What will be remembered is Chavez as he seemed-and perhaps really was-in the 1960s: a secular saint in the tradition of Gandhi, whose autobiography was one of his inspirations. Chavez, too, was a vegetarian and an ascetic-even in later years, no one accused him of a secret taste for decadent luxuries-but unlike the upper-caste lawyer Gandhi, he didn’t have to impersonate one of the dispossessed. In 1937, when he was 10, his family was forced out of Arizona and into “Grapes of Wrath”-era California as migrant workers. They lived in tents and labor camps; Chavez never finished high school and once said he’d passed through 65 different grade schools. These hard-won credentials made him a natural choice to head the newly founded NFWA, which organized poorly paid Mexican-American migrant workers; his personality helped, too. “He was smarter and nicer and more charismatic and cuter” than the rest of the early leadership, a former union official told The Village Voice’s Jeff Coplon. The soft-spoken Chavez had an infectious smile and a leader’s indispensable gift: “When he talked to you,” a former aide recalled, “he let you know you were the whole world for him.”
La huelga-the strike-began in 1965, when the fledgling NFWA joined an AFLCIO affiliate striking against grape growers in Delano, Calif. Soon mainstream labor leaders and New Leftists alike were on the picket lines; when the strike failed, a nationwide grape boycott kicked in. In 1968 Chavez began the first of his celebrated fasts: 25 days, to dramatize “the pain and suffering of the farm workers.” By 1969, 12 percent of Americans were refusing to buy grapes-and 140 out of 200 Delano-area growers had gone under. In 1970 the growers signed with the union. This was the high point. In 1971 Chavez moved headquarters from Delano to a remote hill-country compound-an indication, some thought, of his own increasing remoteness. In 1973 growers signed contracts with the Teamsters, not the UFW. With Jerry Brown as California governor, the union had a brief resurgence in the mid-’70s; by the early ’80s the UFW was in disarray and membership plummeted. The farm workers were a little better off-and still at the bottom of the labor market.
“There is no life apart, from the union,” Chavez once said. “If the union falls apart when I am gone, I will have been a miserable failure.” This is how saints judge their lives-and why they’re sometimes hard to distinguish from tyrants. Most of us would settle for a few years of heroism, ending in some modest but lasting gains. But the Cesar Chavezes of the world know you don’t settle: you give all, and get what you get.
