Hi. I wanted to send something about Cesar Chavez that suggested why he was so important to the Farmworker struggle and has become such a beloved icon. I'd felt it personally, since 1965, but words failed, especially in talking to people who hadn't lived through the period. So, I called my old friend, Jerry Kay, who left his job at the Ash Grove to work with the UFW (good people did things like that, then), headed the Florida boycott, helped initiate housing for retired farmworkers and actually spent a year or so working in the fields. I knew he'd collected lots of tracts and memorabilia, but needed it quick and he read me the passage below, which he'd written for the book he may someday finish. It's key, actually, to Cesar's power; intimate identification, visionary courage to struggle for the betterment of his people, with a silver thread to their souls that inspired their own engagement. Check it out. Ed
What was Cesar Chavez like around the campesinos and how did they feel about him? What was his charisma? Here is a description of a visit by Cesar to Salinas in 1972. The writer was a UFW organizer from 1969-1975. An excerpt from a book in progress, a memoir about the farm worker's union. By Jerry Kay, Santa Cruz, Ca. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cesar Chavez was due to arrive at the Salinas UFW hiring hall the next day. Several women still dressed in flannel shirts, bandanas half-covering their faces and work gloves tucked under their arms-I recognized from the wrapping machine crews -came to the hiring hall to ask us whether they could prepare a proper feast of, say, mol� y arroz, frijoles, frutas. Well, that would be nice, we said; but we do not know exactly when he would arrive, or whether there would be time to eat before the junta grande. And I asked. "You know that Cesar is a vegetarian-how do you say that in espa�ol, El Cesar no com� carne?" That did not matter they responded. For such an important occasion, you have to have food that will make Cesar understand how much we respect him and the union, right? Besides, these women said, they had heard that the women from the strawberry ranch and the ladies from other crews were busily planning and preparing their dishes for this event. So of course, the women of the company that has just signed the new contract, the contract that Cesar is coming to Salinas to celebrate, must prepare a small banquet, corecto? The morning before Cesar was to come I noticed something. The alternating group of workers who liked to hang out around the hiring hall undertook the task of spiffing the place up. They mopped the floors, cleaned the bathrooms, picked up and threw away any trash and empty beer bottles near the parking lot. They straightened up the union 'alter', brushing any cobwebs from the picture of La Virgen de Guadalupe, from portraits of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The neatly stacked the folding chairs and positioned the meeting tables. I heard them chatter about about what they would like to tell Cesar or have him see when he got there. "Quando viene Cesar.." They would all start to say, and then, "Quando viene Cesar, he needs to know how D'Arrigo is still screwing us lettuce crews by putting us in fields too picked over to harvest for any money." "Quando viene Cesar, he needs to tell the officials to give us in Campo McCallum a permanent lease so they don't try and kick us out again." "Quando viene Cesar, we will tell him for you, that here in la oficina, that you need more help." He showed up in the afternoon, in a boxy Checker ex-taxi-cab. Cesar bought it used as his 'official' union automobile. There was not a hint of breeze or fog and the sun glared like a magnifying glass. The small contingent of farm workers who usually stood a few at a time inside the hiring hall and outside in the small parking lot had swelled to a grand contingent, holding red flags with black eagles, the flags and their shirts speckled with Huelga and Boycott buttons. When the Checker cab pulled up the group parted and pointed to the space they had left open, and yelled, "Viva Cesar Chavez!" As Cesar emerged from the car, the top of his jet black head of hair just barely above the roof, they surrounded him and began the huelga clap, slowly in unison, speeding up to a grand crescendo. Cesar, breaking into a relaxed smile joined in with them. He wore a simple short-sleeve button shirt with black chino pants, white socks and dark shoes. He looked thin, but not as skinny and haggard as the pictures I had seen of him during his fast in Arizona. We all regularly asked about Cesar 's health and appearance to anyone who had seen him. How did Cesar look? Thin, heavy? He tended normally to the heavy side even for his small frame; and in the early union days, before his first fast in 1968, he used to smoke heavily and drink lots of sodas. Several campesinos proudly entered the hall alive with more anxiously-waiting campesinos, the aromas of savory dishes, and stacks of tortillas and a few buzzing flies, and announced that Cesar had arrived. They held the door open for him, but Cesar, flanked by a couple of bodyguards minus his two German Shepherds, 'Boycott' and 'Huelga', did not immediately walk in like a king or emperor to his field fortress. No, he stood around, first outside on the sidewalk and chatted. He asked how the work was going this season, and he listened as they told him. He asked how the contracts were going, and listened even more closely. He asked their names, knowing quite a few and shook hands, embracing some and they did likewise. He told a joke about the struggle between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless where the powerless use the vanity of the rich to best them; and the people laughed while he giggled. The cameras came out, the workers asking to take their picture with him, or of Cesar with their kids. He accommodated, then called for his tall shaggy-haired bodyguard, to go back to the car and fetch his camera. He strung the 35mm around his neck and started snapping photos of the members of his union between their short chats. I stood there watching how he connected with them as familia; that's what Cesar was-like a brother, un hermano, or a close cousin, un primo, or perhaps for others, un compadre. Of course, to everyone there he was the leader who, as one campesinos told me, could lead them away from broken dreams. But I wondered if Moses led all those people through that desert hell for all those years to the Promised Land with such an easy grace? No, I thought as I watched from the side. You could not train someone to be like Cesar, or pay any great actor to imitate his character and somehow fake that manner of rapport. Impossible. For all his humbleness, he had star quality. He knew it, and knew how to play the central role, like he was doing right now, like the brother just coming back from the war. After the drive from the La Paz up in the Tehachapi hills, then being greeted by the crowd, it was like he had come home. I saw how he was so damned comfortable among the campesinos. No matter how far he had come from the Santa Clara prune orchards of 1952, nor how much power he had amassed,nor how well-known he had become, his heart was un corazon campesino. And watching Cesar out in the hiring hall parking lot on that poor little street in Salinas, sharing hugs and handshakes and stories and jokes in colloquial Spanish and taking snapshots, I understood what I felt, that he was authentic. He was familia. Here, we're his Salinas familia. Tonight, after the big rally in the high school football stadium where he will speak about winning more contracts and defeating anti-campesino legislation, he'll go to San Jose to see his mother and father, brother and sisters. Oh, he'll kick back and relax with them, but I'd be damned if he wouldn't have them up in the morning-his sisters and cousins over in SanJo, all pulling together, griping and bitching of course, but going door-to-door, making sure all of their neighbors and compadres are registered to vote. Because that's what we do, all of us familia. I think of Cesar, departing in his car, cruising into the night along Highway 101 that cuts up and down and around the California coast. Cesar knows this road, I figured, almost as well as he knows the face of Helen, his wife. He has traveled it and Highway 99 to the east, too, so many times, the good and bad, and across every smaller bisecting and connecting road leading from a chain of small farm towns to big California cities' of dreams. Since his youth he's done it in jalopies and trucks and maybe even sometimes thumbing, wearing out shoe leather while big trucks loaded with fresh produce rumble on by. For twenty years as a migrant worker and for twenty years as an organizer skipping from town to town. You get to meet a lot of people, see a lot of places. And now wherever he goes there are familia. They live in small shacks and labor camps, run roadside caf�s and small town grocery stores. They're in middle class neighborhood homes with kids' bikes on the lawn and in dusty storefront offices hung with register to vote and boycott posters. They work along the field furrows and in lofty offices, teach and study in colleges, and refuse to unload non-union grapes and lettuce at produce terminals. I thought of Dolores Huerta, too, ever-moving and how the road is her home. Like Cesar, she knows these highways and every big city and little town better than any California governor or senator, or any traveling salesman, and I grew envious. One day, I think, I'll talk them into writing a travel guidebook about the California they know like no one else. And I'm sure that Cesar has listened to all the dreams of all the people who have only dreams, in all the cities, along all these roads; and perhaps he has dreamed the biggest of them all. He departed from Salinas along 101, leaving us with not only dreams, but hope, and not only hope, but a plan-and he took his plan to another town and another. And I didn't even wonder then, was it only a dream, after all? *** 7th Annual Cesar Chavez Walk LA 4/2 Join the Chavez Family, Students, Elected Officials, Hollywood Celebrities and Community Members as We Celebrate the Life and Legacy of Cesar Chavez! Registration at 8am, Program 9am and Walk follows. Information Fair and entertainment immediately following the walk Some of the hottest Mexican@/Chicano musicians will be making their mark and honoring Chavez Day. We hope to see you there! Help us Honor the 40th Anniversary of the Historic Delano Grape Strike Sat. April 2, 2005, 8 a.m. East Los Angeles College 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez Monterey Park, CA For more information call: 323-722-0118 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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