Cesar Chavez, an Arizonan by birth, died in 1993. A national monument, parks, roads, schools, libraries, and university buildings have been named in his honor because of his life’s work on behalf of farmworkers. His name no longer is just his to claim, having escaped the man and become a symbol and a legacy. Miriam Pawel’s The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography complicates how one views that legacy because the reader learns that to Chavez “undocumented workers” were “illegal immigrants.” An addition, it might seem, to history’s ironic poses.

And yet, to fixate on Cesar’s attitude toward non-U.S. citizens risks missing what is essential. Chavez had been a hired farmworker himself, as were his parents after losing the family farm to tax difficulties settled by auction during the Great Depression. His understanding of workers’ lives helped him orchestrate campaigns leading to the initial successes of the United Farm Workers union. Pawel gets us into the fields and into the union meetings where men and women discovered their voice in Chavez along with a promise (“Sí se puede”) that a better life lay within grasp if they acted as a collective. Much in their lives needed bettering. An example: A friend doing pathology work in the intensively agricultural Imperial Valley told me she saw cancers there she didn’t see in San Diego, the nearest U.S. urban area. Other worries included poisoning and the possibility that pesticide exposures could maim babies in utero. I found it striking, then, while browsing the first issue of El Malcriado,* the UFW’s newspaper, to see that its first ad ever was for a funeral home. A few pages later a photo shows a father receiving his (life) insurance benefit after death of “su hijita” (his little girl). It recalls Steinbeck’s verdict in The Grapes of Wrath: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.”

For Chavez, the problem with “illegals” (his word) was how their presence aided growers’ efforts to bury his union and subvert the better future he envisioned for people who placed in him their trust. His hostility was such, Pawel reports, that his cousin and ally, Manuel Chavez, put together a “wet line” of men patrolling the border against entry by “wetbacks.”

After a run of contract victories the UFW suffered setbacks. Some of those failures can be attributed to the efforts of agribusiness, but it’s also true Chavez compromised the UFW’s effectiveness by running it more as a grand social movement than as an equivalent of the United Autoworkers, and true too that the UFW was losing the allegiance of some of its members and staff. Pawel presents fascinating and disconcerting information on where commitment to his movement led Chavez and his organization. It becomes a narrative with painful “uh oh” moments and reveals aspects of Chavez’s character that cannot be admired.

Still, Pawel has given us a stirring encounter with a man gripped by a vision and by passion. He achieved, for a time, something his opponents thought couldn’t be done. A sympathizer may wish to dwell not on the wasted successes (though lessons are there to heed), but on an aspiration: How might it be possible to achieve again, and to better effect, such things as Cesar did?

* El Malcriado is available at https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/archives/. Filed under “1965,” the first issue is titled “Don Sotaco.” ( )

A well-rounded, thoroughly researched biography that is sympathetic to the subject but honest in revealing the many flaws of the revered labor leader. Chavez was a man as capable of hubris and pettiness as he was of brilliance and greatness. In other words, he was as human as the rest of us. ( )

A California man
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

By Kel Munger
Sacramento News & Review
This article was published on 03.27.14.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Miriam Pawel's second volume about Cesar Chavez, after 2009's The Union of Their Dreams, focuses on Chavez the person, with the same sort of clear writing. In The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury Press, $35), Pawel contrasts his commitment to nonviolence with his tolerance of his cousin's occasionally violent actions, and his consensus-building approach with his brief '70s flirtation with the Synanon model. Well, he was a Californian. What emerges is a figure who accomplished far more than he set out to do, while managing to inspire far more people than he ever met. ( )