Promoting Chavez

TEN YEARS AGO, while trying to galvanize support for his fledging farmworkers' union, Cesar Chavez struck upon the idea of a mass march on the California state capitol. As Chavez said later to Jacques Levy, a former New York Times reporter, "We wanted to use the march for calling attention to the strike [against Schenley liquors] and we wanted to take our case to Governor Pat Brown. But also we wanted to take the strike to workers outside the Delano area, because they weren't too enthused...Equally important to me--and I don't know how many shared my thoughts on this--was this was an excellent way of training ourselves to endure the long, long struggle, which by this time had become evident. So this was a penance more than anything else." Chavez, too busy before the march to prepare himself, began the 300-mile walk with no rest and an old pair of shoes. Not surprisingly, the intense pain of marching on blistered feet put him on his back and almost killed him.

This incident, while somewhat extreme, is indicative of Chavez's fanatic devoption to the farmworkers' cause and of his attitude toward his own role in that struggle. Chavez has a mystical belief in the power of sacrifice. Through a subtle transformation of traditional Latin machismo into an aggressive, masochistic non-violence, Chavez drives himself on to take gratuitous risks, represses emotions, and lives with pain. And this all in the name of penance for the redemption that one day will bless the UFW. As he puts it, "To be a man is to suffer for others." After years of suffering and organizing, Chavez has become something of a Christ figure to his thousands of followers and, perhaps, to himself. In an interview with Levy, Chavez expressed his admiration for Gandhi.

'He believed that truth was vindicated, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself. That belief comes from Christ himself, the sermon on the Mount, and further back from the Jewish and Hindu traditions. There's no question that by setting such an example, you get others to do it. That is the real essence, but that is difficult. That's what separates ordinary men from great men. And we're all pretty ordinary men in those things."

Unfortunately, Levy in Autobiography of La Causa has failed to bring out many of the latent elements in Chavez's personality. Levy's sympathy for Chavez and his cause (La Causa) has kept him from either asking Chavez the hard questions that would develop these themes or developing them on his own in a critical perspective.

Levy went to California five years ago when Chavez's organizing efforts began to attract national attention. Unlike most other journalists, however, Levy stayed and followed Chavez for five years through negotiations, marches, fasts, strikes--through, that is, the adolescence of the United Farm Workers Union.

DURING THAT TIME, he kept scrupulous notes and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Chavez, the other leaders of the movement, state legislators, Teamster organizers, and even "growers"--the term used in California for the captains of agribusiness. He has written a long sympathetic book describing Chavez's early childhood in Arizona, his family's deprivation during the Depression and flight to California, and Chavez's adult life as a union organizer.

Levy's book is not a biography, not an autobiography, not a history and yet is an intimate and sometimes insightful story of a man and his union. As historical reportage, the book fails because of its lack of critical distance and inattention to detail. As biography it fails because only small sections of the book are written by Levy himself. The book is closest to autobiography although Chavez had no say over what to include. Form should, of course, be wedded to function; the ambiguity in the form of Levy's book reveals a certain confusion on the author's part over just what his book is really about. The constant switching of focus, from one interviewee to another, is annoying and detracts from a clean development of the narrative.

One is left with the suspicion that Levy rushed the book out to aid the UFW in the crucial farm worker elections now underway in the California fields. The story of the election struggle would have been a more logical stopping point for a book about Chavez and the union since the results may determine the fate of the movement. But what's worse is that Levy has thrown five years of impressive research into a book designed to promote Chavez rather than explain him.