Notes and Reflections on Cesar Chavez, via Jose-Antonio Orosco

Notes [showing more about my own note-taking habits than any obvious learning going on; see Zebroski, reading protocols]

Awkward prefatory remarks -- condescending, even.

Reflection: When I asked students the next day to discuss Orosco's presentation, everyone felt that the prefatory comments were a waste of time and "made no sense at all."

Community Service Organization (CSO) > Chicago Industrial Organization (Alinsky, Rules for Radicals)

Reflection: My first reading of RfR was actually at North Harris College, class unknown. Things have changed. I still have that paperback copy and was looking for additional copies recently and found conservative responses to Alinksy, some of whom believe he's Mephistopheles himself. I tried to read portions of these responses and they're horribly written -- zeal, without knowledge. Nor empathy. Nor concern about community. Alinsky didn't start the culture wars, but those who fight them see him as a kaiser of everything that is wrong with community-centric leftism.

CSO, 1947, Fred Ross, not Latino, but grew up with Latinos.

Reflection: Note Orosco's use of "latino" and not Mex-Am or Hispanic. It's not the lexicon we use in Texas; I've written on this before and it deserves more attention. Not from a Census Bureau point of view, but how lexicon reflects identity and forms consciousness.

Listened to parents in LA County about racial segregation in the schools 

Reflection listening = vision sessions, NCI, AI; to be effective in persuasion, listen first; recent readings on rhetoric of trust/ ethos]  

Collected testimonies of the LA Mendez vs Westminster case.

Reflection: the racial segregation in Texas is still misunderstood. Most people feel that Tejanos and Mexicans could attend schools with white children, somehow believing that Texans would have not oppressed brown-skinned children as they did black-skinned children. The stories of Delgado and Hernandez need to be told and become part of regular history instruction.

Thurogood Marshal, NAACP, watching Mendez case; used the Mendez argument for Brown v Board. [ Fred Ross > Mendez > Marshal > Brown V Board]. JAO: Struggles of brown folk and black folk often intertwined with one another. Ross, Bloody Christmas Case 1951. Police abuse; police indictment. 

LA Times, Movie Prop from LA Confidential

1952, Ross meets Chavez, barrio (Sal Si Puedes: Get Out if You can) to set up CSO chapter. [Photograph of CC in zoot suit; uniform associated with black, brown youth, banned by USGov. > Zoot Suit Riots (1943)

CC on right in his zoot suit.

Reflection: my first graduate seminars at U Memphis included a 20th century American drama seminar, where we read Valdez's Zoot Suit. I was too young to understand what it meant, and Memphis's Latino population was so small as to be invisible. Violence. Identity. Oppression. Police brutality. It was out of sight, out of mind.

Anglos represented in the community as government agencies (police, truant officers, social workers]. Outsiders in community untrusted by locals. Ross's teachings of community organizing: how to think abt problems. See Alinsky "through action, persuasion, and communication..."

Reflection: the quote in context: "An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations. He must create a mechanism that can drain off the underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time. Out of this mechanism, a new community organization arises… 

The job then is getting the people to move, to act, to participate; in short, to develop and harness the necessary power to effectively conflict with the prevailing patterns and change them. When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an “agitator” they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function—to agitate to the point of conflict… 

Enter the labor organizer or the agitator. He begins his “trouble making” by stirring up these angers, frustrations, and resentments, and highlighting specific issues or grievances that heighten controversy… 

And so the labor organizer simultaneously breeds conflict and builds a power structure. The war between the trade union and management is resolved either through a strike or a negotiation. Either method involves the use of power; the economic power of the strike or the threat of it, which results in successful negotiations. No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation. 

This is the function of a community organizer. Anything otherwise is wishful non-thinking. To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced. 

In the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems… 

Through action, persuasion, and communication the organizer makes it clear that organization will give them the power, the ability, the strength, the force to be able to do something about these particular problems. It is then that a bad scene begins to break up into specific issues, because now the people can do something about it. What the organizer does is convert the plight into a problem. The question is whether they do it this way or that way or whether they do all of it or part of it. But now you have issues." (RfR, "Education of an Organizer")

Rules for Organizing:
#1 Find the problem

CC's problems of Sal Si Puedes (Chavez 1991) "Throughout California we registered people to vote and turned them out at the polls. We fought segregation. We battled police brutality -- the roughing up of young guys and the breaking and entering without warrants. We opposed the forced removal of Hispanics to make way for urban renewal projects. We fought to improve the poor conditions that were so common in Sal Si Puedes and in other minority neighborhoods, the mean streets and walkways, the lack of street lights and traffic signals, the polluted creeks and horse pastures where kids played, the poor drainage, the overflowing cesspools, the amoebic dysentery." 

Reflection: Aldine. The issues are still the same. Low voter registration/turn-out. No representation, no community organizations to pressure. Enter Freire.

Take a problem into an issue that you can fight. Community not inevitable. Leaving doesn't solve problem. F Ross, problems can change. Solidarity results in change. See CC's ** eulogies of CC's mother, of F Ross. #2 -- Look to the margins of the community. That most need our help. People in the field; not the aspiring middle class, those that are barely surviving, subsisting. "To make change, learn to network with the authorities." -- The powerful are not concerned with the marginalized. Place matters. Seeking justice, or respectability? "Once you become a respectable group, you're not going to fight any more."

Reflection: There's the rub. Justice, or respectability? Justice, ... or respectability? Respected by whom? Why? King, "threat to justice." More (Man for All Seasons): "If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that abhorrence, anger, pride, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice, and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes." More, again: ""Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?" Paul, via Tyndale: "Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: and as a tinkling cymbal." (1 Cor 13.1). Justice, or respectability? Respectability? Justice?

#3 Sacrifice to minimize the suffering of others. Sacrifice is revolutionary. Pain in the world; we must pay attention to pain of others. 3 major hunger fasts, 1968 (25 da, xx, 1988 (36 days) Chain of suffering: Passing on the fast 3 days at a time. Keep in mind the importance of suffering for others, keeping in mind that our comfort is built on others' suffering. #4 Use Multiple Measures of Success Not just quants -- not just the numbers of ZAPATA! Impact of UFW: "our opponents must understand that it's not just a union we have built ..." (1989)

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. 

You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. 

Our opponents must understand that it's not just a union we have built. Unions, like other institutions, can come and go. 

But we're more than an institution. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people's cause--and you cannot do away with an entire people; you cannot stamp out a people's cause. 

Regardless of what the future holds for the union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone. "La Causa"--our cause--doesn't have to be experienced twice. 

The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm! 

Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. 

That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade. But it will come, someday! 

And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, "That the last shall be first and the first shall be last." 

And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed--and that fulfillment shall enrich us all. (Address to the Commonwealth Club of California, 1984).

#5 Charisma Can Cripple a Movement. Personality obscures the message. CC kicked out of union those who challenged his authority 

Reflection: How do young people respond to this today? The rhetoric of authority is different now than in CC's day. Milgram is long gone. OWS was a failure. Now rhetoric of mushroom clouds move nations to invade other nations, but we can't control our own police or imprison a corrupt investment banker. Whence authority? Whence the author?

“Why bother with reading and writing when the world is so obviously going to hell?” (Miller , Writing at the End of the World 16).  

? Cousin Manuel Chavez -- vandalism, violence? CC ok with this? > If you build org on personality on one person, creates an authority figure, unchallenged, protecting family members who used violence.

See Martínez, Elizabeth. "‘Chingón Politics’ Die Hard: Reflections on the First Chicano Activist Reunion." De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi Colored Century (1998): 172-181.

Orosco calls for horizontal leadership for community change.

Reflection: Ha. I really laughed out loud at that moment. Those who play with fire will be burned by the fire. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

Real men, real power, real flaws. Struggle for social justice doesn't require superheroes. We need to figure out how to work with one another -- humans working with humans. We're going to go through life hurting people. We need to learn how to heal and empower people as well. If Chavez can do it, then we can do it.

Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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