A walk in the path of greatness
Chavez homestead offers rare insight
Talking about plans to preserve the Harvard dorm room of Franklin D. Roosevelt, renowned historian Doris Kearnes Goodwin described the extraordinary feeling of literally walking in the footsteps of a great historical figure.
I know the feeling.
I once stood in a mammoth art studio made of black volcanic rock and designed by the brilliant muralist Diego Rivera.
In a small village called Anahuac near Mexico’s Gulf Coast, I toured the remnants of a home built by the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez.
More recently, I visited the childhood homestead of the late Cesar Chavez, the legendary civil-rights leader and founder of the United Farm Workers union who was born near Yuma in 1927.
Each of these sites represents not only a moment in the remarkable personal histories of these individuals, they reveal hints about the future that was about to unfold for them.
I visited the Chavez farm about a year ago with Francisca Montoya, a former farmworker who is now director of the Cesar Chavez Foundation in Phoenix.
We were accompanied by her education director, Delia Torres, and Torres’ young son, Amias.
My visit to the property, which Chavez’s family reportedly lost in a tax and real-estate swindle during the Great Depression, stirred a mix of emotions.
The home, sadly, is in ruins. Only half-walls remain of its adobe frame. The roof, doors, and floors are gone. Most of the property, which sits on the bank of an active irrigation canal, is overgrown with brush and mesquite trees.
It’s clear that few people know or even care that the crumbling home is there.
I found this disturbing. Americans can visit the birthplace memorials of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., but the Chavez family farm is gradually being reduced to dust.
Yet I also was inspired by the visit. I was touched knowing that it was in that house that Chavez acquired his core values. Chavez often said it was his mother who taught him the virtue of non-violence, which he later combined with the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and King as he built his non-violent labor movement against California agribusiness.
Chavez’s father, Librado, was a business owner and farmer before the family joined the ranks of hundreds of thousands of other Americans who flocked to California to find work in the fields.
By all accounts, Librado was a proud and generous man. Long before Chavez formed the UFW, Librado was quick to join wildcat worker strikes against unscrupulous landowners.
As I wandered around the Chavez homestead, I stumbled upon an abandoned well. Because I’m a playwright, it was easy to imagine Chavez’s mother instructing her then 10-year-old son to go out and fetch a bucket of water.
I’ve even envisioned him standing before the well, eyes shut tight and wishing that his family’s life had not taken a turn for the worse.
Since then, I’ve co-written a play inspired by that visit. It’s called "A Boy Named Cesar." In the piece, aimed at elementary-school children and up, 10-year-old Cesar Chavez – thanks a certain magic wishing well – travels to his future, guided by the ghost of his grandfather, Papa Chayo.
On stage, we follow Chavez’s life up until the late 1960s, though he would live another 25 years. In the last scene of the play, as the Chavezes pack up the family Studebaker and prepare in 1938 to drive to California, Cesar asks Papa Chayo how his story will end.
His grandfather tells him, "You’ll come back home, mijo."
Chavez did come home.
In 1993, Cesar Estrada Chavez died in his sleep visiting friends in the southern Arizona town of San Luis, just a few miles from the original Chavez homestead.
After decades as the tireless leader of the UFW, it must have seemed like a good place to rest.
James E. Garcia is a senior research fellow with the ASU Center for Community Development and Civil Rights College of Public Programs.