept in his hotel room in San Luis, Arizona--only miles from where he was born. He was waiting to testify yet one more time against the vegetable growers.

A few days later more than 50,000 people took to the streets to mourn him at his funeral in Delano. One of them was the actor and environmentalist, Ed Begley, Jr., who helped carry Chavez's coffin down the streets of Delano.

Begley, who grew up in Van Nuys as the son of Hollywood actor Ed Begley, followed Chavez's work much as I had as a teenager. Then in 1985 Begley ran into Chavez by accident.

"I was at a coffee shop on Sepulveda having a bowl of oatmeal and a guy pulled up in a car with another," Begley recalls. "I thought that guy looks a lot like Cesar Chavez, but I knew it couldn't be him. It was a tiny little car. There was only one guy, no entourage. There was no security team that any labor leader of the time would have had. This was a guy like Jimmy Hoffa, a big labor leader. But when he walked by, there was no mistake. It was Cesar Chavez. I walked up to him and asked him if the grape boycott was still on. He said, `Yes, because of the pesticides.' I offered to help and he said, `Give me your number.'"

In 1987, Begley began working with the United Farm Workers. Ten years have passed since Chavez' death, and his life story has yet to be told on film, TV, or the stage. Perhaps this is not an entirely unhappy circumstance given the ludicrous nature of the usual Hollywood biopic.

But now Begley comes along with Cesar and Ruben, a musical tribute to the life Chavez and his friend Ruben Salazar, the Los Angeles Times reporter who was slain by LA Sheriff's Deputy Tom Wilson in 1970.

Cesar and Ruben is a discussion between ghosts. It opens in some purgatorial bar soon after Chavez's death. Salazar leads Chavez back through his past--and Chavez returns the favor for Salazar, a man worthy of his own film--with a string of popular song and dance routines to keep things moving along. Begley skillfully deploys songs by Ruben Blades, Santana, Sting, Don Henley, and David Crosby to speak to the struggles of racism, cop abuse, and fieldwork: tough issues to depict in a musical. In fact, Cesar and Ruben provides the first beneficial use of an Enrique Iglesias song I've yet heard.

Begley's play flirts with hagiography, and navigates around Chavez's unsavory ties to the Synanon cult, and its mad leader Charles Dederich, but never fully surrenders to it. That's a good thing. Chavez's life and career are instructive, but not unblemished. There were plenty of wrong turns, internal feuds, and petty betrayals. He neglected his family and nearly destroyed his union. It's the familiar story of the destructive monomania of the professional activist.

But you can't discount Cesar Chavez's accomplishment. Over his three decades of work, there were fasts, arrests, strikes, setbacks, nasty battles with the Teamsters, and one boycott after another. The union won some exceptional victories, including the replacement of employment contractors with union hiring halls, union contracts negotiating safety and sanitary conditions in farm labor camps, banning discrimination in employment and sexual harassment of female workers, and the banning of the infamous short-handled hoe that maimed generations of farmworkers. It's a record few labor leaders can match.

Sai Si Puedes. Escape if you can. Words to live by.