Agriculture in California is different from anything we associate with bucolic notions of farming. "Agribusiness" is almost the right word, but the best characterization is by Carey McWilliams: "factories in the fields." The capitalists who conceived of this system should be congratulated for implementing a truly grand vision of what might be possible with the optimum irrigation. About 40 percent of all fruits and vegetables produced in the United States come from four California valleys: Salinas, Coachella, Imperial, and the largest, the San Joaquin (when joined with the northern Sacramento valley, it is known as the Central Valley). The growers are also frank about the human reality required by this enormous undertaking: they need a system of peon labor to make it function. The large workforce deployed for the harvest, for a critical few weeks or months, cannot be sustained all year. For over a hundred years, many ethnic groups (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos among them) have toiled the fields made famous by John Steinbeck. In the last 40 to 50 years, the workforce has become almost exclusively Mexican. This literally backbreaking labor is unsatisfying, and the poor pay cannot sustain the family of the worker.

This general context afforded the rise to prominence of Cesar Chavez, who means to Mexican Americans what Martin Luther King, Jr., means to African Americans. His birthday in March is celebrated in eight Western states. There is talk of making it a national holiday. Chavez was the founder and leading light of the Farm Workers Union, which in the 1960s and 1970s challenged the great financial and political power of the growers and their friends in high places (e.g., Gov. Ronald Reagan). But Chavez was more than a labor leader and a cultural icon. Readers of Books and Culture will also be interested in him because, like Dr. King, he was a committed Christian. Indeed, after King, Chavez was the most important Christian social activist of our time advocating change through non-violence.

Miriam Pawel, a veteran journalist and scholar, has written a welcome and very challenging addition to the literature on Chavez and the movement he led. It is an important subject because he and it were the spearheads of the Latino civil rights movement. Like the African American civil rights movement, the Latino version was deeply religious, as Pawel points out. While the songs of deliverance buoyed black marchers from Selma to Montgomery, their Mexican American counterparts, marching from Delano to Sacramento, walked every step behind an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Secular labor leaders and radical kids from Berkeley who walked with the farm workers may not have understood that this was not a protest march but a peregrinacion (pilgrimage). No one had to tell the ordinary campesinos why they marched on Santa Semana (Holy Week), or that the rally on the steps of the capitol building on Easter was to begin with Mass.

The genius of Pawel's The Union of Their Dreams is that, instead of constructing her narrative as a chronicle of the union's early struggles, later successes, and final failures—although all that is thoroughly discussed—she tells her story through the eyes of eight people who dedicated their lives to work for "la causa," the pursuit of justice for the (mostly Mexican American) farm workers. So, while Cesar Chavez is always onstage in the book, he is not, in the first instance, the subject. The main actors in the book, a diverse group, are people all fiercely loyal to Chavez and the cause. One (Chris Hartmire) is a Princeton-educated churchman. Others (Mario Bustamente, Eliseo Medina, and Sabino Lopez) were people of lesser education but who had great gifts for empowering people whose lives were powerless. Another (Gretchen Laue) was a bright young lawyer who worked on the staff of the irascible legal genius of the movement, Jerry Cohen.

Pawel's objective is to modify what she says is the hagiography that has characterized previous work on Chavez. In fact, while prior scholarship on Chavez has been mainly positive, hagiography is too strong a term. But Pawel's work credibly and clearly establishes the negative and less winsome side of Chavez's life and career, even as she acknowledges that this hero—glaring warts and all—was able to construct a movement which has inspired many people, both at that time and in other ventures in the seventeen years since Chavez's death.[1]

There had never been a successful attempt to organize farm workers before Cesar Chavez. The power of the growers, along with their allies in banking, law enforcement, and politics, was always too strong. But there had never been a leader like Chavez before, a person who could rally ordinary campesinos as well as leaders from the labor movement and the churches. And in turn, all those friends could rally tens of millions of North Americans (yes, Canadians too) in the 1960s and 1970s to boycott table grapes and lettuce, and thereby put pressure on the growers to offer just contracts to the farm workers.

While the testimony of Bustamente, Medina, Lopez, and Laue is captivating, I think many readers of B&C will join me in being particularly interested in Chris Hartmire, the Presbyterian minister who was the head of the California migrant ministry. Indeed, that ministry was an important key to the Union's success, as Chavez often said. Readers who believe in justice for the poor and powerless will have their hearts strangely warmed, so to speak, as they read about the ways Chris Hartmire joined Delores Huerta and others to advise Cesar Chavez; their efforts (strikes, boycotts, marches) resulted in new contracts that brought some justice to the fields from whence food for our tables originates. When help was needed, Chris got on the phone to church people throughout California. When conservative churches had to be mollified, Chris did the talking.

So, one asks, with all the successes of the union in the 1960s and 1970s, and with public holidays and postage stamps lauding the Chavez legacy, why is it so bad for farm workers now? Why are there so few members of the union now, and, for example, next to none in the Imperial Valley? Why are farm workers nearly as bad off as they were fifty years ago? Why have the growers largely won?

Here is where Pawel's book is most relevant, and frankly, painful for people like me, who boycotted grapes and lettuce back then and later became friends with people like Chris Hartmire as I wrote about the movement. The problem is that something happened to Cesar Chavez. One of his brothers thought Cesar went loco, but that is just one person's conjecture. In fact, Chavez could not make the transition from leader of a popular movement to leader of a successful organization. In Max Weber's classic formulation, Chavez could not make the transition from charismatic to bureaucratic leadership. He wanted to build on the union's success to create a poor people's movement that would establish health clinics, credit unions, and retirement housing. But though he had lost interest in the union, he could not relinquish control of it, and the results were disastrous. The union needed good management to continue the contracts that had been earned. Chavez found that boring, and he let the union work slide. That caused deep divisions in both the rank and file and the leadership. Even the most loyal people could not figure out what Chavez was doing.

In a weird twist in the story, Chavez bought into the philosophy of Synanon, founded as a successful drug rehab program, later to become a highly questionable cult. It used a confrontational "Game" as part of its therapy program. Chavez adopted this brutal "Game" as a device to build community and to sort out those who were for or against his new vision for the cause. All the main actors in Pawel's book—close associates and loyal lieutenants of Chavez—were victimized in that secretive, confrontational atmosphere, and then denounced by an increasingly "paranoid" Chavez as traitors to the cause and, incredibly, in some cases, as "communists."

Years ago, I told Chris Hartmire that I did not want to know about the reign of terror at the end, when Cesar Chavez turned on Chris and callously expelled him after 27 years of loyal and dedicated work. Because of Pawel's book, I now know the story, and I am saddened by it. As the author points out, it took Chris some time in therapy to be able to forgive Cesar Chavez; nevertheless, Chris has repeatedly told me that today he still values the work he did with Chavez for the farm workers, and would do it again.

Miriam Pawel concludes by affirming that Cesar Chavez helped to empower millions of Latinos in America—a legacy, both political and spiritual, that continues to this day. Fair enough. But, in this path-breaking and challenging book, I am grateful that Pawel lets us down easy as we acknowledge that yet another hero of ours was a flawed human being too. On March 31st, l was still able to say "viva la causa" and "viva Cesar Chavez," but I had to strain to summon the gusto in that proclamation.

Ronald A. Wells is professor of history, emeritus, at Calvin College. He is now mostly retired in Tennessee, where he also directs the annual Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College. His most recent publication is "The Protestant Allies of Cesar Chavez: The California Migrant Ministry and the Farm Worker Movement," Journal of Presbyterian History (2009).

1. For insight into the evolving and spirited debate about Chavez's legacy, visit farmworkermovement.us.

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