Mayor Follows Instinct

From Brookhurst Street, just a couple hundred yards away, you couldn’t hear the din. But once you pulled off the street and drove into the Garden Grove business complex that includes a Vons supermarket, it was like stepping into one of those frenetic fight clubs the movies have made famous.

Loud, boisterous, excitable. It all produced a sound and the fury that signified something, made more intense by how tightly packed the crowd of more than 1,000 in the parking lot was. At 2 in the afternoon on a sunny Southern California day, it was an unexpected scene of emotion and, in an odd way, celebration.

Or, as they say in the union business, solidarity.

You could see getting caught up in it, and that’s where Anaheim City Councilman Richard Chavez enters our narrative.

Chavez, appointed mayor pro tem just last week, was arrested Saturday afternoon along with 14 other demonstrators for blocking the Vons entrance. The group locked arms in a planned protest of the strike and lockout that have affected three major grocery chains since October.

Getting arrested isn’t how most mayors pro tem celebrate their first week, but Chavez was unapologetic Tuesday. “[The union] has been struggling with this for 100 days, and they had contacted me and asked if I would be interested in participating,” he said.

Because he knew a family badly hurt by the strike and because he thought his public profile might draw attention to the situation, Chavez agreed to join in the civil disobedience.

Some constituents aren’t thrilled that he willingly broke the law (Chavez says he has gotten a dozen complaints), but it’s just as likely others will applaud him.

So, of course, we all want to know: What did his first act of civil disobedience feel like?

“During the entire time I was there, mostly I felt sad,” Chavez, 48, said.

“So sad that we had to get to this point. Looking into the crowd, I could see the disappointment in their faces. Also I could see and hear and feel the desperation. If this continues, it’s going to turn out to be more and more angry.”

No adrenaline rush?

“I was surprised,” he said. “Even though there was a lot of noise and you could feel the tension, for me it was different. I felt very calm. I felt like I was supposed to be doing what I was doing.”

Chavez joins a long tradition of civil disobedience but insists he wasn’t trying to pump up his credentials as a man of the people. And while acknowledging that it’s impossible to separate political considerations from such things, he says he didn’t factor them in.

“Honestly, I felt enough wasn’t being done to resolve the situation, and families are just suffering tremendously. It was hard for me to say no. I felt an obligation to families in our community.... Politically, in Orange County, it’s maybe not the smartest thing to do, but I didn’t get elected to worry about not getting reelected.”

Chavez says he asked a few people beforehand and all advised him not to risk arrest. The city attorney, however, told him it wouldn’t jeopardize his council status.

“I felt uncomfortable with

the thought I was going to obstruct traffic or shoppers from getting to the store,” he said, “but knowing how this particular situation was going to occur, it wouldn’t be that intrusive to the general public. With that, I felt very comfortable being involved.”

As director of development for a shelter for abused children and their mothers, Chavez is used to seeing sadness in people’s faces.

That was the theme he sounded again Tuesday when asked how the events of Saturday looked from his rearview mirror. “I still feel sad,” he said. “I drove by a grocery store and saw some people on the picket line. I want this thing to end.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at

dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.