Chavez in Hollywood: A Roundtable: Cesar Chavez

Books and the Arts repression of people holding ideas that threatened the exploitive system and what would become Chávez’s autocratic rule. We get no sense of this at all. The movie ends in 1970, with a triumphant Chávez and joyous farmworkers celebrating the historic victory of union recognition. As the screen grows dark, a message appears—Chávez won the first law granting farmworkers the right to organize—a reference to California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975. With no mention of the wretched conditions in the fields today, of deep and continuing exploitation and injustices, we are left to assume there is a legal mechanism for ensuring justice. A savior came and sacrificed to ensure the oppressed shall be free. Sound familiar? Author Biography Bruce Neuburger is a longtime political, anti-war, and union activist. He worked ten years in the fields during the 1970s, drove a taxi in the 1980s, and, for the past twenty-eight years, has taught English at Adult Schools and community college. He is the author of the book Lettuce Wars and a supporter of Revolution newspaper. Reviewed by: Miriam Pawel DOI: 10.1177/1095796014545469 I have friends who cried watching Cesar Chavez, moved by the film’s scenes of MexicanAmerican farmworkers toiling under brutal conditions, championed by a soft-spoken leader who understood their pain. I appreciate the movie’s emotional resonance for Latinos and applaud the filmmaker’s sincere effort to educate a new generation about an improbable American hero who has all but disappeared from our collective memory. A biopic is entitled to bend truth in the interest of drama. But in this case, the actual events were far more dramatic than the simplified story depicted on the screen. A script that hewed closer to history could have touched a larger, 93 more diverse audience and given the movie far greater impact. By stripping away the diverse coalition and significant alliances that Chávez forged, the movie has no ability to show Chávez’s strategic brilliance. As director Diego Luna has said, Cesar Chavez is the family’s story, produced in consultation with César’s middle son, Paul, and the César Chávez Foundation, which he runs. The story César Chávez’s heirs choose to tell is simple and focuses on one man to the exclusion of almost everyone else who was crucial to the success of the farmworker movement in its early years. The problem is not that other people do not get credit; the movie is called Cesar Chavez. The problem is that the shallow script does the hero a disservice. By stripping away the diverse coalition and significant alliances that Chávez forged, the movie has no ability to show Chávez’s strategic brilliance. Instead of a grape boycott built with creativity and perseverance around an unconventional mix of Catholic farmworkers, Protestant ministers, radical students, and traditional labor leaders, we see Chávez walking alone through the streets of a foreign city and dumping grapes into the ocean. Instead of a carefully planned pilgrimage through the heart of California’s central valley—each nightly stop designed to build support, educate, and empower farmworkers—we see a spontaneous decision to march from Delano to Sacramento that begins when Chávez stares down police who block his way. Instead of a twenty-five-day fast that turned the opposition’s strength against them and made a hostile courthouse into farmworkers’ turf, we see a sacrifice presented with little explanation or context. An event that was pivotal in Chávez’s development as a leader and his rise as a national charismatic leader becomes just another scene. In the end, there is no way for a viewer to understand how victory was won, or what the signing of contracts in 1970 meant for farmworkers. We see the pain of work in the fields 94 but nothing of why a union was important or what a contract meant. There is certainly some value in a feel-good movie about a heroic Mexican-American who takes on the bad guys and wins. But the Chávez family’s insistence on a one-dimensional hero has backfired for years, robbing him of his complexity and his humanity. The movie is yet another example of a missed opportunity to paint Chávez as the deep, strategic thinker who catapulted la causa into the national spotlight more than four decades ago. Author Biography Miriam Pawel is a journalist and independent scholar who has spent the last nine years writing about farmworkers, the United Farm Workers union, and César Chávez. She is the author of The Crusades of César Chávez: A Biography (Bloomsbury 2014) and The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope and Struggle in César Chávez’s Farm Worker Movement (Bloomsbury 2009). She worked for twenty-five years as an award-winning reporter and editor for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. Reviewed by: Frank Bardacke DOI: 10.1177/1095796014545470 Hagiography, disdainfully dismissed by so many, is not altogether a bad thing. The cleanedup 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: New Labor Forum 23(3) “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. [The Chávez movie] is the Chávez children’s version of their dad and mom. 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. Author Biography Frank Bardacke is the author of Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the Copyright of New Labor Forum (Sage Publications Inc.) is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.