Many of those who reflect systematically on the practice of nonviolent struggle against injustice have noted a powerful dynamic: Before the practice of nonviolent direct action makes any impact on the external world, it first transforms its practitioners. Sometimes it takes violent persons and channels their aggression more creatively. But nonviolent direct action can also evoke talents and qualities of leadership, virtues of courage and discipline, that were unknown or obscured in the person before they began practicing nonviolence. This is abundantly evident in the story of Cesar Chavez (1927-1993).

Cesar Chavez was born on 31 March 1927 on a farm near Yuma, Arizona. His grandfather Cesar, after whom he was named, had been a poor farmworker in Mexico. But he moved the Chavez family north to the U.S. and managed to purchase a 160-acre farm in Arizona that grew corn, lettuce, beans and a little cotton. The farm prospered above the subsistence level until the Great Depression. As with so many other family farms during that disaster, the Chavez family farm was lost in 1937, sold to the bank for whatever little they would give. This was an incredible downturn in the Chavez family fortunes. They became migrant farmworkers in California, moving from farm to farm to harvest whatever crops were in season. Migrant farmworkers not only experience poverty and poor living conditions, their need to move with the harvests has a devastating effect on migrant families' ability to educate their children. Cesar attended over 20 different elementary schools in Arizona and California. Finally, he dropped out of school altogether in the Seventh Grade. From that point on, Cesar began to work 10-12 hours per day, 6-7 days per week.

When the U.S. entered World War II, Cesar enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After the war, he returned to California and became a migrant farmworker once more. He also got married and started a family. The life of a migrant worker was hard and Cesar wanted better conditions for his family than what he had enjoyed as a child, but he had no confidence in his ability to do any other kind of work, nor in challenging the growers' abuses of migrant workers. Growers paid workers by how much they could pick, pitifully low prices. They "housed" the migrant workers in shacks that seldom had running water or indoor plumbing, and were firetraps. Workers were exposed to pesticides and often worked without breaks for water, food, or even use of the bathroom. Outdoor bathrooms in the fields were often located upstream from water available for workers to drink. Growers could get away with all these abuses (and more) because migrant workers are often immigrants who speak little English and know little of their rights under the law. Also, growers know that many migrant workers are undocumented, that is, "illegal immigrants," who can be cowed into silence about their treatment by threats to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which would probably result in deportation.

This was the context that Chavez knew with the migrant farmworkers of California, most of whom were Chicano (Mexican-American) or Chinese immigrants. It was a context that created hopelessness among most of his fellow farmworkers. Hope for change was dim with Chavez, too, but the spark had not been fully extinguished. Perhaps his exposure to wider world as a consequence of his service in the U. S. Navy partially accounts for Chavez' continued resistance to hopelessness. Perhaps it was his strong Christian faith. Like most Chicanos of Chavez' generation, Cesar had been raised with the deep piety of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. As Cesar was later to admit, as it was practiced by poor Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, this piety included several cultural elements from Native American traditions that many would call "superstitions." It is also true that pre-Vatican II popular Catholicism often encouraged the poor to accept conditions as they are, as either a reflection of God's will or as unimportant in the light of eternity. But in Cesar, this faith created hope for the triumph of God's justice, and the courage to face great obstacles for God. His mother had raised him on the stories of the saints, whose fervent dedication to God surmounted any obstacles.

In 1952, Chavez met a union organizer named Fred Ross. It was to prove a life-changing encounter. Ross approached Chavez to enlist his aid in persuading Mexican-American farmworkers to organize themselves. At first, Chavez doubted his own abilities to lead others and he knew that the other workers would be skeptical that they could struggle to improve their own lives. But Ross touched something deep in Chavez that cried out against the injustice of farmworkers' plight. He knew that he and his fellow workers were essential to the growers' livelihood. They were a vital resource that fed the nation and the world. For them to be treated with such indignity was therefore unjust and that could not be God's will. Without knowing it, Ross had channeled Chavez' admiration for the saints' devotion into the struggle for earthly justice. Chavez soon found that he was fairly persuasive as an organizer. The migrant workers trusted him as one of them, thereby giving him a more receptive audience than even a veteran organizer like Ross could hope to gain.

Soon Ross put Chavez to work full-time for the Community Service Organization (CSO), founded and headed by Saul Alinsky. It was from Alinsky that Chavez learned many of the methods of nonviolent direct action that he would later employ in the struggle of the farmworkers. This needs a word of clarification. Alinsky, a guru of community organizing, was no pacifist and did not conceive of his method of organizing communities to struggle against entrenched powers as "nonviolence." Indeed, there have been tensions between the Alinsky school of community organizing and the strategies developed by committed Gandhians. (I owe several insights into these tensions to my friend, Dave Brown Kinloch, an engineer who runs a small-business that designs alternative, renewable energy products, is also a longtime community organizer. He currently heads the environmental group, The Paddlewheel Alliance. Dave wrote an M.A. thesis comparing the Alinsky approach to the Gandhian and concluding that Gandhian strategies were superior since they made post-struggle reconciliation between groups easier.) Nevertheless, both activists and nonviolent theorists have incorporated many of Alinsky's ideas. If nonviolence theory can learn from committed warriors like von Clauswitz (and they have), then surely incorporation of several elements of Alinsky's organizing strategies should trouble none but purists.

Chavez worked for Alinsky and CSO for the next decade. He carried on successful voter registration campaigns among migrant workers who were U.S. citizens. He helped the farmworkers learn to petition the growers for toilets, clean housing, and safe drinking water. As his direct action helped to empower the workers to take more control over their own lives and to assert their God-given dignity as human beings, Chavez found himself changing. Nonviolent actions for others were changing and empowering Cesar as well. Chavez the school drop-out began a lifelong process of self-motivated study for self-improvement. He improved his English and became an effective public speaker. Realizing that ignorance of the law prevented the farmworkers from knowing their rights and how to get them enforced, Cesar began studying the law on his own. A man that could once barely read and write, now spent hours up late at night pouring over law books with a single light.

In 1962, Chavez left CSO to take a non-paying job at the National Farmworkers Association, the predecessor to the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) that Chavez would soon lead for decades. Chavez traveled farm to farm, urging workers to join the union. As union membership increased, Chavez led the union to start workers' credit unions, a gas station that charged fair prices, and a grocery store as an alternative to the grower-owned "company stores" that kept workers so impoverished. Victories in these areas enabled Chavez to dream even bigger dreams for the UFW: creating affordable burial arrangements for members and their families. That made it easier for the farmworkers to discharge a family duty that was extremely important in both the Mexican-American and Chinese cultures -- a duty that previously added to their poverty or their indebtedness to the growers. Finally, with Chavez as president, the UFW was able to hire its own lawyers.

Chavez had learned much from Alinsky and CSO, but realized that he could take the UFW only so far with those methods. From afar, he had watched with interest the Southern-based Black Freedom Movement and its use of Gandhian nonviolence. Chavez admired the Christian spirituality of most of the movement's leaders, but wondered if nonviolence could be communicated in a Catholic idiom that would speak to most of the UFW membership in a way that was more natural than the speeches of African-American Baptist and Methodist pastors could. He soon discovered the Catholic Worker Movement and several of its members, including Dorothy Day, co-founder and de facto head of the movement, traveled to California. The Catholic Worker folk investigated the UFW and interviewed Chavez for their publication, The Catholic Worker. In turn, Day and others introduced Chavez to the revolutionary potential of modern Catholic social teaching (especially the papal social encyclicals), and to the growing Catholic peace movement. Cesar began to read the writing of Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk who was becoming a major theologian of Christian nonviolence during the 1960s. These dialogues and readings persuaded Chavez to become a Christian pacifist and he now knew that he could communicate the practicality of nonviolence to the Chicano members of the UFW, almost all of whom were Catholic. Many of the Chinese members were also Catholic, but Chavez undertook to study Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian teachings in order to find cultural connections for nonviolence to all the Chinese UFW members, although many of his fellow Chicanos wondered what a "good Catholic boy" like Chavez was doing studying these exotic beliefs and customs.

By the mid-1960s, Chavez was ready to lead the UFW beyond Alinsky-style community organizing into campaigns of nonviolent direct action. He began with strikes, since a strike is the method of nonviolent struggle with which unions are most familiar. In response to these strikes, the growers and farmers hired thugs (sometimes with connections to organized crime, but sometimes off-duty police officers or retired police officers) who beat the farmworkers mercilessly, killing some and hospitalizing others. Since the strikes threatened the greater economy, the California governor used the law to force the strikers back to work. When the UFW resisted, Cesar Chavez was jailed.

By now, Chavez and the UFW were attracting nationwide attention. Some media pundits even dubbed him, the "Latino Martin Luther King." Jail gave Chavez time to enter more fully into the spirituality of nonviolence, and his newfound publicity gave him the opportunity to change tactics. In 1967, Chavez called for a nationwide boycott of grapes. The vast majority of the grapes consumed in the U.S. are grown in California and the grape growers were heaping the most abuses on the farmworkers. The vineyard owners had successfully broken strikes through violent intimidation, the collusion of the INS, and even by smuggling in new groups of illegal immigrants to work the vineyards as unorganized "scab" labor. Their illegal immigration status allowed the vineyard owners to treat them as virtual slaves. Chavez used his contacts in the media, including the Catholic Worker, which circulated beyond Catholic circles to the wider religious peace and justice movement, to make all these things public and to call for the national boycott of grapes until worker demands were met.

The grape boycott galvanized the public imagination, even attracting the attention of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, two rival Democratic senators campaigning for the 1968 presidential nomination. Chavez and RFK became friends. Many even said that meeting Cesar Chavez led to a spiritual renewal in Bobby Kennedy and pushed him further along his pilgrimage from a Cold Warrior and rabid anti-Communist into a progressive champion of the downtrodden and of peace. When the growers broke agreements mediated by RFK with the United Farmworkers, Chavez began a hunger strike. Hunger strikes are adaptations of the spiritual discipline of fasting into tools of nonviolent political struggle. They were practiced regularly by suffragists in the U.S. arrested while struggling for the right to vote. And they had become a staple of Gandhi's leadership in India's struggle for freedom. But in 1968, most people in the U.S. were unfamiliar with hunger strikes, especially by a Catholic union leader. Chavez lost so much weight that he came dangerously close to death, but the publicity mobilized pressure from many different sources and sent the growers back to the bargaining table. By 1970, the grape boycott succeeded in winning all the UFW demands.

Chavez had learned a pattern that persisted in his leadership: organize; petition for redress; resist; prepare spiritually to maintain nonviolence in the struggle; publicize the struggle widely; negotiate fairly and without bitterness when the adversary is persuaded to turn from oppression to negotiation. Chavez needed such a focused pattern of leadership to deal with problems in the Union, too. As the romance in the Civil Rights struggle of "black and white together, we shall overcome," gave way to an emphasis on Black Pride and Black Power, similar quests for group identity and pride spread to other movements and ethnicities, including Native Americans and Latinos. Some in the UFW had become enamored of the concept of La Raza, of Latinos as a separate racial/ethnic group who should voluntarily segregate themselves from others. Chavez insisted that the UFW was not a racially-exclusive organization, and threatened to resign if any moves were made to oust the Chinese members. Chicano pride and Latino/Hispanic pride and self-respect, Chavez encouraged. It was clearly so much healthier than the internalized inferiority that the racism of America encouraged. Nevertheless, Latino/Hispanic pride was not to be equated with exclusion or bigotry, against which Chavez was relentlessly opposed.

Chavez' legacy is great: He illustrates the power of nonviolence to transform the practitioner even as it struggles to transform society. Last night (25 October 2002), I saw the potential for such transformation at a rally in Louisville, KY, against the proposed war with Iraq. Held across from the Federal Building, a group of about 100 (smaller than at the candle-light vigil the week before), beat on drums, pots & pans, blew whistles, and made other noise so that political leaders not listening could no longer say they did not hear us call for peace. I brought my 7-yr. old daughter Molly with me. Although she had already written letters to the president and to congressional leaders urging peace, this was Molly's first "experiment in truth" with nonviolent direct action. She had been frustrated at not being able to do more to stop the proposed war (something with which I identified). She felt small and powerless against massive forces outside her control. Collective nonviolent protest empowered her. She had fun, banging on pans and shouting, "Drop Bush, Not Bombs!" and other slogans. She enjoyed meeting other children and older peace activists. She was excited when passing cars honked and gave signs of support. She knew that she was doing something active, not just passively accepting an evil like war. Regardless of what happens in external events, Molly will never be quite the same. I, her father, saw something spark inside her -- a sense of her own worth and power to stand for truth, to work for justice and peace, to face overwhelming odds undeterred when supported by the solidarity of organized community nonviolent direct action. In his very different circumstances, Cesar Chavez learned that as well and left that legacy for Molly and all the Mollys all over the world.

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