Miriam pawel 11 is the former pulitzer prizewinning editor who has spent 25 years working at a news they and the Los Angeles Times. Her book the crusades of cesar chavez is the First Comprehensive biography of the iconic charismatic leader. She has also written the union of their dreams, a widely acclaimed and nuanced history of the united farm workers movement. She recently received a National Endowment for the humanity fellowship to support her work on the chavez biography. Please welcome miriam pawel. [applause] can you hear me . Okay. I want to ask you something i feel is really important. What brought you through the writing about cesar chavez. A lot of people in texas know who he is but then i was very surprised to learn that recently when the mexican filmmaker diego will do not was having the premier of his film on chavez, he took a walk, a stroll down cesar chavez boulevard, and asked if they knew who cesar chavez was. Most of them said they felt he was the boxer, the mexican boxer Julio Cesar Chavez or they thought he was Julio Cesar Chavez junior who is also a boxer. And the venezuelan leader hugo chavez. Several others. Others thought he was part of the Chicano Movement. Why did you decide to write a fulllength book after writing, what is it, a long series in the Los Angeles Times about the unions and your recent book union of their dreams . Thanks for asking the question because the answer ties closely to what you said. There was no biography and that is why you wrote it. You all are here today presumably because you have heard of Caesar Chavez and know something about him but he is virtually unknown these days and outside california and the southwest people have no idea who he was. I was in the Salinas Valley recently, one of the hearts, the heart of the agricultural industry. And english teacher got up at an event and said her students had no idea who Caesar Chavez was. I believe part of the reason he has faded from our collective memory and not gotten the attention and a study he deserves because there has been until recently so little serious scholarship about him. There has been a lot of a geography, repetition of stories that make him into a fairly 1dimensional figure. A lot of people have known he was a much more complicated person but there has been the reluctance to tackle the subject. I also knew from my earlier work that there reza tremendous amount of material available. He saved everything. He saved documents, high audio tapes of conferences, so i knew there was a rich trove of material that had not been fully mined. He is such an important figure in history and should be. Biography would go, would be an important step in restoring him to that position he deserves. How helpful were earlier works about the union and chavez . John Gregory Dunne and Peter Matthiessen . I feel there were a couple others like jack levy as well. How helpful where those earlier biographies . They were really helpful. All 3 of those books in different ways, for folks who dont know about them. The first two books you mentioned, john donne and Peter Matthiessen, written at the height of the struggle and the real glory days of the movement and the boycott, people remember the boycott. They were both written in 67, 68, 69, that time period and they are both wonderful writers so each of them captured a lot about the spirit of the times. Done was much more leary of where the movement was going to end up and in some ways more accurate in his predictions. Peter matthiessen who i interviewed for my book as well was much more optimistic at the time about where things were going to end up and disappoint and jack levys book, he was the official biographer of cesar chavez in the early years. His book was published in 1974. Obviously a big gap after that but because he was authorized, he was allowed this incredible access to chavez and chavez and the union knew that they would have the right to review the manuscript before hand and what levy did was take everything also and transcribe all the tapes. Ultimately he had a falling out with chavezs bears and sold his collection to Yale University so there are again hundreds of tapes he was present at negotiations and all sorts of inner circle meetings. They were a wonderful resource. He went with chavez on a trip to europe where among other things cesar and helen chavez had an audience with the pope and levy was there, not an audience with the pope but on the flight back, cesar talking about the trip and what it meant to him to meet the pope. Wonderful resource for me. Do you repeat any of those stories for us recent readers . Absolutely. I do repeat the stories and then try to separate out the facts and the way the stories have gone embellish over the years. Really interesting in important ways. Recreated his own methodology, and helped with the cause. In the end, 21 years after his death, time to separate out the waste in which he created the myth ology. I understand you did not have access to most of the family. Tell us the reason they didnt want to cooperate with another book. Basically let the family speak for themselves but they did not feel it was transmitted through third parties, they felt only a member of the family should write a story essentially. They have always retained great control over the story. The movie which i will get to later is the family movie and they were very involved in the movie so they did not feel that i was the person who should be writing the story and i knew that going in. I would not have cooperation and there was so much material available that i didnt need it. I understand that they did respond to your first article that appeared in the l. A. Times and they actually filed some kind of suit with the attorney general. What was the result of that . The article in Los Angeles Times were really much more about what the usw had become and the fact that the union was not in the field anymore and had not been for many, many years so the story focused mostly on the present and on the problems that farmworkers still suffer from and the exploitation and terrible Housing Conditions that go on while the usw has moved on and done a lot of other entrepreneurship. In doing those stories i started to look back at the past. I came to the path and ultimately to this book through the present and ultimately writing about farm workers conditions today. The union did not like the stories. They file the notice thing they were preserving their right to sue the paper for libel but ultimately never filed the suit and issued a 100 page report alleging that the paper stood by the stories and we never read any corrections. Theres a famous line in a film by john ford, and they have the john ford panel, it is a scene at the end when James Stewart goes to a newspaper reporter or editor and tells him he is the man he is not the man who shot liberty balance. The newspaper editor did not hear anything about it. If the legend becomes fact, print the legends. I would like to start there by asking you how cesar got started as the labor organizer. We have to connect that to the legend of how we are going to do that. Is beginning as an organizer is a fascinating part of the story and important to understanding his later years and decisions. He was a farm worker, became part of the migrant stream in 1939 when he was 12 years old and lost their farming in yuma, arizona. He was in the navy, he finally worked his way out of the field, working in a lumberyard in 1952, a man named fred ross, no one has heard of fred ross. And enormously Important Community organizer and ran a group called the Service Organization which was almost exclusively in california and was the first part of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. In 1952, started doing what he did to hold house meetings when you invite a few people over. And try to get people engaged in collective community organizing. He meets cesar chavez and heres where we can tie into the legend, and the idea was fred ross then rose in his journals that night, i think i found the guy i am looking for. And you can find that close in lots of books, but that is made up. The actual entry, something is very positive, chavez, great potential, and great energy. Something very positive about cesar but not exactly the quote as the legend has become. And he has become. And he is prettybecome. And he is pretty smart in stuck in his dead end job, fred ross says we will do a Voter Registration drive and he becomes chairman of the registr by 1954 cesar is on the payroll so he has a ten year apprenticeship as an organizer working for ross from 19521962 before he goes off into the part of the story that more people are familiar with when he organizes farmworkers. Lets go back to his name. When i first got a copy of your book, the accent marks in his name were not there and it read cesar chavez and i wondered, i looked it up and several newspapers to use the accent marks and also found in the second brain wikipedia the accent mar cop were there and h original name was miriam pawel for was cesardio. His gr always called him cesario. He spoke spanish at home to his parents. He became cesar when he went to school and he was always if you listen to these tapes, i listen to hunys weds of hours where yo talk to people who worked with him at the time although there is some revisionist history in that but he was always called cesar. I saw an interview with the actors who played helen chavez in the movie and she was asked why the you call him cesar in the movie which they do and she said helen calls him cesar so that was good enough for me. He never used the accent. Called himself cesar. In recent years there has been a revisionist, you are here from time to time to refer to him as cesar although she did not. At the time he became organizer, he became disenchanted with the way things are being run. He was also kind of upset with the fact that once the Union Members were put in the circuit, that often wanted to talk about money and very little else and not support the work that needed to be done to create the union. That is really key point that goes back to the cso days lucias organizer, to empower mexicanamericans, they are not part of the voting public to some degree and certainly not the political power. As he wor cop with them and mov into the middle class that got middleclass vamses. He talks about that a lot. So later on the cso was part of this. So then he is running a labor union and they supported because they want to make more money. And they want better conditions and he felt very strongly that you needed to educate workers in order to share this philosophy that he had. And that became a tough issue. At this time there was a beginning of the next American Civil Rights movement, the Chicano Movement. If you will. And there were other leaders in the mix as well. There was corgi gonzalez and the crusade for justice in denver and there was one in crystal city here in texas. And yet chavez never reached out to commit with them and it seemed to be very focused only in california or in. I think this goes back to the control issue to some degree. He made some efforts and we can talk about that later, perhaps, in texas. That he ultimately really undermine efforts by other people because he didnt want to be in a position of sharing power. And that was not necessarily shared by the other leaders of the Chicano Movement. And it emerges at the end of his life as the part of the Chicano Movement even though he didnt embrace it in the early years. Will was an appearance untrendy appearance that catapulted the union and his crusade . To a more National Audience . I think absolutely. It takes place in march of 1968. This is about 2. 5 years into the great strike. And he is going to become somewhat of a nationalist figure , particularly the march to sacramento in 1966 and certain other event. But it is a tremendous organizing opportunity and he fasts for 25 days in the place where he fasts, which is the human headquarters becomes basically a shrine. There are nightly masses and people walking on their needs of the path to the 40 acres and it was attracting tremendous attention for the first time. And Robbie Kennedy coming to break this fast, its probably the picture that more people have seen and it still gets used a lot today and the kennedy name was, you know, enormous at that point in time. So it also comes about a week before kennedy announces that he was running for president. So that it also ties this is their First Political campaign and they go out and do doortodoor campaigning in particular in los angeles and help kennedy win the primary. They are there in the Ambassador Hotel when he gets shot. So it was important for those political reasons and so i see this as a real turning point in the history of the movement. And i always quote the reverend drake who is one of the top advisers and he says in later years that after the fast caesar was too saintly to make mistakes. So i think it is an important concept in this was thrust on him to some degree. So he certainly embrace the image of the suffrage and opinions and that was part of the marching as well and believe that when he sacrificed that it is a powerful force that it forces other people to want to help you. And i think you did. Was he a very religious man . Or was it the fact that they appropriated a lot of religious iconography . I think that it was both. I think it was a tactic, certainly. Obviously it was a real thing that he grew up with. His mother was quite religious in the sense of mexican catholicism, which has its own cultural resonance for people. And so it was important to him. But he also used it tremendously effectively and you have to remember that when the strike starts in 1965 the Catholic Church in california is not supporting this union. So now we think of the church as being on their side. But the colors on the financial colors of the church where the growers. So they were loath to do anything over it. And there are a lot of great things that the archdiocese had that show all of the letters that they are writing to the bishop, saying that these people out of here, what is going on and so on. And so lacking support from the church in knowing how important that is, youre trying to convince very poor mexican farmworkers who are scared us speaking out in favor of the union because they are risking their jobs and their homes. As well as their livelihoods. So they embrace the church and they have the support and he does that. He does this sort of brilliant thing of using this everywhere he goes, and particularly in the march. The march to sacramento, people are not necessarily familiar with california but they walked through all of these little towns. Everywhere they go every night there is a rally in the church has to open their doors to these farmworkers and so it was brilliant and ultimately the church comes around in the bishop supports them and so on. It took a lot. At the same time this is happening, there was a lot of discussion as to the nonviolence they used in the strikes and the boycotts and etc. And you mentioned that there was violence and there were acts of sabotage against the growers. Manuel chavez, a relative of caesar, was quite relentless and perhaps im reading too much into the, but i sense the emotional violence that many volunteers must have felt when they were dismissed from the movement and it must have caused a lot of emotional violence as well. Ruthlessness was not exactly a foreign concept. And i think that that manifested itself in different ways. One of the reasons he was so effective was the singleminded intensity. And so people interpreted that in different ways, people being part of the movements or who have read about it, they may identify it. If you believe you are led to believe by the leader who is a tremendous force for you, that anything goes in the interest of getting this victory, sometimes people do things in the name of the movement or on behalf of the movement that would not have been sanctioned. Sometimes we would look the other way. When i talked to growers who live through this era, one of the things that make some the most angry is this is not a nonviolent movement. And they are right to a degree. There was a lot of tacit understanding, violence against property is okay, violence against people wasnt. Well, if you are a grower in your life is your vineyard and someone comes and takes a machete and chops down the vines, youre pretty angry at about that. So there was a degree of violence. During this time, i lived in crystal city, texas and i was part of the community. We were privileged at the time to have a performance. He came and brought his troupe of actors and we were very pleased with that. We were very proud of that. Little did we know that chavez had sort of distance himself from them and the police had been told that they came second and offers. So they were dismissed. So when reading your book i discovered this bit of information. So i wondered if you could clarify some of that for us as well as the relationship that caesar had with people that were all for the union and yet were in a sense summarily dismissed. Okay, so theyll does was a very interesting and important figure in the movement in its early years. So for people who might not know his name, he was actually a farm worker born in a labor camp in delano, his family moved to san jose and had some great personal sacrifices to make sure that their kids went to high school and college. So he was a migrant farm worker as a kid. He goes to san jose state becomes a promising playwright. He was working with the San Francisco mime troupe in 1965 and part of a radical group in the San Francisco bay area. And that is such an important part of the story because it was the Civil Rights Movement that was very strong in a lot of the early support that made them successful came out of that and particularly the San Francisco era. So he has to decide, hes 25, and he asked to see go to new york for that to go back to try to help the farmworkers. So he goes back and he tells caesar that he wants to start a theater for the farmworkers and he says we dont have any money or actors. The go ahead if you want. So he begins what becomes this casino. For people that dont know about it, i would say that there is a wonderful website at the university of california Santa Barbara has put together that has actual video you can see online and its really terrific. So he starts this theater where they improvise and they do skits and hes teaching theater to farmworkers. Many of them are not literate. But they can perform and they are naturals. And then the theater becomes immensely popular vote as entertainment and also for education. So hes teaching basic concepts. How does this work, what is a union. Until it becomes more and more popular and he is a rival for us to cesar chavez, not because he wants to run the labor union but because he has a credible voice for the farmworkers. He also sort of embodies the more radical elements of the movement not in terms of politics but in their independence. So if any of you know and have dealt with people who were very politically to, they have strong opinions. There comes a time in 1967 when those opinions are not really welcome. So i think chavez never really believed in a democratic organization. The heated a good imitation in the earlier years of a democracy, but it never really was a democracy. So in 1967, those are the first purges. And so this is also online. And he talks publicly for the first time in that video and audio, rather, of being purged. And i found all the records. He told me the story and i actually found the written minutes of the meeting, who said why, what the votes were and so on, to help me tell that story in an authentic way from documents. So i think its really significant. He never talked about it and people who were purged in general do not talk about it. You didnt want to do anything that would hurt the union. So throughout his life he has always supported this. And the emotional impact of being thrown out and not talking about that, i think it was something about this. Another thing that strikes me as interesting is the fact that many of the workers at some point. And it seemed to go against his original idea that it should be made out of farmworkers deciding for themselves and it seems at some point he decided like he did earlier on but he didnt want anyone telling him how to run something. Is that an accurate suggestion . Guesstimate even talks on the tapes. When he says he becomes very frustrated with the battles that hes having with some of the board members. He says i feel like im back where i was in the cso and that is exactly what he did not want. So the lack of farm worker participation and leadership goes back to that idea that if you give them power, they may make decisions that are not the ones that you want. So becomes a big struggle between the movement and the union that ultimately this to the demise as a viable labor union. At some point shot is becomes a National Figure partly due to the boycott the National Boycott that are held all across the country. Would you tell us more about how that really became a symbol of his successes . Sure. I think we want to leave room for questions as well. So i will do a very short story. Because to me this shows his belly and in that what he did for this that made it so effective was to send mexicanamerican farmworkers. And tell them to stop the sale of grapes. Which you think is kind kind of an insane idea. And yet the smart creative ones were able to tap into communities of support and build the networks. Ultimately putting enough pressure on on the supermarket chains so that a 1970 that is what ends the strike. Is that the supermarkets go back to the growers and say that we just cant deal with this boycott nonsense anymore. It is the height of creativity and also creates the problems that come up later because then the union has all of these contracts may have to figure out how to run it. Smack i think we have time for questions from the audience. And perhaps you can bring up issues that we havent addressed so far. Yes . [inaudible] yes, yes. Go ahead. [inaudible question] the role of them, i think that they originally had started. They have their own union in 1965 the walkout on strike an inch asked them to support. So ultimately the two unions are merged and the filipinos always felt like secondclass citizens in a mexican controlled union. There was some effort to bridge the differences. But their leadership never really was very happy. And so they end up leaving and great frustration. I write about his comments and remarks and unhappiness when he felt that chavez could not and would not validate. So they become marginalized including a misguided effort going to the philippines as a guest of ferdinand marcos. And so then that becomes a tremendously polarizing event as well. And so theres quite a bit about this and there is an important part of the story as well. And so i believe that part of the meetings were held there for the most part. And so i believe that the Filipino Community has announced part of the film because the filipinos are shown in the background and not in the forefront. And they were sitting next to chavez and he was one of the people that signed and in the film he is shown in the background. You shared with me before the presentation that you had worked as an agriculture reporter for the Los Angeles Times. I have two questions for you. The first is how did you physically retrace the path of cesar chavez. Did you spend time in san jose and libraries in brazil, los angeles, i was going to ask if you were able to talk to his brother. But apparently not. So in your extensive research, is there one nugget that the public doesnt know . Yes, absolutely yes. The rulings of the house are just kind of crumbled walls of the house where he was a child. So i think that this is really important when you are writing an so many places that exist in so yes my retrace all of that. In 1969 he had been in traction in all sorts of things and he couldnt sit up in bed. And so one of them you see here and he had to lift it. So finally they had treated president kennedy for his back and he comes to delano to try to help and he sees right away that hes crooked and he has this extreme case of asymmetry. And he still relieved. Its a simple solution you can even this out. Because the second toe is longer. And this includes how you turn on a tape recorder. And so for me that kind of summed up a lot of remarkable mess about the man and writing a book. Did you reeserresearch the role that he played in the United Farmworkers Movement . There was some information about him in the book. I do deal with a degree that arizona and texas, independent organizations formed together and try to function and chavez tried to make sure that they didnt get funding. So theres a battle over it and theres the sole voice for farmworkers. So ultimately the idea was that it would be a National Union and that was the goal. But they could never effectively run it well enough to really expand in the kind of bogged down efforts in texas and heirs is madge texas farmworkers had a Hunger Strike back in 1978. And at the time i remember speaking to antonio and he said that they wanted to represent all farmworkers both u. S. Citizens and mexican workers and that caesar did not want that. He only wanted u. S. American farmworkers to be represented. Yes, that was it a representative difference between the two groups. He really was a poor act. And im wondering whether that was evident and therefore they strategize to do the boycott. Because they were excluded from the act, something that was perceived turn out to be for the benefit of the boycott. And its a complicated story. As a nurse i am interested in pesticides in declining health. These farmworkers from the close proximity but they were to the crops, i consider this a shot as the pioneer in organics. Its part of his visionary nature that early on that he was a vegetarian in the fight against pesticides. I would just like to ask one more question. What is his legacy . His legacy is not in the fields but a generation of activists who learn from him and who have taken our knowledge and gone elsewhere. And for the farmworkers who were empowered by his union. That was also determined this experience as well as a hero for the latinos in the country as well. Thank you very much. [applause] to some degree, yes. As well as the union efforts. [inaudible conversations] next from the san antonio book festival, a panel in the local history of the the city. [inaudible conversations] thank you everyone for coming today. We call this session are story that shapes san antonio. Of our authors will be signing books immediately after this action in the reference area in the second floor. My name is Gilbert Garcia and i am a metro columnist and im really honored to be here today with the two authors who have books about san antonio and very different stories. But i think that they are stories about cultural outsiders in the city who hard work and ingenuity excelled in this community. To my left i have nick cox who is a pulitzer prizewinning journalist. He tells the story of his grandfather who immigrated from russia in 1890 and ended up in 1899 in russia. The book is part of the award for nonfiction. To my right, a professor garcias. The author of five books including his latest and it tells the story
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