You were raised Catholic. You said you didn’t believe. Much anyway. How one lives one’s life is what one believes, you said. You admitted to downright needing Christmas.
And music. Twice you said you didn’t know if you assented to the notion of God.
Notion? Existence then. You said you believed in mystery. Mystery? You said religion—any religion you knew about—was a cult of patriarchy. Men in the Bible were better fathers than husbands, you noticed.
A friend who sat with you through the night, one of the worst nights, very near the end, recounted to me how troubled you seemed. What a bad person I’ve been, you said to the friend, to the shadows, to the statues huddled in the shadows (Wait, are those statues?), turning your face away. What a poor mother, what a poor daughter.
No, no, the friend reassured: Come on, you are a very good mother, your children are wonderful. They adore you. Everyone adores you.
I am thinking of your two-hour theorem, Darling. It is the most fortifying advice I have ever received. You said: I find I can stand anything for two hours. Fly through a thunderstorm. Drive through a desert. Visit a kid in prison. Root canal. Cocktail party in Brentwood. Birth. Financial report. Roast turkey. Just do it and don’t fret! Think about getting home. Think about pulling into the driveway. Think about cereal and bananas.
In the morning, your friend said, you opened your eyes, though no one could enter them; you spoke as if from a trance. How wonderful God is, you said. How beautiful it is!
• • •
I mean, who doesn’t love the breast, the throat, the hands, the rings, the laughter? Who doesn’t love the economy of her ways? Her sudden abandonment to joy? The way she can arrange a bed, a sheet, a blanket, a pillow. The way she can leave everything better than when she entered.
I know plenty of men who can arrange a room. But I am not talking about “taste,” I am talking about . . . Partly, it is the patience for folding material—the patience of square corners. But partly it is the carelessness of allowable drift. Of opening a window and closing a curtain and letting the curtain blow as it will.
During World War II, the U.S. military, in an attempt to make men more uniform, studied the art of the hospital, the convent, the feminine. Men were trained to make up their cots in an efficient, spotless, feminine way. Selfless, in other words—literally selfless, as a grave is selfless. One bed must be exactly like the next. Inspecting officers tended to make a metrical fetish of a made bed, a punishment of what should promise ease.
Darling, you couldn’t wrap a package to save your soul. I watched as you taped together some wrinkled, flowered, saved remnant of Mother’s Day. Then you tied on a wide plaid ribbon. The result was not perfection. It was pretty. Same with your flower arrangements—plunking a fistful of cut flowers into a vase, any vase, any flowers. One would need to study for years to achieve the carelessness of your impulse. An unkempt, Pre-Raphaelite prettiness followed you wherever you went, and I don’t understand at all how you came by it. I don’t even understand what it was.
Who doesn’t love her stockings?
You were dead, so you missed the plump-jowled televangelist Jerry Falwell confiding to the gaunt-jowled televangelist Pat Robertson that the Islamist attack on America was the result not of religious extremism but of divine displeasure with a morally decadent United States of America: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, the People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
He means us, Darling. You and me in the bar of the Garden of Eden, passing those long-past afternoons.
I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women.
Without you.
six
Saint Cesar of Delano
The funeral for Cesar Chavez took place in an open field near Delano, a small agricultural town at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. I remember an amiable Mexican disorder, the crowd listening and not listening to speeches and prayers delivered from a raised platform beneath a canvas tent. I do not remember a crowd numbering thirty thousand or fifty thousand, as some estimates have it—but then I do not remember. Perhaps a cool, perhaps a warm, spring sun. Men in white shirts carried forward a pine box. The ease of their movement suggested the lightness of their burden.
When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at sixty-six, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had cofounded was in decline; the union had five thousand members, equivalent to the population of one small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers—the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union; the workers he had branded as “scabs.”
I went to the funeral because I was writing a piece on Chavez for the Los Angeles Times. It occurs to me now that I was present at a number of events involving Cesar Chavez. I was at the edge of the crowd in 1966, when Chavez led UFW marchers to the steps of the capitol in Sacramento to rally support for a strike against grape growers. I went to hear Chavez speak at Stanford University. I can recall everything about the occasion except why I was there. I stood at the back. I remember a light of late afternoon among the oaks beyond the plate-glass windows of Tresidder Union; I remember the Reverend Robert McAfee Brown introducing Cesar Chavez. Something about Chavez embarrassed me—embarrassed me in the way I would be embarrassed if someone from my family had turned up at Stanford in a dream to lecture undergraduates on the hardness of a Mexican’s life. I did not join in the standing ovation. Well, I was already standing. I wouldn’t give him anything. And yet, of course, there was something compelling about his homeliness.
In her thoroughly researched and thoroughly unsentimental book The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement, journalist Miriam Pawel chronicles the lives of a collection of people—farm workers, idealistic college students, young lawyers from the East Coast, a Presbyterian minister, and others—who gave years of their lives at subsistence pay to work for the UFW. Every person Pawel profiles has left the union—has been fired or has quit in disgust or frustration. Nevertheless, it is not beside the point to notice that Cesar Chavez inspired such a disparate, devoted company.
We forget that the era we call the sixties was not only a time of vast civic disaffection; it was also a time of religious idealism. At the forefront of what amounted to the religious revival of America in those years were the black Protestant ministers of the civil rights movement, ministers who insisted upon a moral dimension to the rituals of everyday American life—eating at a lunch counter, riding a bus, going to school.
Cesar Chavez similarly cast his campaign for better wages and living conditions for farm workers as a religious movement. He became for many Americans, especially Mexican Americans (my parents among them), a figure of spiritual authority. I remember a small brown man with an Indian aspect leading labor protests that were also medieval religious processions of women, children, nuns, students, burnt old men, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
By the time Chavez had become the most famous Mexican American anyone could name—his face on the cover of Time—the majority of Mexican Americans lived in cities, far from the tragic fields of California’s Central Valley that John Steinbeck had made famous a generation earlier. Mexican Americans were more likely to work in construction or in service-sector jobs t
han in the fields.
Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927. During the years of his hardscrabble youth, he put away his ambitions for college. He gave his body to the fields in order to keep his mother from having to work in the fields. The young farm worker accumulated an autodidact’s library—books on economics, philosophy, history. (Years later, Chavez was apt to quote Winston Churchill at UFW staff meetings.) He studied the black civil rights movement, particularly the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. He studied most intently the lives and precepts of Saint Francis of Assisi and Mohandas Gandhi.
It is heartening to learn about private acts of goodness in notorious lives. It is discouraging to learn of the moral failures of famously good people. The former console. But to learn that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer is to be confronted with the knowledge that flesh is a complicated medium for grace. To learn that there were flaws in the character of Cesar Chavez is again to wonder at the meaning of a good life. During his lifetime, Chavez was considered by many to be a saint. Pawel is writing outside the hagiography, but while reading her book I could not avoid thinking about the nature of sanctity.
Saints? Holiness? I apologize for introducing radiant nouns.
Cesar Chavez modeled his life on the lives of the saints—an uncommon ambition in a celebrated American life. In America, influence is the point of prominence; power over history is the point. I think Cesar Chavez would have said striving to lead a holy life is the point—a life lived in imitation of Jesus Christ, the most famous loser on a planet spilling over with losers. The question is whether the Mexican saint survives the tale of the compromised American hero.
The first portrait in The Union of Their Dreams is of Eliseo Medina. At the advent of the UFW, Eliseo was a shy teenager, educated only through the eighth grade. Though he was not confident in English, Medina loved to read El Malcriado, the feisty bilingual weekly published by the UFW. Eliseo Medina remembered how his life changed on a Thursday evening when he went to hear Chavez in the social hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano. Medina was initially “disappointed by the leader’s unimpressive appearance.” But by the end of the meeting, he had determined to join the union.
No Chavez speech I have read or heard approaches the rhetorical brilliance of the Protestant ministers of the black civil rights movement. Chavez was, however, brilliantly theatrical. He seemed to understand, the way Charlie Chaplin understood, how to make an embarrassment of himself—his mulishness, his silence, his witness. His presence at the edge of a field was a blight of beatitude.
Chavez studied the power of abstinence. He internalized his resistance to injustice by refusing to eat. What else can a poor man do? Though Chavez had little success encouraging UFW volunteers to follow the example of his abstinence, he was able to convince millions of Americans (as many as twenty million by some estimates) not to buy grapes or lettuce.
Farmers in the Central Valley were bewildered to find themselves roped into a religious parable. Indeed, Valley growers, many of them Catholics, were dismayed when their children came home from parochial schools and reported that Chavez was upheld as a moral exemplum in religion class.
At a time in the history of American business when Avis saw the advantage of advertising itself as “Number Two” and Volkswagen sold itself as “the Bug,” Chavez made the smallness of his union, even the haphazardness of it, a kind of boast. In 1968, during his most publicized fast to support the strike of grape pickers, Chavez issued this statement (he was too weak to read aloud): “Those who oppose our cause are rich and powerful and they have many allies in high places. We are poor. Our allies are few.”
Chavez broke his 1968 fast with a public relations tableau that was rich with symbol and irony. Physically diminished (in photographs his body looks to be incapable of sustaining an erect, seated position), Chavez was handed bread (sacramental ministration after his trial in the desert) by Chris Hartmire, the Presbyterian minister who gave so much of his life to serving Chavez and his union. Alongside Chavez sat Robert F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from New York. The poor and the meek also have allies in high places.
Here began a conflict between deprivation and success that would bedevil Chavez through three decades. In a way, this was a struggle between the Mexican Cesar Chavez and the American Cesar Chavez. For it was Mexico that taught Chavez to value a life of suffering. It was America that taught him to fight the causes of suffering.
The speech Chavez wrote during his hunger strike of 1968 (wherein he likened the UFW to David fighting the Goliath of agribusiness) announced the Mexican theme: “I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men.” (Nearly three decades later, in the program for Chavez’s funeral, the wording of his psalm would be revised—“humanity” substituted for “manliness”: To be human is to suffer for others. God help me to be human.)
Nothing else Chavez wrote during his life had such haunting power for me as that public prayer for a life of suffering; no utterance sounded so Mexican. Other cultures in the world assume the reality of suffering as something to be overcome. Mexico assumes the inevitability of suffering. That knowledge informs the folk music of Mexico, the bitter humor of Mexican proverb. To be a man is to suffer for others—you’re going to suffer anyway. The code of machismo (which American English has translated too crudely as sexual bravado) in Mexico derives from a medieval chivalry whereby a man uses his strength or his resolve or even his foolishness (as did Don Quixote) to protect those less powerful. God help us to be men.
Mexicans believe that in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared in brown skin, in royal Aztec raiment, to a converted Indian peasant named Juan Diego. The Virgin asked that a church be erected on the site of her four apparitions in order that Mexican Indians could come to her and tell her of their suffering. The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was an aspect of witness at every UFW demonstration.
Though he grew up during the American Depression, Cesar Chavez breathed American optimism and American activism. In the early 1950s, while still a farm worker, he met Fred Ross of the Community Service Organization, a group inspired by the principles of the radical organizer Saul Alinsky. Chavez later became an official in the CSO, and eventually its president. He persuaded notoriously apathetic Mexican Americans to register to vote by encouraging them to believe they could change their lives in America.
If you would understand the tension between Mexico and the United States that is playing out along our mutual border, you must understand the psychic tension between Mexican stoicism—if that is a rich enough word for it—and American optimism. On the one side, the Mexican side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the American side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and depression, when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American dream.
By the late 1960s, as the first UFW contracts were being signed, Chavez began to brood. Had he spent his poor life only to create a middle class? Lionel Steinberg, the first grape grower to sign with the UFW, was drawn by Chavez’s charisma but chagrined at the union’s disordered operations. Steinberg wondered: “Is it a social movement or a trade union?” He urged Chavez to use experienced negotiators from the AFL-CIO.
Chavez paid himself an annual wage of $5,000. “You can’t change anything if you want to hold on to a good job, a good way of life, and avoid suffering.” The world-famous labor leader would regularly complain to his poorly paid staff about the phone bills they ran up and about what he saw as the misuse of a fleet of secondhand UFW cars. He held the union hostage t
o the purity of his intent. Eliseo Medina, who had become one of the union’s most effective organizers, could barely support his young family; he asked Chavez about setting up a trust fund for his infant son. Chavez promised to get back to him but never did. Eventually, thoroughly discouraged by the mismanagement of the union, Medina resigned.
In 1975 Chavez helped to initiate legislation that prohibited the use of the short-handled hoe in the fields—its two-foot-long haft forced farm workers to stoop all day. That achievement would outlast the decline of his union. By the early 1970s, California vegetable growers began signing sweetheart contracts with the rival Teamsters Union. The UFW became mired in scraps with unfriendly politicians in Sacramento. Chavez’s attention wandered. He imagined a “Poor Peoples Union” that would reach out to senior citizens and people on welfare. He contacted church officials within the Vatican about the possibility of establishing a lay religious society devoted to service to the poor. Chavez became interested in the Hutterite communities of North America and the Israeli kibbutzim as possible models for such a society.
Chavez visited Synanon, the drug-rehabilitation commune headed by Charles Dederich, shortly before some Synanon members were implicated in a series of sexual scandals and criminal assaults. Chavez borrowed from Synanon a version of a disciplinary practice called the Game, whereby UFW staff members were obliged to stand in the middle of a circle of peers and submit to fierce criticism. Someone sympathetic to Chavez might argue that the Game was an inversion of an ancient monastic discipline meant to teach humility. Someone less sympathetic might conclude that Chavez was turning into a petty tyrant. I think both estimations are true.
From his reading, Chavez would have known that Saint Francis of Assisi desired to imitate the life of Jesus. The followers of Francis desired to imitate the life of Francis. Within ten years of undertaking his mendicant life, Francis had more than one thousand followers. Francis realized he could not administer a growing religious order by personal example. He relinquished the administration of the Franciscans to men who had some talent for organization. Cesar Chavez never gave up his position as head of the UFW.
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