‘Other’ Chavez Didn’t Pull Punches Either

His name is Luis and he owns a little Mexican restaurant here in town and when his brother called to tell him Cesar Chavez had died, his heart sank. Here is why. Luis owns a second restaurant up California 99 in Fresno, in a neighborhood that has lost its luster. He has tried everything to attract customers. Mariachis. Free margaritas. Lunch-hour discounts.

Not long ago, he paid a couple thousand dollars for rights to a closed-circuit broadcast of a coming prizefight. One of the combatants is to be Julio Cesar Chavez, a popular young boxer. The idea is to show the fight at the bar, sit back and watch dollars fly into the cash register. For one confused moment, however, Luis thought he saw the money headed in another direction--out the window.

“I thought my brother was saying Cesar Chavez, the boxer, had died,” Luis recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, no.’ I didn’t realize he meant the former one, the other Cesar Chavez.”

No, the boxing world is secure. It was Cesar Chavez the former who died, the one who a quarter-century ago lit a fire in the vineyards around this little town. He died in his sleep Thursday in Arizona, and by Friday afternoon everyone here was telling their Cesar stories. Farm labor activists recalled a charismatic leader, the marches, the strikes, the boycotts. Farmers recalled, for public consumption, an earnest foe and then, speaking privately, eulogized in more bitter tones. None of the stories anyone told was fresh.

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Farm labor organizers were not new to the valley when Chavez came along. Dozens had come before, and dozens had gone, defeated. Chavez, though, was a product of the California ‘60s--a different place, a different time. Chavez could attract Kennedys. Chavez could deliver contracts. He ate a macrobiotic diet between his celebrated fasts and moved easily in his flannel shirts among movie stars. Even to people who never walked a furrow, Chavez was, in the lexicon of his time, cool. And he stuck.

For a time.

In the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s, Chavez could be seen as one of those rare individuals powerful enough to bring real change to the vast, complex machine works that is California agriculture. Then came the slide. “My father,” Paul Chavez said Friday, “knew what it was like to work hard all day and have nothing to show for it.” The son was speaking in another context, about Chavez’s early days as a migrant field hand. But to hear a lot of people tell it Friday, he also captured the sum of his father’s life: good effort, nothing to show for it.

This revision of the Chavez legacy was under way long before his death. For the last decade or so, the focus has been on the UFW’s utter retreat from the vineyards, the declining membership, the new obsession with computerized fund raising, the purges and defections and rumors of other strange doings in the compound up the mountain in Keene.

“Aren’t the conditions still pretty bad for farm workers?” I heard a reporter ask Paul Chavez outside the Keene headquarters Friday. It seemed more an accusation than a question, and Chavez let it go with a shrug.

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Let me tell my own Cesar Chavez story. It comes from the early 1970s, back when the movement was at its hottest. I worked summers at a feedlot. One of my co-workers was a young man named Aquapito Gomez. We called him Pete. I remember he had a barrel chest and a goatee and many horror stories about his family’s life in the fields. At noon we all would sit under a swamp cooler in a tiny cinder-block lunchroom and talk farm worker politics.

Pete would dominate these discussions. He would rage about lousy wages and short-handled hoes and inhumane treatment, about the need for Chavez and his union. What I remember most is the passionate, prideful way he would say his piece, puffing out that chest and speaking in a mottled, almost tearful voice of rage.

“We are men,” he would say. “We deserve dignity.”

I never had a doubt that every word came from his heart. And as I remember Pete, I wonder if post-mortem analysis about what Cesar Chavez did or did not accomplish in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley inevitably misses the point. This seemed to be about something more than contracts or chemical toilets, and maybe it wasn’t even about agriculture at all. What I do know is who gave Pete his voice. It was that other Cesar Chavez, the one who could not box.