Abstract
Hagiography, disdainfully dismissed by so many, is not altogether a bad thing. The cleaned-up account of the deeds of a hero can serve as a model of human possibility, a life we might emulate, an image we can use to better ourselves, even as we know the historical record has been bowdlerized and that no one could have been that good.
That is how the life of César Chávez is used, at least in California. The César Chávez movie now will be a part of that moral pedagogy, and the efficiency with which it has been put to use is impressive. Here in Watsonville, a farm town on California’s Central Coast, middle school students were taken to the movie and encouraged to write about it afterward. One local school had a “Heroes Day” with an enlarged movie poster as the backdrop of the stage on which retired farmworkers—“who had walked with César”—were honored. One of the middle school students, Ana Cárdenas Diaz, told me she “loved” the movie: “César was so determined. He fought so hard for his people.” Yes, he was and he did, and, for Ana, I did not have the slightest desire to complicate the matter.
But readers of New Labor Forum are not twelve-year-olds. And history has other uses besides moral uplift. If we look at César Chávez and the UFW with our eyes wide open, we can learn something about movements, unions, and heroes. César Chávez is an authentic Latino champion. He was the spiritual father of the Chicano Nation, the leader of a vast social movement, and the first Latino to play on the national political stage, where he remained true to his own bilingual, bicultural brilliance. When we honor him, we honor all that.
But Chávez was also a flawed unionist, whose union record is fraught with contradiction and difficulty, filled with betrayal and tragedy. His errors were many. He—and the people around him—built a union without locals: in the UFW, no worker can be elected a full-time union official. He—and most of the people around him—lost faith in farmworker power, and put their energy and resources into leveraging the support of their urban allies. He—and many of the people around him—denounced the undocumented, and thereby divided the farmworker community. And finally, he—personally—led a campaign against the rank-and-file leadership of his union, fatally weakening the UFW and setting it up for defeat in the grower offensive of the mid-1980s.
None of that was likely to be covered in the movie. This, after all, is the Chávez family movie. The main dramatic tension is between César, the too-busy father, and his disappointed son, Fernando. It is the Chávez children’s version of their dad and mom; their account of the family sacrifices that now help them justify, to themselves especially, the success of César Chávez, Inc.—while farmworkers continue to lose.