The Shame of Cesar Chavez
These are Chavez’s greatest achievements, and they are reasons to revere his prowess as a labor leader. Unfortunately, Chavez didn’t see himself as a mere labor leader; he sought a more intangible legacy, and, in a way, he got it. Today Chavez is remembered as an exemplary Chicano, but schoolchildren can be forgiven for not knowing exactly why. The Times story introduces Chavez as “one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement.” But although Chavez did some civil rights work, that wasn’t his principal task. Indeed, as time wore on, Chavez’s task got harder to identify as he worked to create a cult of personality.
It’s widely known but seldom acknowledged that Chavez seriously botched the job of actually managing a labor union. Miriam Pawel documents this extensively in her books The Union of Their Dreams (2009) and The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (2014), both of which I reviewed, along with the biopic Cesar Chavez, for The New York Review of Books in October 2015. Chavez was uninterested in the day-to-day work entailed in running a union—negotiating contracts, managing hiring halls, creating a credit union, etc.—yet he wouldn’t delegate that work to anyone else. The result was administrative chaos. His grape strike brought growers to the table, but by September 1974, The New York Times was reporting that the UFW retained “only a few fragments of the collective bargaining power it won in 1970.”
Instead of building on his organizing, legislative, and legal victories for farmworkers, Chavez got increasingly interested in being a sort of cult leader. He moved the UFW’s headquarters from Delano, near the farmworkers, to an abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium in the Tehachapi Mountains that UFW employees mockingly called “Magic Mountain.” He fell under the influence of Charles Dederich, founder of a creepy 1970s cult called Synanon, and likewise sought to make the UFW more like Hare Krishna and the Unification Church. He sent thugs (“cesarchavistas”) south of the border to beat up “wetbacks” (his term) who were trying to migrate to the United States and, he feared, take UFW members’ jobs. One by one, Chavez either expelled or bullied his closest advisers into leaving as, increasingly, he became obsessed with the idea that they were plotting against him.