Cesar Chavez revisited

In Dolores Huerta's interview about the rapes she endured by her United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez, she explains:

"I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

She goes on:

“Cesar believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said. It was, she suggested, a reflection of something deeper. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.” 

And there it is. The New York Times expose [gift link] of Chavez's pedophilia, as well of his many infidelities to his long suffering wife Helen is a period piece. Read it; it captures a great deal about what one of the significant progressive heroes and movements of the 1960s and '70s was really like. 

But Chavez makes such an arresting villain that the Times piece obscures a truth of those times: pretty much all the men who saw themselves as heroes of history-defining movements -- for poor people, for peace, for justice -- blithely saw women as subordinate workers and sex objects, just as Dolores Huerta describes. 

There's a reason that Second Wave feminism was born among women inside the movements of the 1960s. Long days working in struggles for justice alongside men who could not be trusted to see and value our brains and humanity was bound to spark resistance.

And, moreover, it should be no surprise that a vibrant lesbian feminism also sprung up and came to include many movement women who might not have organized their sex lives around women if they hadn't gotten tired of being seen as conquests for movement men. Some, like me, found a natural home as lesbians; for others, bi-sexuality was a protest and an experiment, a liberating option.

Chavez was not unique in his time in his root-and-branch sexism and in being a sexual predator when opportunity came his way. 

• • •

Chavez was however unique in being a larger-than-life movement visionary who both moved mountains, metaphorically, and, very materially, stumbled over stones along the wayside. 

I worked for the United Farm Workers twice, briefly, first on the grape boycott in Boston in 1970-1971 and again in New York City in 1972. Later, when located in California, I reported on the UFW for the national Catholic Worker newspaper  and various alternative media through much of the 1970s and volunteered on the San Mateo County boycott. I was never anywhere near the center of the union/movement, just a peripheral staffer, supporter and observer.  

But that background gave me credibility on reporting trips to California's fields, talking with dozens of staffers and workers about their experiences with the union. When I visited strike sites or attended a mass rally, I could usually find a slightly disappointed staffer who was about to leave the union and could share the joys and contradictions that were life in "La Causa." Very little of those conversations found its way directly into my reporting, but I hope they informed a fairly honest picture of the struggle of the workers.

Years later, on this blog, when the LA Times was publishing one of its periodic exposés about the UFW, I wrote this:  

... in the 1960s and 70s, Cesar Chavez' United Farm Workers Union was a stirring, seething locus of social creativity, bound together by its founder's charisma. It was a multi-headed beast, providing structure and meaning to very different tendencies and constituencies.

• Most obviously, it was a labor union, organizing to win better wages and working conditions for agricultural workers.

• True to Chavez's roots in community organizing, it engaged whole communities with the struggle of the farmworkers for justice, especially settled Latinos who had escaped the migrant labor stream and put down roots in rural California.

• It ran a network of social services, clinics, a credit union, a gas station and more.

• It pioneered a creative tactic, the grape boycott, that carried what could have been a local California struggle to cities across the country and world, engaging literally millions with the well-being of farmworkers.

• The farmworkers' movement served as a catalyst and rallying point for the struggle for Brown people's civil rights in whole Southwest.

• It was also a beacon for Latino and Chicano cultural nationalism as a formerly muzzled segment of the population articulated its identity.

• The UFW attracted a stream of earnest, mostly white, mostly middle class, progressive people who learned class consciousness and organizing skills from the farmworkers and went on to work in labor, politics and communities all over the country.

• The movement incorporated the workers' Roman Catholic spirituality, marching to victory behind the Virgin of Guadalupe.

• Chavez also urged a philosophy of self-sacrificial non-violence, drawing on many traditions including those of Gandhi and Jesus.

• And I'm sure that other veterans of the movement could and would suggest more things the UFW was to its many adherents.

Nobody straddled all these tendencies but Cesar Chavez himself. Not surprisingly, as the movement grew, tensions between devoted workers who emphasized different parts of this complex package within the movement only increased. 

I still think that was a pretty accurate catalogue of characteristics of the classic period of the UFW, though looking back now, I'm very aware that once agricultural organizing stalled in the 1970s, Cesar led the union's leaders into his idiosyncratic explorations, in particular the "attack therapy" which was the Synanon Game. 

• • •

Contra what the Times article implies, in its peak years, the UFW was not in support of broad immigration reform or migrant laborers. The backbone of Chavez's union and movement was the class of settled Spanish-speaking Californians in the Central Valley who had long moved beyond their migrant roots. Their children were upwardly mobile and now constitute much of the political leadership of the state.

• • •

I chose the photo of Cesar here because it places him beside his admired role model, the Indian visionary and anti-colonial campaigner Mohandas Gandhi. Late in life, the Indian who had famously taken a vow of celibacy slept alongside young girls "to test, or further test, his conquest of sexual desire". As Dolores says, "I think it is an illness."