Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Bookshelf Miriam Pawel The Cr

Good morning, welcome. Today we are very fortunate to have a very special guest with us, miriam pawel. However, i would like to introduce myself first so you know who to complain to later. My name is greg berrios. Im a former book editor of the san Antonio Express news. I worked for many years in los angeles for the Los Angeles Times. Ive written for the new york times. Currently i write for the los angeles review of books and im on the board of directors of the National Book critics circle. Im also the author of a book of poetry that deals with lacausa. In fact, its called, lacausa. At this time i would like to introduce miriam. Miriam is the former Pulitzer Prize winning editor who spent 25 years working at newsday and the Los Angeles Times. Her book, the crusades of cesar chavez, a biography 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 chavezs United Farm Workers Movement. She recently received a National Endowment for the humanities fellowship to support her work on the chavez biography. Please welcome, miriam pawel. [applause] hi miriam. Miriam hi, greg. Thanks. Can you hear me . Yeah im on. Greg i want to ask you something i feel that is really important. What brought you through the writing about cesar chavez . I know a lot of people here in texas know who he is but then i was very surprised to learn that recently when the mexican filmmaker, diego luna, was having the premiere of his film on cesar chavez in austin at south by southwest, he took a walk a stroll, down cesar chavez boulevard and asked people 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 jr. Who is also a boxer. Another answered, isnt he the venezuelan leader, hugo sanchez . And several others said they thought he had something to do with the chickano movement. It really surprised the filmmaker and i want to ask you 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 then your recent book, the union of their dreams. Miriam thanks for asking that question because the answer ties closely to what you said about diego luna. The fact is that there was no biography and thats why i wrote it. Because you all are here today presumably because you have heard of cesar chavez and know something about him but hes virtually unknown these days and when you get outside of california and the southwest people really have no idea who he was. I was in the Salinas Valley recently, which as people may know is still the heart of the agriculture industry and an english teacher got up at an event and said her students had no idea who cesar chavez was. I believe that part of the reason that he has sort of faded from our collective memory and not gotten the attention and the study that he deserves is because there has been, until recently, so little serious scholarship about him. There is sort of theres been a lot of hagueography, a lot of repetition of stories that are rather make him into a fairly one dimensional figure so a lot of people have known that he was a much more complicated person but theres been a a reluctance to tackle the subject. And i knew from my earlier work that there was a tremendous amount of material available. He saved everything. He saved documents. He saved hundreds of audiotapes of conversations and meetings and conferences. So i knew that there was this rich trove of material that had not really been fully mined and i think hes such an important figure in history and should be and that a biography would go would be an important step in sort of restoring him to that position that he deserves. Gregg how helpful were earlier works about the union and sanchez like John Gregory Dunn and Peter Mathison. I feel there was a couple of others jacques levy, as well. How helpful were those earlier biographies . Miriam they were really helpful. All three of those books in different ways. For folks who dont know about them, the first two books that you mentioned, John Gregory Dunn and Peter Mathison were written at the height of the struggle in the real glory days of the movement and the boycott. Probably people remember still the boycott, right. So they were both written in 1967 1968, 1969, that time period. And theyre both really wonderful writers so each of them captured a lot about the spirit of the time. Dunn was much more leery of where the movement was going to end up and in some ways a little bit more accurate in has predictions. Peter mathison who i interviewed for my book, as well, was much more optimistic at the time about where things were going to end up and was disappointed. Then jacques levys book jacques levy was the official biographer of cesar chavez in the early years. His book was published in 1974. So theres 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 beforehand and what levy did was tape everything also and transcribe all his tapes and ultimately had a fallingout with chavezs heirs and sold his collection to yale university. So there, again, these hundreds of tapes. He was present at negotiations and at 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 just there, not in the audience with the pope but on the flight back, tapes cesar talking about the trip and about what it meant to him to meet the pope. So it was a wonderful resource for me. Gregg do you repeat any of those stories for us recent readers . Miriam absolutely. I do repeat the stories and then i try to separate out the facts and the way the stories have gotten embellished over the years, some of them. And really interesting and important ways. Chavez created to some degree his own mythology and he did that because he was a great organizer and he did it sort of to help with the cause. But in the end, you know, 21 years after his death, i think its time to sort of separate out and show the ways in which he created the mythology. Gregg i understand that you did not have access to most of the family, or, i believe, dolores, as well. Could you tell us the reasons that they felt perhaps, they didnt want to cooperate with another book . Miriam so i think i should basically let the family speak for themselves about their reasons. But they did not cooperate. They felt it was transmitted to me through third parties that they felt that only a member of the family should write the story, essentially. They have always retained great control over the story. The movie, which ill get to later, the movie is the familys movie and they were very involved in the movie. So they did not feel that i was a person who should be writing the story. And i knew that going in. I knew i would not have cooperation and i knew that there was so much material available that i didnt need it. Gregg i understand that they did respond to your first articles that appeared in the l. A. Times and they actually filed some kind of a suit with the attorney general. What was the result of that . Miriam well, so the articles in the Los Angeles Times were really much more about what the u. F. W. Had become and the fact that the union was really not in the fields anymore and had not been for many, many years. So the stories focused mostly on the present and on the problems that farm workers still suffer from and the exploitation and the terrible Housing Conditions that go on, while the u. F. W. Has moved on and done a lot of other sort of entrepreneurship. So in doing those stories i kind of started to look back at the past. I came to the past and ultimately did this book through the present and through writing about farm workers conditions today. The union did not like the stories. They did not actually sue. They filed a notice saying that they were preserving their right to sue the paper for libel but ultimately never filed a suit and we never they issued a hundredpage report alleging all sorts of things which the paper stood by the stories and we never ran any corrections. Gregg theres a famous line in a film by john ford, and theyre having the john ford panel next door. So and its a scene at the end when James Stewart goes to a newspaper reporter, or editor, and tells him that hes the man who shot hes not the man who shot liberty valence. And the newspaper editor wont hear anything about it. He says, when the legend becomes fact print the legend. I think that id like to start there, by asking you how cesar got started as a labor organizer miriam and then well have to connect that to the legend. Im thinking of how were going to do that. Ok, youve got a plan. His beginning as an organizer is really a fascinating part of the story and i think really important to understanding his later years and decisions. He was a farm worker. He became part of the migrant stream in 1939 when he was 12 years old and his family lost their farm in yuma, arizona. He worked as a farm worker. He was in the navy. He came out. He finally worked his way out of the fields and was working in a lumber yard. In 1952, when a man named fred ross who really nobodys heard of fred ross and thats too bad too. He was an enormously Important Community organizer and ran a group called the Community Service organization which was almost exclusively in california and it was really the first sort of part of the mexicanamerican Civil Rights Movement and in 1952 he went to san jose and started doing what he did when he came to a new place which is hold house meetings, you invite people over and talk to them about their concerns and needs and try to get people engaged in collective Community Organizing and he meets cesar chavez at a meeting at the chavez house and heres where we can tie into the legend nicely because part of the legend is that fred ross wrote in his journal that night, i think i found the guy im looking for. And that, you can find that quote in lots of books and lots of scholarly works, even but in fact, thats made up. And i found the actual entry in fred ross journal from that night in which he says, something very positive. He says, you know, chavez, great potential, great Energy Something very positive about cesar but not exactly the quote as the legend has become. So thats how he gets his start. He immediately hes 25 years old. Hes really smart. He stuck in this deadend job and along comes fred ross who says were going to do a Voter Registration drive and he becomes the chair of the Voter Registration drive in san jose and by 1954 clearly impresses ross and saul alinski who was the under of the Community Service organization and by 1954, cesar is on the payroll of the i. A. F. And c. F. O. So he has a 10year apprenticeship as an organizer working for ross before he goes off into the part of the story that more people are familiar with when he organizes farm workers. Gregg lets go back to his name. When i first got a copy of your book, i was startled, in a way because the accent marks in his name were not there and it read, cesar chavez. And i looked it up and i found that several newspapers do use the accent marks and i also found in our second brain wikipedia, that the accent marks were there and that his original name was would you tell me why he changed the name or whether he actually used the accent marks or not . Miriam his name was hazario and he was named after his grandfather and growing up just outside of yuma, when he went to school his name was changed to cesar and his mother never was happy about this situation. She always called him caesario. She also did not speak english. He spoke spanish at home to his parents. So he became cesar when he went to school and he never he was always, if you listen to these tapes which ive listened to hundreds of hours or you talk to people who worked with him at the time, although theres some revisionist history in that but he was always called cesar and i actually saw an interview with America Ferrera who plays helen chavez in the movie and she was asked why do you call him cesar in the movie and she said helen calls him cesar so that was good enough for me. He never used the accents. He called himself caesar. In recent years, theres revisionist. You will hear dolores refer to him as caesario nowal she did noback in the day. Gregg was he, at the time he became organizer with the c. S. O. , i think he became disenchanted with the way things were being run. He also was kind of upset with the fact that once the Union Members were put in the circuit they often wanted to talk about money and very little else and not support the work that needed to be done to create the union later on. Miriam i think thats a really key point and it goes back to the c. S. O. Days. So here he is, an organizer in the c. S. O. Hes helping to sort of empower mexican americans who have not been part of the voting public to some degree and certainly not a political power. And as he works with them and as they move into the middle class they adopt middle class values and he is really upset by this. So in the late 1950s, you see him writing in his journal more and more and writing letters to fred roth and saying, the way this is going, this is just not going in the direction that i want. He really believed that it was important to empower people and for them to not to have a sense of dignity and not live in poverty and be comfortable but not to forget where they came from and to help people who were still living in poverty and to help the cause. And that is a lot of the reason why he leaves the c. S. O. And starts out on his own to organize farm workers but i think that really strong feeling that i have empowered these people and now theyre using that power towards goals that i dont support becomes very significant later on when you try to understand some of the decisions that he made and the degree to which he wanted to maintain control because he never understand to be in that situation again. And he talks about that quite a lot. So later on, the c. S. O. Was just a membership organization. Once hes running a labor union a lot of people support labor unions because they want to make more money and they want better conditions and not everyone joins a labor union because they believe in lacausa and they want to better the lives of other people and sacrifice so 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. Gregg at this time, there was the beginning of the mexicanamerican Civil Rights Movement Chicano Movement, if you will. And there were other leaders in the mix. There was reyes dadina, there was Corky Gonzales in the crusade for justice in denver and there was Jose Angel Gutierrez in crystal city here in texas. And yet chavez never reached out to connect with them. It seemed to be very focused only in california. Miriam i think this goes back to the control issue to some degree, that he wanted to be the sole person in control. He made some efforts and we can talk about this later, perhaps in texas, that he ultimately really undermined efforts by other people to organize in texas because he didnt want to be in that kind of position of sharing power. So he also had a very strong commitment to nonviolence and that was not necessarily shared by some of the other early leaders of the Chicano Movement so that became a difference. Ironically, he emerges at the end and particularly towards the end of his life as the symbol of the Chicano Movement even though he did not really embrace it in his earlier years. Gregg was it the appearance during the fast of Robert Kennedy that catapulted the union and his crusade to a more National Audience . Miriam i think absolutely yes. The fast takes place in march of 1968. This is about 2 1 2 years into the grape strike and hes begun to become somewhat of a nationally known figure, particularly the march to sacramento in 1966 and certain other events but the fast is a tremendous organizing opportunity. He fasts for 25 days. The place where he fasts which is the Union Headquarters becomes basically a shrine. There are nightly masses. There are people walking on their knees up the path to the 40 acres and it was it attracted, obviously tremendous Media Attention for the first time and then Bobby Kennedy coming to break the fast, its an iconic picture, probably the picture that more people have seen than any other. It still gets used a lot today and the kennedy name was enormous at that point in time. And it also comes about a week before kennedy announces that he was running for president. So it also then ties the u. F. W. Into their First Political campaign, chavez and the union go out and do doortodoor campaigning particularly in los angeles and help kennedy win the primary. Theyre there in the Ambassador Hotel when he gets shot. So it was important for those political reasons but covering more, i see the fast as a real turning point in the history of the movement and i always quote the reverend jim drake who was one of chavezs top advisers. He was a protestant minister. And he