Miriam PawelCritiques

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.”

We may be hurting for competent, thoughtful leaders in the public sector in 2018 (ok, we definitely are). But digging beyond the Trumps and Mays of the world, we do have the Browns, and Pawel wrote a painstakingly detailed account that follows three. Those are imminently retiring California governor (and one time state attorney general, mayor of Oakland, and candidate for president) Jerry Brown, his sister Kathleen, former state treasurer and one-time gubernatorial candidate, and, one generation back, their father Pat, also an attorney general and governor. The number of interviews she conducted is an insanely impressive feat, to get a fuller picture of where this family came from and what inspired them to govern as they did. Given the many offices held by the three Browns over multiple decades, this could have been an insurmountable topic, but Pawel whipped it into a smart narrative that put the details where they did the most good. Jerry Brown is the primary subject, but many other family members and friends are included. Recommended if you want to feel more optimistic about public service and how wealthy people can contribute positively.

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.

With a novelist's empathy and a historian's care, Pawel chronicles the well-known story of how Chavez built the first successful union for farmworkers--and the lesser known story of how he tore it down

Miriam Pawel presents an incomplete but illuminating history of the United Farm Workers (UFW) from 1965 through 1989. The book focuses tightly on the experiences of eight people in the movement, including boycott organizers, attorneys, a minister, and farmworkers who became team leaders and union organizers. Although Cesar Chavez is a dominant figure in the story, he is presented at a distance, always through others' eyes, and Pawel spends virtually no time explaining his background. For the reader, as for the focal characters, Chavez' leadership and legendary status is a given from the outset. This stylistic choice makes it easier to grasp how, for so long, movement and union members could defer to Chavez and overlook his flaws, while giving greatly of themselves to realize his dreams.

For students of advocacy movements, the central lesson of the story is that Chavez was a charismatic and idealistic movement leader, and a terrible administrator. Once the movement won -- institutionalizing, through state legislation in 1975, the right of workers to form a union -- Chavez should have stepped away from the fledgling UFW, turning it over to the gifted organizers and managers he had recruited. That would have freed him to build new movements -- a broad campaign for poor people, a utopian spiritual community, a community services organization. Instead, Chavez tried to have it all, refusing to hand over control of the union, but neglecting union business to pursue a series of experimental initiatives. The story Pawel tells is a tragedy -- for Chavez, who destroyed much of what he had built and turned on staff who loved him; for the farmworkers, many of whom lost contracts they had fought hard to win; and especially for committed union staffers forced out in a series of emotionally brutal purges.

While this book will benefit anyone interested in labor or advocacy movements, it has too narrow a focus to serve as the definitive account of the entire UFW. For example, Dolores Huerta comes across in this book as Cesar Chavez' hatchet woman, though she has had a distinguished career in Sacramento as a lobbyist for workers. Richard Chavez, Cesar's brother, comes across as a Cassandra who repeatedly warns Cesar against his mistakes but is ignored. The book is simply silent on Richard and Dolores' long-running relationship, which could hardly be overlooked in a book that wanted to address all facets of the UFW's history. In later chapters, Chavez' son Paul and son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez climb to leadership positions in the union, but are never sketched with any depth. The book also gives little sense of how the union has evolved since Cesar Chavez' unexpected death in 1993 (although Pawel published a long and highly critical article on that in the Los Angeles Times in 2006). Pawel has little to say about the theory of organizing, another dimension of the story that would have been interesting to understand better. But, with respect to its purpose -- capturing the experience of working for Cesar Chavez during the UFW's initial rise and fall -- the Union of Their Dreams does an excellent job.

The Union of Their Dreams presents a unique perspective of the farm worker movement, with individual chapters focused on some of the integral members of the movement that do not get much attention. Pawel does a good job portraying both the strengths and the faults of Chavez and the movement.

I would recommend The Union of Their Dreams to anyone that is interested in social movements or the history of the period.

Miriam Pawel, in her book The Union of Their Dreams, chronicles the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers movement through the eyes of a handful of central participants. Pawal's approach is particularly valuable because it allows her to evade the hero worship and iconography that surrounds Cesar Chavez and his legacy. Instead, Chavez is sketched by others' relationships with him and the reader gets a much fuller picture of the UFW as an organization.

Earlier, I reviewed John Dittmer's The Good Doctors which explored a civil rights organization from its birth in the segregation-era South to its eventual dissentigration. Whereas the Medical Committee for Human Rights eventually fell prey to its diversified interestsand lack of strong leaders that diluted its clout, the UFW profiled by Pawal was an organization bound too tightly to a single charismatic leader. It reminds the reader that institutions have many ways to fail, no matter how much good they've effected.

Pawal's book is an important addition to the history of American labor, and is unique in its attention to the relatively anonymous participants. It was heartbreaking to read the stories of people who had poured their lives into the movement and been discarded and forgotten. Chavez played a major role in the UFW, but he was never alone.

Heroes are funny things. We choose to put someone on a pedestal for any number of reasons, from the way they look to the way they sing to the causes they champion. But beneath the façade of every hero beats the heart of a human being, with all the quirks and foibles that make up all of our complex personalities.

César Chávez was a hero to many people in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the driving force behind making the plight of migrant farmworkers visible to the rest of America through boycotts of grapes and lettuce. With the founding of the United Farm Workers union, he and his dedicated staff fought for what most of us recognize as basic human rights: a safe workplace, a fair wage, decent housing, education for our children. Under his leadership, the UFW boycotts captured the attention of the nation and won major concessions from field owners to improve the lives of the workers. His accomplishments have been enshrined in American life: schools, parks, libraries and streets have been named after him, and the state of California officially celebrates his birthday as César Chávez Day.

As Miriam Pawel illuminates in The Union of Their Dreams: Power, hope, and struggle in Cesar Chavez's farm worker movement, Chávez's considerable accomplishments were not without setbacks. Over the years, his initial dedication to the cause of farm workers shifted to a determination to preserve his control over the organization he created. After farm workers at many farms and ranches in California won the right to hold union elections and chose the UFW to represent them, the union found it difficult to actually deliver on the promises it had made. Chávez could be capricious, transferring staff members out of communities in which they were working hard to win the trust of and organize workers. As the union grew, Chávez became preoccupied with fighting off what he perceived to be challenges to his authority from board members, resulting in midnight purges of staffers who had lived in poverty and dedicated their lives for years to the farm workers' cause.

Pawel creates her complicated portrait of Chávez indirectly, by telling the stories of nine of the UFW's most dedicated workers in alternating vignettes. The style allows us to get to know each of the workers well, but muddies the reader's sense of a coherent timeline of events, and sometimes leads to incidents being told twice and out of order. The Union of Their Dreams is not a hatchet job in any sense; Pawel does not try to demonize Chávez nor lay the UFW's failures solely at his feet. The most grievous flaw of the book, however, is the lack of representation from UFW officials who remained loyal to Chávez throughout the 1970s turmoil. But Pawel, a journalist by trade, has a very accessible writing style, and her informality creates an intimacy that makes the reader feel part of the story.

This book is a worthy read not only for for those interested in progressive politics, but also readers looking for insight into how organization are formed, grow, and are stifled by their success. It's a familiar story for anyone who has volunteered or worked for a nonprofit organization, but it seems especially poignant in this case, because the stakes were so high for so many people, and even more significant victories were so close. I came away from this book deeply impressed by the incredible accomplishments of a group of idealistic, committed men and women, and saddened by thoughts of the opportunities lost to power struggles, disorganization and petty quarrels.

I've never known much about Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Worker's union so I was pleased to receive a free copy of this book from the Library Thing Early Reviewers program. The book is not about Chávez directly although his presence hovers over the events covered in this book for both good and ill. Instead Pawel focuses on the stories of nine individuals who dedicated their lives to the farm worker movement - field hands, organizers, lawyers and a ministers. Their overlapping stories offer a glimpse into the movement's rise and fall from the 1960s to the 1980s.

At first it's an inspiring story of boycotts, strikes and union elections where the union prevails against the growers (and their Teamster thugs) as well as scoring legislative victories. Chávez becomes a national hero for his inspiration, non-violent leadership. Unfortunately like many organizations the UFW is torn apart by internal conflicts and Chávez only exacerbates the problems. Pawel details how these close friend and colleagues of Chávez see him becoming increasingly paranoid, micromanaging and megalomaniac, purging the union of people on specious grounds and making life miserable for those who remain.

This book is ultimately heartbreaking but there are glimpses of hope nevertheless. It's inspiring that despite all the difficulties these nine people dedicated themselves to an ideal and a cause. While shattering the myth of Chávez the hero, this book still illustrates the good that can be done by ordinary people working for social justice.

The Union of their Dreams is a history of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Worker (UFW) movement: its development and early successes followed by its quick and unfortunate demise. As a movement it had great appeal, and drew many talented and idealistic folks into its camp. Chavez as a leader inspired thousands of people, including the farmworkers whose plight he was pushing to improve. But his co-conspirators and co-dreamers were just as responsible for some of UFW's draw AND successes, which is why Chavez's paranoia and inability to delegate tasks eventually killed the movement by driving those same key players out of the game.

Any history this charged with scandal and controversy is hard to present objectively, but author Miriam Pawel manages to keep herself out of it. It's evident that she gathered ALL the information she could, to the point that she apologizes to her sources in the Acknowledgments section for grilling them on so many details... Then, in the book, she presents just the facts as she can cite and support them. All opinions expressed are those of UFW founding members or long-time participants who personally witnessed the collapse of the UFW. And, let me tell you, the story is so shocking that it borders on exposé.

A warning that Union of their Dreams is pretty lengthy and detailed. It's the kind of book you have to sit down and enjoy in solitude, because it doesn't really lend itself to distractions. And then you might have to read it over a second time because you didn't catch it all the first time through. (I skimmed some paragraphs just so I wouldn't end up drowning in the details.) Still, DEFinitely worth reading, especially if you've ever heard of Cesar Chavez and wondered, hey whatever happened there, anyway? You won't find out by looking it up on Wikipedia--that's how ground-breaking Pawel's book is. I highly recommend it.

I'm only half way through this book and it is fascinating. As someone who is an organizer and has seen behind the curtain, it's good to read about other organizations and their own struggles.

I will be looking for critical responses to this book as it doesn't paint Chavez in the best light, but one I can only hope is an honest look at a man who became a movement.

Pawel’s book presents a compelling narrative constructed of the many voices and lives that contributed to “Chavez’s” farm worker movement. As a contrast point to other reviewers, I liked the organization of the book by person. I think it contributes to the view of involved workers as whole people who handed their lives over to a cause in large or small ways. The book is a qualitative and impartial overview from many viewpoints of the movement. An appreciated read. :D

In The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel relates the history of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers (UFW), 1965-1989, primarily through the stories of eight people who were involved in the union. Although this is an interesting approach, the organization of the book leaves much to be desired. The surnames of the eight people are given when they are first introduced but their first names only are used throughout the narrative. The title for each chapter is followed by the beginning date; the chapter is then arranged by character such as Eliseo, Chris, or Jerry. This arrangement tends to get choppy; in one chapter, the narrative might go from one character to another back to the first. The history would be easier to follow if either the surnames or full names were used, especially since many other people are mentioned in passing in the history. Moreover, the persons whose stories are told are not identified until the Acknowledg-ments at the end of the book. The Prologue tells a moving story about the death of Jessica Govea, who was involved in the union. It leads one to want to read more about her, but she is only mentioned occasionally; her story is not told.

Although he is not highlighted with a personal narrative, Cesar Chavez is the central character throughout the book. He was the person who founded the union, set the policy, micromanaged the union, and was centrally involved in its disintegration. The history shows how many idealistic people who had worked well together initially became each other’s enemies in the years of the union’s decline.

Miriam Pawel’s The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement is a complicated telling of an important story, the rise and fall of the National Farm Workers Association. Looking at their story we see the success of the underdog labor movement struggling against powerful growers and the Teamsters union who were brought in by the growers to undermine the NFWA organizing and boycotting activities, and we see the movements self inflicted failure after achieving an level of unprecedented success.
The book’s organization is a major hurdle for the reader to overcome. Although the main chapters are laid out in chronological order they are broken into sections headlined only by a persons first name. Following the story is difficult due to the lack of full names and titles. “Reverend Chris Hartmire” would stick in the readers mind as a uniquely identified person quicker than just “Chris”. Why use an individual’s names for the headings anyway? I have seen this method used in oral histories but this is not an oral history. Although Pawel did speak to many of these people in her research these are not the person’s own words.
In spite of the organization the book is worth reading. Seeing Chavez’s failures allows us to see what can happen when the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. The story of the NFWA illustrates both the advantages and the dangers inherent with charismatic leadership. Chavez built and destroyed the union and, in large part because of the cult of personality built around him, even people who saw his errors were unwilling to correct him.

The Union of Their Dreams by Miriam Pawel is an examination of the United Farm Workers (UFW) rise as a economic and political force as an agricultural union in California in the 1960s and 1970. This book takes as its premise that the often glowing accounts of the UFW, which focus mainly on the personality of its founder Cesar Chavez, tell an incomplete and inaccurate story of the union. Pawel’s premise is that while Chavez accomplish med much, much more could have been accomplished if it was not for Chavez’s management style and seemingly paranoia about people in the union who would actually betray its ideals.
Pawel’s method of unfolding her story is by focusing on various people who eventually became disaffiliated from the union, mostly through the use of purges of union leadership. Through the use of interviews of eight former members who were all victims of these purges, Pawel pieces together an alternative vision of the rise of the UFW that is not expressed in standard accounts of the UFW.
There are a number of important contributions that Pawel has made to the often complex picture that has become the UFW. First, she shows the dynamic group of people who were all part of the union’s rise. By not focusing solely on Chavez, Pawel shows how a whole group of people,- idealist lawyers and college students, ministers, and farm workers- contributed to the often startling successes of the UFW. In addition, she does not hesitate to show Chavez in solely glowing terms. This account gives a more realistic picture to the person of Cesar Chavez.
However, this positive also becomes a negative. This book should also not be seen as an objective account of the UFW. Rather, it has its own understanding and biases which are shown through her methodology. All of her primary sources are people who, in one way or another, feel that they were victims of these purges. In other words, her sources are not wholly objective either. A far different account of the union would be shown if she included in her sources others who were not disaffiliated with the union. However, I do not believe that this is her purpose for the book. It is not to provide an objective account, but rather an account from a certain point of view.
In addition, there are two aspects of her writing that I find problematic. First, is the way the various chapters are broken up. Rather then being told in a narrative form, the chapters are broken by the person speaking. This way of writing was at times confusing with characters coming in and out of the story at various times. From an organization standpoint, I found this extremely confusing. From a standpoint of respecting each individuals distinctive voice it is commendable. In this case, I would have preferred clarity however. Second, there is one serious act which I find to be more on gossip mongering then actual reporting. Pawel’s account of the death of Cleofas Guzman insinuates that Cesar Chavez had wanted his death is startling. Providing nothing but rumors her account seemed to wallow in the rumors of people who she did not speak to nor could their account be evenly remotely proved. It seemed that rather then just tell the account of former union members, Pawel also desired to denounce a person for the sake of denouncing them.
Would I recommend this book? My answer is maybe. I would not recommend it for a person who knows nothing about Chavez or the union. The book, while not focusing on Chavez, also focuses a lot on Chavez. Other members of the leadership and their part in the union are barely mentioned or within a completely one-sided way, most important would be Delores Huerta. I would recommend this book if one has some familiarity with the union and its various accounts. I believe that a person would need to have some background in the general development of the union before one reads this book.½

This was the first Early Reviewer book that I actually liked! It was a wonderful exploration of the people and issues (social, extrinsic political, and intrinsic political) that made of the farm worker's union and movement. It was well-written and a pleasure to read. As an activist and as an attorney, I was particularly interested in the tale of what went wrong with Chavez's movement. Well done!

Fair notice: I received this book for free as an Early Reviewer copy.

This is a wonderfully told story about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers as seen through the experiences of eight people who were either with Chavez from the birth of the union or who held key positions at critical junctures in the union's history. Idealists first and foremost, organizers, teachers, farmworkers and ministers second, they devoted a significant portion of their adult lives working for little or no pay simply to be part of that cause.

However, as so often happens with idealistic visions, reality inevitably sets in and the result to the psyche is seldom pretty. Unfortunately in this case, the weaknesses and mistakes of Chavez (who is not portrayed sympathetically by the author) are exposed and offered as the main reason the union ultimately failed, and why all eight eventually parted ways with Chavez, some on their own terms, some unwillingly, all unhappily.

Nonetheless, the book ends on a positive note. The final pages are devoted to a "Where are they now?" recap. There we find no regrets over the time each worked for the UFW, despite the pain and bitternes of their final days. All feel the time spent at the UFW influenced their lives in significant, permanent ways. Sandy Nathan, one of the eight, carried in his wallet a quote from Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" which sums up perfectly their attitude and the real message of this book: "...still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us...better perhaps than we are."

This is a very readable history of the United Farm Workers union--a true organizational history and not a more general history of farmworkers or the labor movement. Through the perspectives of a handful of union workers, Pawel tells the story of the early, unexpected success of the movement, which was due in large part to Cesar Chavez's ability to inspire volunteers. Once the union got off the ground, though, Chavez was unable to consolidate that success. He lacked organizational skills and was unwilling to relinquish any power to those who could have done a better job, and the result was that the union fell apart.
I did not know much at all about this subject before reading this book, but I thought the story was very interesting both as an analysis of organizational failures in a political movement and as a history of one segment of the labor movement. Although the end of the story is depressing--the complete failure to protect the farmworkers after such a promising start--the stories of the individuals who worked with the movement are more uplifting. Some of them were farmworkers who learned how to organize and how to speak on behalf of the other workers. Others were college students, ministers, etc. who wanted an opportunity to make a difference.

Miriam Pawel’s book, The Union of Their Dreams, takes a different-and successful- tack to illustrate the life of Cesar Chavez and the Union movement in agriculture. I think with other biographical endeavors, the author places the “star” at the center of the story and builds around that person. In this case, we jump right into the story of the development of the union and Chavez’s work. We learn more about the union and about Chavez himself, by seeing, hearing, and experiencing events through the eyes and mouths of those less heralded supporters and pioneers with the union. I found it to be a fascinating history of the movement in that era and I found the dispersion of sources from these less known builders of the Agricultural union movement to be innovative and illustrative.

This book reads like a case-study in leadership gone wrong. It was really fascinating to read about the union/movement as it started from a very small organization, to a large union that just imploded on itself. A lot of the themes in this book are classic - a micro-managing leader who increasingly becomes paranoid as his hold over the union wanes, an organization that becomes big at a pace faster than their leadership can keep with, purges of once-loyal members, etc. At times the book got a bit mired in minutiae, but overall it was interesting, and I found myself rooting for certain people as the drama unfolded.

Unfortunately, this book isn't fiction, and the reality is that a union, which could have done so much good for so many farmworkers, wound up as a shell of itself, and ultimately didn't help the farmworkers of California, much less of the entire US.

This book tells the story of Cesar Chavez and the UFW through the personal stories of some of the lesser-known people involved. While the book describes the UFW's well-known successes, it also spends a lot of time on what the author clearly sees as the failure to follow up on these successes, the internal chaos that both caused and resulted from this failure, and the near-collapse of the UFW.

Before reading the book, I was only familiar in vague outline with Chavez and the UFW, so it's hard for me to analyze the accuracy of the portrayal. But the book, which tells its story chiefly through the interwoven stories of a number of less-well-known UFW activists, makes its argument clearly and compellingly, and left me wanting to know more.½