Marc Cooper: Tthe Fate of Cesar Chavez's Dream (review of 'The Union of Their Dreams')
[Los Angeles-based writer and author Marc Cooper is director of Annenberg Digital News at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. ]
In the midst of a searing heat wave in the summer of 2005, three Mexican-born California farmworkers succumbed to the relentless sun within a few weeks of each other. Outraged local community groups, some with roots in but no longer affiliated with the legendary United Farm Workers union, organized a protest march and rally in the gritty town of Arvin, in California’s Central Valley.
At the last minute, a delegation from the UFW more or less commandeered the event from the original organizers. I was there reporting on the conditions in California’s fields (for a piece that would be published few weeks later in the L.A. Weekly) when I saw the UFW arrive. Accompanied by a caravan of shiny vans, with a high-tech mobile broadcast unit along from one of the union-run radio stations, UFW members in trademark red-and-black T-shirts disembarked from a couple of buses and joined the crowd assembled in a church patio.
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. The farmworkers were dusty and rail-thin and mostly young men dressed in jeans and work shirts. Many, if not most, were fairly recent border-hoppers from the impoverished Mexican state of Oaxaca. And most of them were Mixtec Indians who spoke choppy Spanish. The UFW members, by contrast, were older, clearly middle-class, many of them Chicanos, many of them college-educated, thick around the middle and wearing neatly pressed chinos.
As one of their leaders used a bullhorn to shout “Viva La Causa! Viva Cesar Chavez!” many of the heat-weary farmworkers only politely clapped or just stood unmoved.
Among those who have worked as California farmworker advocates, or who have done any reporting among such advocates over the last decade or so, there’s a well-known and grim joke: Ask almost any farmworker today just who is Cesar Chavez and the answer is that he’s a great boxer—Julio Cesar Chavez, that is.
If one needed any proof of the waning influence of Chavez’s UFW, he or she would have to look no further than a momentous union election held shortly after this rally at the giant Giumarra vineyards. Even though the union had had one of its first contracts with the massive grower and was riding the crest of anger over the recent heat-related deaths (so dire that even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger imposed an emergency order to give some relief to fieldworkers), the UFW was soundly defeated in a slap-dash drive to reunionize the Giumarra workers...
... The real problems begin, however, when in the mid-1970s then (and most likely future) Gov. Jerry Brown allies with the UFW and ushers into life the most advanced farm labor legislation and regulatory agency in America—the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
Just when the decks are cleared for Chavez to push full steam ahead in organizing his union on an unprecedented even playing field, he balks. Moreover, he seems to sink into a paranoid depression and become prone to unpredictable and unprovoked tirades and lashing out at the closest of friends, suddenly branded as traitors.
Pawel can’t answer the central enigma surrounding Chavez—his true state of mind and motivation. No one can. Whether he was, as one aide put it, “a little crazy,” or whether he was more a utopian visionary or a Christian ascetic, or a simple megalomaniac, he told everybody around him he was definitely not interested in building one more “business union.” And that’s the theme Pawel repeatedly circles back to. Every time history offered him a choice between building a vigorous union or dreaming up a more amorphous social movement, Chavez always chose the latter. At least verbally...
Read entire article at Truthdig
In the midst of a searing heat wave in the summer of 2005, three Mexican-born California farmworkers succumbed to the relentless sun within a few weeks of each other. Outraged local community groups, some with roots in but no longer affiliated with the legendary United Farm Workers union, organized a protest march and rally in the gritty town of Arvin, in California’s Central Valley.
At the last minute, a delegation from the UFW more or less commandeered the event from the original organizers. I was there reporting on the conditions in California’s fields (for a piece that would be published few weeks later in the L.A. Weekly) when I saw the UFW arrive. Accompanied by a caravan of shiny vans, with a high-tech mobile broadcast unit along from one of the union-run radio stations, UFW members in trademark red-and-black T-shirts disembarked from a couple of buses and joined the crowd assembled in a church patio.
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. The farmworkers were dusty and rail-thin and mostly young men dressed in jeans and work shirts. Many, if not most, were fairly recent border-hoppers from the impoverished Mexican state of Oaxaca. And most of them were Mixtec Indians who spoke choppy Spanish. The UFW members, by contrast, were older, clearly middle-class, many of them Chicanos, many of them college-educated, thick around the middle and wearing neatly pressed chinos.
As one of their leaders used a bullhorn to shout “Viva La Causa! Viva Cesar Chavez!” many of the heat-weary farmworkers only politely clapped or just stood unmoved.
Among those who have worked as California farmworker advocates, or who have done any reporting among such advocates over the last decade or so, there’s a well-known and grim joke: Ask almost any farmworker today just who is Cesar Chavez and the answer is that he’s a great boxer—Julio Cesar Chavez, that is.
If one needed any proof of the waning influence of Chavez’s UFW, he or she would have to look no further than a momentous union election held shortly after this rally at the giant Giumarra vineyards. Even though the union had had one of its first contracts with the massive grower and was riding the crest of anger over the recent heat-related deaths (so dire that even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger imposed an emergency order to give some relief to fieldworkers), the UFW was soundly defeated in a slap-dash drive to reunionize the Giumarra workers...
... The real problems begin, however, when in the mid-1970s then (and most likely future) Gov. Jerry Brown allies with the UFW and ushers into life the most advanced farm labor legislation and regulatory agency in America—the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
Just when the decks are cleared for Chavez to push full steam ahead in organizing his union on an unprecedented even playing field, he balks. Moreover, he seems to sink into a paranoid depression and become prone to unpredictable and unprovoked tirades and lashing out at the closest of friends, suddenly branded as traitors.
Pawel can’t answer the central enigma surrounding Chavez—his true state of mind and motivation. No one can. Whether he was, as one aide put it, “a little crazy,” or whether he was more a utopian visionary or a Christian ascetic, or a simple megalomaniac, he told everybody around him he was definitely not interested in building one more “business union.” And that’s the theme Pawel repeatedly circles back to. Every time history offered him a choice between building a vigorous union or dreaming up a more amorphous social movement, Chavez always chose the latter. At least verbally...