Guest lecturer: journalist/scholar, author of Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel.
Her Q to audience: How many have been part of a protest, a march? (3, including me!)
Background of sixties protests: she a NewYorker, heard about Chavez from afar. Civil Rights, SNCC, etc as a context. She came to LA in 90s to report for the Times; investigated what the union had become--it was no longer much of an advocate, a family run operation that didn’t do much for workers at all. Farm workers living in caves, tar paper shacks, and so on. A failure as a union (higher wages, better conditions); a successful social movement, because all who were involved felt their lives changed forever. As a journalist/historian, she wants to show Chavez’s greatness, but also his flaws, failures: in order to understand what can happen going forward.
Clips from “Chicano!” PBS documentary on the grape strike and UFW movement. Chavez made it a civil rights movement. The boycott worked!
She practices “history without a license,” she says. Interviews are interesting: memory is completely unreliable! She relied on documents; Chavez kept all his papers at the Ruether Library at Wayne State: everything was sent there. Tapes too. She then pursued living witnesses to fill in gaps. (Especially those who had good stories to tell.) Very strong sense that there’s no objective viewpoint for writing this history--especially in such a dispersed movement.
The Fall: said she was going to explain the decline of the movement, but didn’t. It’s in the book, I guess. She got a lot of pushback for her portrait of Chavez; Mayor Villaragosa himself said, “It’s true, but why write it? We need our heroes!”
More clips: scenes from Cesar’s life--in front of a storefront in Delano; four years later, the cover of Time Magazine. Pray-ins at the supermarket.
Answered questions from the audience for a while: whether she got pushback (lots), her views of Chavez (complicated), next book (bio of Chavez).
No comments:
Post a Comment