Cesar Chavez — Great Story, Pretty Good Film

(Guest Post by John Byrne Barry, author of Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.)

The day before celebrating the holiday commemorating Cesar Chavez, my wife and I watched the recently released movie about his life. We were staying the weekend up in Guerneville, but the rain was relentless, so we drove to Santa Rosa to catch an afternoon showing. On the way, we passed rolling hills of vineyards, where another generation of farm workers toil for low wages and under wretched conditions. (Though we didn’t see any. It was Sunday and pouring.)

I enjoyed the film, but it could have been so much better. The acting was fine — Michael Pena plays Cesar Chavez, who was not a remarkable orator or a big, charismatic personality, in a resolute, understated way, and America Ferrara turns in a bravura performance as his wife Helen, who was more instrumental in the farm workers’ struggle than I realized.

My biggest problem was the film’s reliance on the “great man” theory of history, common to so many biopics. Yes, Cesar Chavez was extremely influential as a leader, but he didn’t do it himself. Many people whose names we don’t know played huge roles in that movement. Some, like Dolores Huerta and Fred Ross, Sr., had small roles. Huerta, played by the beautiful Rosario Dawson, is portrayed as little more than a secretary. Others, like UFW organizing director Marshall Ganz—now a Harvard professor, influential in the Obama campaign of 2008, among other things—were not even included.

John Malkovich is delicious as a vineyard owner who wants to crush the union. But he’s not the stereotypical villain, rubbing his hands together in glee. Because he’s also an immigrant, from Croatia, and he’s worked hard to get to where he is, he feels put upon by the boycott, which devastated his business.

Because I’ve worked as an organizer, I’ve heard one particular line attributed to Cesar Chavez hundreds of times. When asked his secret of organizing, he famously said, “First you talk to one person, then you talk to another, then you talk to another.” The film didn’t really show that. They showed him fasting, giving speeches, struggling with his teenage son Fernando. But they could have shown more of him persuading people one on one.

I would still heartily recommend the movie though. It’s an important story, and I learned a lot I didn’t know. (Plus, it motivated me to do some browsing on the web afterwards to fill in the gaps.)

The film did a good job of showing Chavez’ commitment to nonviolence, especially in the face of impatience from people within the movement, some of whom argued for fighting back, who said not doing so was cowardice. But Chavez, following in the militant nonviolent tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully held his ground. Following the example of Gandhi, he also fasted — for 25 days — to make the case for nonviolence. And it worked.

Central to the farm workers struggle was the the strategy of persuading consumers to boycott table grapes in order to support the farm workers’ strike, arguably the most successful consumer boycott in U.S. history. A big part of why I enjoyed the movie is that I was unwittingly part of that boycott. My parents didn’t buy grapes. For what seemed like my whole childhood. I’m not sure how they found out about the boycott, though my guess is their church.

They showed some of the farm workers fanning out to supermarkets with flyers and telling people about the boycott, but there wasn’t much in the way of context. This was the late 1960s, a time of great change, with the civil rights movement and the women’s movement blooming, and, of course, the U.S. labor movement was stronger than it is today.

One element of the boycott story that was new to me was the role of President Richard Nixon, who vowed to break it by buying up half the unsold grapes to feed to U.S. soldiers, and helping growers export the other half to Europe. In response, Chavez and other UFW leaders, some of whom had never traveled before, went to Europe to meet with labor leaders, church groups, and gained enough international solidarity that the grape export plan was never fully realized. Dock workers in England refused to unload the grapes, dumping them off the ship like the early Americans did with tea in Boston Harbor.

In that respect, the movie’s core message was on target. It wasn’t just one man who made the difference, but a worldwide movement.

Marshall Ganz

I ‘discovered’ Marshall Ganz when his work on ‘The Power of Story” formed the basis of the annual Hillel Institute, the professional conference. I wrote about this in an earlier post. Today, I want to focus on Professor Ganz and his own story.

Marshall Ganz

Ganz grew up on the West Coast, in Fresno and then Bakersfield. The first remarkable chapter in his life was when, as a child, his family went to post World War Two Germany, where his father, who was a rabbi, served as an army chaplain working with displaced persons. The impact of meeting Holocaust survivors had a powerful influence on the whole family and Ganz grew up learning about the dangers of racism and Antisemitism.

Ganz began his undergraduate degree at Harvard but left the year before he graduated in 1964 to volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project, where he worked in a freedom house in McComb and helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. He also joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America and over the next decade and a half gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing for the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA).

The Union of Farm Workers is smaller today, but its significance has not lessened.

He left the UFWA in the 1980’s and began to focus on political organizing for a number of candidates including Nancy Pelosi for Congress, Alan Cranston for Senate, Tom Bradley for governor, and governor Jerry Brown.

Twenty-eight years after leaving, Ganz returned to Harvard where he finished his undergraduate degree, received an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2000.

Since completing his doctorate in 2000, he has been a lecturer in public policy, teaching courses on organizing, leadership, civic engagement, and community action research at the Kennedy School for Government

While preparing to facilitate the workshops at the Hillel Institute, I learned that Ganz offers a unique perspective on community organizing and activism. In contrast to institutional mass mobilization, Ganz stresses the need to tell the story/

He stresses the need for personal investment through what he defines as “the story of self.” Here the individual shares something of him/herself, something that offers a moral or insight to whatever the message is. This can then be fused with “the story of us,”which is essentially the party line or goal that the activist is trying to suggest. Finally, Ganz concludes that there must be a call to action, which he encapsulates in “the story of now.”

Activism Is About Telling the Story

Finally, Ganz stresses that the communication cannot be one-way, but must involve genuine listening to understand the other person’s perspective through their own personal narrative.

Ganz illustrates this through the famous three questions of Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”

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Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist (now available on Kindle) and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com/and on Twitter (#alonshalevsf).