I never met Cesar Chavez but that didn’t preclude my having a serious discussion with him that may have proceeded about like the creative story below. As I write this introduction in March 2026, a decade later, I’m disturbed by revelations in the New York Times, following five years of investigative journalism, that the legendary leader of the United Farm Workers molested at least two underage girls, one only twelve-years old, and also sexually harassed a variety of women. Some of those who resisted were dismissed from the movement. Even the revered cofounder of the UFW, Dolores Huerta, disclosed that she bore two children by Chavez, the second after he allegedly raped her in the back seat of a car near a field where farmworkers had recently toiled.

The United Farm Workers quickly announced they were cancelling the annual birthday celebration for Cesar Chavez. He would have been ninety-nine on the final day of this month. Around the nation there will doubtless be many deletions of his name from schools and street signs and much denunciation, and rightly so.

For the moment, let us revisit the man who for sixty years was respected as a great civil rights leader.

Discussion with Cesar Chavez

Thirty miles east of Bakersfield, amid parched brown hills enlivened by dry but green oak trees, in the museum at Cesar Chavez Center, I walk by a replica of a humble room like many farm workers lived in fifty years ago. Walls and the roof are made of thin corrugated metal that sounded like drums under rain and became freezers in winter and ovens in summer. There’s a single bed in the corner. That doesn’t mean one person lived there. It implies a single sleeping space sufficed for one family or more, often ten people in a cramped room.  There’s no running water or bathroom.  Some workers had worse accommodations, surviving in insect-infested shacks of rotting wood, others in tents.  I knock on a tinny wall.

At ten-thirty, as scheduled, a short man with a serene brown face and thick black and gray hair approaches and says, “Good morning, I’m Cesar Chavez.”

His handshake is gentle.

“I’m Tom Clark.  Thanks for coming.”

“You ever live in a place like that?”

“Fortunately, I haven’t.”

“I lived in plenty and also worked a lot in the fields before I became a community and union organizer.  Farm workers respected my background.  They knew I was one of them.  They know I always will be.”

“Your office is in the rear, isn’t it?”

“Yes, come on.”

The office is closed to the public but visible through a large window revealing a desk covered by papers and folders, and full bookshelves lining two walls.

“Back in the early seventies, you were one of the pioneers in hiring people to build computer systems for your organization, the United Farm Workers.  Where’s your computer?”

“People designed computer systems for the UFW, but we didn’t have personal computers in those days.”

“I’ve read the UFW developed a printing business and did pretty well, and also used mailing lists, from various clients as well as your own rolls, to contact people during political campaigns.”

“You must always convey your message,” Chavez says.

“Moving back to the sixties, before computers became a factor, you received a lot of favorable coverage for the Delano Grape Strike and your fast in 1968 as well as your association with Bobby Kennedy.”

“I also got a lot of bad publicity,” he says, “but we knew we were right to strike and boycott products of growers who denied workers even minimum wages and safe working conditions.  It took us, and thousands of people helping us around the nation, five years to get a contract.”

“There was a lot of violence, on both sides.”

“On theirs. We only protected ourselves.”

“Respectfully, I think some UFW members, especially your cousin Manuel Chavez, were at times the aggressors. I’ve just read a biography about you.”

I sense some displeasure as Chavez asks, “Which one?”

“The Crusades of Cesar Chavez by Miriam Pawel.”

“You won’t find that one for sale in our bookstore.”

“I guess not, but I think her portrayal of you is primarily positive, especially through the early seventies, when you were by far the most important Latino civil rights figure. After that…”

“After that she writes a lot of things that aren’t true.”

“In that case, why not sue her?” I ask.

“I’ve been gone since 1993 and my family and colleagues don’t want to give her any more publicity.”

“During your 1968 hunger strike, which lasted twenty-five days, there was a mass every night outside your little room in the old gas station on the UFW’s 40 Acres compound in Delano.  More than a hundred people came to pray for you.”

“Sometimes two or three hundred.”

“Do you think some people began to view you as a religious figure, almost a saint, perhaps?”

“No, I don’t think so. They viewed me as a man dedicated to bettering their lives. I felt their love.”

“That’s a lot of adulation for anyone to deal with and keep in perspective,” I say. “It seems some of your followers began to worship you.”

“I didn’t seek to be worshipped. I earned respect for my cause, their cause, of earning a decent wage while working under civilized conditions.”

“Your successes in the sixties were remarkable,” I say. “I think what this biographer, Miriam Pawel, and others are saying is that you isolated yourself here at La Paz, far from the farms in the Central Valley, and spent much less time organizing workers and developing contracts and became, above all, the leader of a commune here on these grounds.”

“That’s insulting. Ask anyone who really knows. I worked all the time. I ate and slept and worked.”

“Some of your allies say you began to view yourself as infallible and demanded absolute power.”

“Every leader must have confidence in his judgment. And those who say I ignored my advisors aren’t telling the truth. As even this biographer concedes, we had many vigorous arguments here at La Paz. Those discussions, though heated, were democratic in nature. I did have the prerogative of any leader and made final decisions. You see that in corporate America every day. No organization can be completely democratic if it’s going to be effective.”

“Miriam Pawel, and more importantly those who were here in the seventies, say you were influenced by the Synanon alcohol and drug treatment group, led by Chuck Dederich, that eventually proclaimed itself a religion and forced men to have vasectomies and women to divorce their husbands and mate with those Dederich directed, and I could go on.”

“The UFW separated itself from Synanon when it became a bizarre organization and changed its focus from helping people to controlling them.”

“But you did adopt their practice of using The Game to control people.”

“We didn’t use The Game much.”

“I’m just quoting those who said they were forced to participate and curse their friends and colleagues and make accusations, many outrageous, that upset and damaged many people.”

“There was a lot of good therapy in The Game, but we moved on from it.”

“Quite a few longtime colleagues say you arbitrarily ran them off, accusing them of disloyalty, of being assholes, even communists.”

Cesar Chavez replies, “I’m about to run you off now.  In forty years as a community organizer, union organizer, and civil rights leader, I came to disagree with some I’d trusted.  Perhaps they no longer trusted me, either.  Fine.  That was their time to move on.  I in effect fired some people in a very nonconfrontational way.

“Since you’ve been trying to ask me tough questions, let me ask you some.  Have you ever organized a union?  Have you ever organized a boycott?  Have you ever attracted thousands of people in your area, and millions nationwide, to a cause that will make their lives better?  Have you ever done anything like that?  I know you haven’t.

“Here, at least read this Sacramento Bee article by Bobby Kennedy’s daughter, Kerry.  You’ll see she emphasizes that our efforts for farm workers continued long after the seventies.  We’ve got contracts with Dole and D’Arrigo Brothers, a prominent vegetable grower, and seventy-five percent of California’s mushroom industry. Our mushroom workers earn about forty thousand a year and have full health benefits. We also have unionized workers at Gallo and Mondavi wineries.  There are plenty of others.  Read the article.

“Over the last fifty years, has anyone done more for farm workers than the UFW? I don’t think so. Viva la unión. Viva la causa.”

The fictionalized portion of this story, “Discussion with Cesar Chavez,” written in 2015, appears in my collection Where Will We Sleep? The title is available wherever books are sold.

Where Will We Sleep? on Amazon