What Cesar Chavez’s Biographer Says Now

LOS ANGELES — Cesar Chavez’s reputation has been shattered by the sexual abuse allegations against him revealed this week.

Miriam Pawel, the journalist and historian of the farmworker movement, said that even before the blockbuster New York Times report, Chavez represented “a much more complex story than the hagiography” surrounding him for years.

While Pawel’s 2014 biography, “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez,” did not include his alleged abuse of underage girls or rape of movement co-leader Dolores Huerta, it was one of the first unvarnished looks at the labor rights leader, including darker chapters in his story.

Playbook spoke with Pawel about Chavez’s influence on California history — and where the movement he led stands now.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Chavez is so interwoven into California history and the Latino political class. How should we understand his lasting political influence in the state?

He had a somewhat rocky relationship with the Chicano movement at its height in the early years. He felt the Chicano movement was too radical and so on. But in his last years, especially in the early ’90s, he becomes a very important figure. I wrote at one point he was more important in the cities than he was in the fields because in the fields he’s not doing very much, but he’s a Chicano icon at that point. It’s just at the point where we’re heading into 1994 and Prop 187 and all of that. And there are students who fast because he fasted. That generation that comes of age in that period is very influenced by him and his legacy and the movement more broadly. Those people are mostly gone or off the scene at this point, and there's a newer generation.

Why aren’t there more icons in the pantheon of Latino leaders? Why are Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta so singular? 

Chavez, in particular, was really a very remarkable human being — in good ways and in bad ways. And the reason I wrote a biography was because nobody else had, even though he was dead for quite a while, and there was an enormous amount of material available. And the reason that other people hadn’t written it is that nobody wanted to write it because the people who knew more about him, including a lot of Chicano historians, knew that it was a much more complex story than the hagiography had been to that date.

I think what he achieved is remarkable, still. He brought hope and inspiration to a generation of people and farm workers who had no power, no hope of getting out of the fields. And he did that. And I think this is part of what makes the new revelation so difficult for people to process and so disturbing. Because a lot of his power and his strength as a leader stemmed from his personal example … He was charismatic in the sense of building a real movement, which is not easy to do. If you think of movements that were really important, enduring movements, there aren't that many. And the farm worker movement was for a period of time. And he did that in part because he fasted and he marched and he went to jail, and he really put himself on the line. For that generation who had some personal contact, this becomes all the more devastating.

I don't think there were a lot of Cesar Chavezes out there. There’s a reason that he became that. There are major political leaders in California since then who are Latino — who were speakers of the Assembly and chairs of the Board of the Regents … people who were really significant figures in California, but not nationally.

And Dolores Huerta outlived everyone. So she's a living icon.

How much was Chavez a California figure, and how much do you think he was a national one?

He's very much a California figure, but I don't think he shaped the nation [as much]. I think most people don't really have any idea who he was. Certainly in California, Arizona, Texas [but] get beyond that, people don't know who Cesar Chavez was. I think they have a very fuzzy idea.

The same year my book came out, there was a movie that Diego Luna did about Cesar, and it premiered at South by Southwest. And Diego Luna stood on Cesar Chavez Street in Austin and he just stopped people randomly [to ask], “Do you know the guy that the street is named for?” And people were like, “that guy in Venezuela,” or “the boxer.” All of that is much better known in California.

You said one one of the reasons there hadn’t been a comprehensive biography of him before yours is there was a hesitation to dig into the more unsavory parts of his life. Now people are trying to wrap their heads around how something so egregious could stay hidden for so long. Do you think the desire to protect his image stopped people from delving in too deeply?

Yes, absolutely. I think that — because of not just my work but other historians who were doing work at the same time — there’s been a reassessment of his legacy and his work in the last 20 years. Somebody asked me today whether this was inconsistent with the Chavez I [wrote about.] No, it’s not. There were a lot of terrible things that went on, and they were all not talked about because of that movement ethos. It was the strength and it was the weakness. The strength was that he built a movement and brought together people from all sorts of walks of life — students and lawyers and all these people who volunteered or worked for $5 a week or whatever it was. Because they believe deeply in this cause. You talk to people who volunteered in that period of time, and even if they were only there for a short time, this is an experience that shaped their life and that they’re doing what they’re doing now because of the experience that they had in the movement. And it was such a powerful force, and they believed it was a force for good, and it was a force for good for a generation of farm workers who had no hope of getting out of the field.

So when bad things happened — when the Filipino leader Philip Vera Cruz was brutally drummed out and accused of being a Communist spy, nobody said anything. There were a lot of people there who knew, but they didn’t speak up. And ever since, some people have wrestled with the questions of whether they should have.

So there were a lot of red flags. It was a politics of nonviolence. And then his cousin ran a “wet line” on the border that beat people up. But all of that to people was second to, “I’m not going to say anything.” And people didn't say anything for decades. I came along at a time when, first of all, the union itself was not doing anything anymore. There was nothing to damage by speaking out. And second, it had just been a long time. People’s kids would come to me and say, “Thank you for writing this. My parents never talked about what happened.” These were people who had been purged or drummed out, or fired. And yet all those people have always said to me, I would do it again. So the power of what he did and why he succeeded was because of the inspiration and bringing all these people together, and yet the downside of that was that people then looked away from a lot of different kinds of abuse. Looked away when he perjured himself in court in order to fire farm worker leaders who threatened him with their leadership. So I think this adds another sort of chapter to that.

The stock phrase that we're hearing in the statements today is “this movement is bigger than one man.” What do you think of that line?

I think they should have thought of that quite a while ago. When I started writing about the UFW, it was “Cesar Chavez's union.” And in 2005, farm workers in the field didn’t know who Cesar Chavez was anymore.

Sure, that’s true. Movements need to be able to survive and outlast their founders. There are a lot of founders who have trouble letting go of their movements, or trouble running the movements that they create, and he certainly fell into that category in a lot of ways. To me, that seems pretty basic. Of course, a movement should be more than a person because otherwise it’s not going to survive.

But it seems like there was a lot of investment in the myth around this man — up until this point.

Absolutely. It’s a complete investment in the myth of the man. I didn’t think what I was doing was all that controversial. And then ultimately, it wasn’t when it was published, in the sense that people accepted the idea that he was a complicated, complex individual, and his life should be looked at in that way. But up until then, the family was enormously protective of the image. And so, yeah, that was a problem.

Many people are now proposing taking Cesar Chavez’s name off of landmarks and replacing it with Dolores Huerta’s. What do you make of that idea? How will people who were involved in the movement react?

If the mantra is, “the movement is more than one person,” replacing one person’s name with another person’s name, it seems like you’re falling into the same trap. Let’s rethink how we’re dealing with this and what the point is. If the point is to talk about farm workers, then pick 10 farm worker leaders and name streets after them, if that’s your goal.

After our discussion, California leaders moved to change the name of the holiday in his honor to “Farmworkers Day.”

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