Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 he goes to san jose state, becomes a promising playwright, working with the San Francisco troupe in 1965 when the strike starts and part of a sort of radical group in the San Francisco bay area, and thats an important part of the story too i think because, again, things didnt happen in a vacuum. It was the Civil Rights Movement was very strong and a lot of the real early support that made the union successful came out of that San Francisco area. He has to decide, hes 25, his play about to be produced off broadway and does he go to new york or back to delano to help the farm workers. He goes back, he tells caesar he wants to start a theater for farm workers and he says we dont have any money, actor, anything, sure, go ahead if you want. He begins what becomes the for people who dont know theres a wonderful website that the university of california at Santa Barbara has put together that has actual video that you can see there on line and its terrific and he starts this theater and hes teaching theater to farm workers who many are not literate and theyre but they can perform and theyre narls and the theater becomes immensely popular both as entertainment and for education. Hes teaching basic concepts, whats a contract, whats a union, and it becomes more and more popular and he is a rival force to cesar chavez not because he wants to run the labor union but as a credible voice for farm workers and sort of embodies the more radical element of the movement, not in terms of their politics interfering but in their independence, so if any of you know or have dealt with people politically active they have strong opinions. There comes a period of time in 1967 when those opinions are not really welcome and chavez, i think, never particularly believed in a democratic organization. He did a good imitation in the earlier years of being a democracy, but it never really was a democracy. So in 1967, are the first purges and louis did a great session with me at the Los Angeles Public library this week, which is also online, and he talks really publicly for the first time in that video, audio rather, of what of being purged. I found all the records and he told me the story but then i actually found the written minutes of the meetings and who said what and what the votes were and so on that helped me to tell that story in a really authentic way from documents. I think its really significant, he never talked about it, no one people who were purged in j general did not talk about it because that was the ethos you didnt want to do anything that would hurt the union. Louis throughout his life has always supported the ufw and continued to do so, but the emotional impact on him of being thrown out and not talking about that, i think, you know, took was something that took him a long time to work through as well. Another thing that strikes me as interesting is the fact that many of the workers at some point were no longer farm workers that were in the positions of the ruling board, et cetera, and it seemed to go against his original idea that it should be made up of farm workers deciding for themselves and ruling for themselves and it seems that at some point he decided, like he did earlier on in the cso days, that he didnt want anyone telling him how to run something. Is that an accurate thats really accurate. He even talks on the tapes at some points about saying when he becomes very frustrated with the battles that hes having with some of the board members, he says i feel like im back exactly where i was in the cso. That was exactly what he did not want. The lack of farm worker participation and leadership goes back to that idea if you give them power they may make decisions that are not the ones that you want. It becomes a really struggle between the movement and the union and ultimately leads to the demise of the ufw as a viable labor union. At some point, chavez becomes a national figure, partly due to the boycotts of National Boycotts that are held all across the country. Would you tell us more about how that really became a symbol of his successes . Sure. Let me do the boycott quickly because we want to leave room for questions too. Okay. I will do a short boycott story because again, to me, this shows the brilliance and him at his best in that what he did for the great boycott that made it so effective to send Mexican American farm workers across the country, never been on planes, didnt have any support, had the names of a few supporters and tell them stop the is sale of grapes which on its face you think is an insane idea, and yet the smart, creative ones were able to tap into communities of support and build networks and ultimately put enough pressure on the supermarket chains so in 1970 that is what ends the strike and achieves contract, is that the super markets go back to the growers and say we just cant deal with this boycott nonsense anymore. You need to solve your labor problems. It is sort of the height of creativity and also ultimately creates the problems that come up later because then the union has all these contracts and then they have to figure out how to run them. Okay. I think we have time now for some questions from the audience and perhaps you can bring up issues that we havent addressed so far. Yes. The role in yes. America . Yes. I [ inaudible ]. Her question is the role of the pill feipinos in the fil pinos in the strikes. The filipinos had their own union and in 1965, the filipinos start the strike. The filipino union walks out on strike and goes to chavez and asks for support. The two unions are merged in 66 and the filipinos always felt like secondclass citizens in a mexican controlled union. Theres some effort to bridge those differences, but their leadership never is very happy. Larry, who was the most prominent and strongest organizer for the filipinos ends up leaving in great frustration. I write about some of his comments and remarks and unhappiness when he felt that chavez could not delegate, would not delegate and that that so the filipinos become marginalized and then chavez in an effort to sort of do something about it in a misguided effort, goes in 1977 to the philippines as a guest of Ferdinand Marcos and that becomes a tremendously polarizing event as well. And praises martial law and, you know, anyway, theres quite a bit we havent tauktsds about it, but the important part of the story is about the filipinos. I believe part of the meetings were held in filipino hall. Absolutely. For the most part. I believe that the Filipino Community has denounced part of the film because the filipinos were shown in the back ground and not in the forefront and i believe when the growers signed the contract larry is right there. Sitting next to chavez and he was one of the people that signed and yet in the film hes shown in the background. You shared with me before the presentation that you had worked as an agricultural reporter for the los angeles times. I have two questions. The first is, how much did you physically retrace the path of cesar chavez when you were doing your research . Did you spend time in san jose, in dell leino and libraries in bakersfield and sacramento and los angeles . I was asking to ask if you got to Lakes Isabella to talk to his brother, but apparently not. The second question in your Extensive Research is there one nugget you found about Cesar Chavezs life that the public doesnt know but should. Yes, absolutely, yes, i went everywhere. I climbed out on the yuma and the ruins of the house, just kind of crumbled walls of the house where he was a child, his grandfathers estate. I went i think place is important when youre writing and there are so many places that exist that i was able to really yes, i retraced all of that. The nugget i like is that in 1969 he was flat on his back and couldnt move. He had a tremendous he was in tremendous pain. He had been in traction and all sorts of things and couldnt sit up in bed. There are pictures in the book that i found in the archives and one you see him flat on his back and theres a bar because he had to lift himself up at the bar. Finally the Kennedy Family doctor, dr. Trabell, who treated president kennedy for his back comes to delano to try to help and she watches him walk and she sees right away hes crooked, that he has sort of this extreme case of asymmetry. She tells him this. Hes relieved because its a simple solution, you even out your shoe and she also tells him he has a foot because his second toe is longer and the reason we know all of this is because he taped it. The fact that here is a man flat on his back in tremendous pain and has the presence of mind to preserve history to turn on a tape recorder and 40 years later im sitting in the library listening to this tape, that was for me summed up about the man and writing the book. Yes. Did you research the role that san antonio played in the United Farm Workers Movement . To a limited degree. I did interview antonio and information about him in the book and i do deal in the book with the degree to which in both arizona and texas, independent organizations formed and tried to function as unions and chavez basically sort of undercut them in a lot of ways making sure that they didnt get funding. Theres a battle over theres a turf battle because he wanted to be the sole voice for farm workers. Ultimately the idea was it would be a national union. That was the goal. But they could never effectively run California Well enough to really expand and then kind of batted down the efforts that grew up in texas and in arizona. The texas farm workers had a Hunger Strike at the capitol back in 1978 and they also had a march to washington, which i believe youre familiar with. At the time i remembered speaking to antonio and he said that they wanted to represent all farm workers, both u. S. Citizens and mexican workers, and that caesar did not want that. He only wanteds u. S. American farm workers to be represented. That was a well be leaving this American History tv program at this point. You can see it in its entirety go to our website cspan. Org. Live to where pentagon officials are marking the 19th anniversary of the september 11th terrorist attacks