Cesar Chavez’s 36-Day Fast and UFW Boycott of Grapes

Richard Rodriguez is a hopeless aesthete. For him, art is what matters, not politics. His account of Cesar Chavez’s fast strains to be poetic at any cost and in the end completely misrepresents a people and their struggle.

This cannot be attributed solely to an Ivy League education nor to Rodriguez’s undernourished memory, a memory candid enough to recall that in the 1960s the Harvard scholarship boy felt “embarrassed” by the union leader. Rather it is the result of a profound inability to understand political action as practiced by groups of activist.

Rodriguez completely misses the point. He forgets that Chavez’s fast was undertaken to protest the use of pesticides, and so drifts off into an “arty” stupor: “I saw the lovely peregrinations of crop-dusting planes in the morning light . . . . “ Enough of Rodriguez’s banalities!

GEORGE MARISCAL

Cardiff