A Song for César (Song for César, Juno Films, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 9) at 9 I got a welcome break from the depressing current news of the latest attacks by Hamas against Israel by watching KPBS, which was showing an intriguing 2021 documentary called A Song for César. It was an unusual depiction of the life of United Farm Workers’ founder and president César Chávez (the online documentation has stripped him of his diacriticals but I’m giving them back) shown through an unusual lens: the importance of culture in general and music in particular in bringing together public support for his movement and his union. I grew up on César Chávez and his struggle; my mother had a subscription to the movement’s newsletter, El Malcriado (“The Bad Worker”), and every time it arrived I’d eagerly devoured its contents. Chávez has been built up into a saint-like figure, essentially the Martin Luther King, Jr. of Latino-Americans, and it’s nice to see him humanized. One of the things I hadn’t known about Chávez before is that in the 1940’s he lived in Los Angeles and was a pachuco, a social movement of young Latinos who listened to jazz, hung out in clubs and had fun. One KPFA newscaster recalled that in the station’s headquarters when Chávez came in for an interview was a poster of the San Francisco Blues Festival, which announced that Jimmy Liggins would be one of that year’s performers. “Jimmy Liggins? Is he still alive?” Chávez asked incredulously, revealing that Liggins had been one of his favorite performers in his zoot-suited pachuco days. And Chávez’s granddaughter recalled taking a trip with him through various used book and record stores in New York just a month before his death in 1993. He had in his back pocket a list of 100 major jazz records he was looking for, with check marks next to the ones he’d already acquired, and she was impressed with his dedication. One of the missed opportunities in this film, written and directed by Andrés Alégria and David Sanchez, was to draw the connection between the 1960’s, in which the United Farm Workers (and its predecessor, the National Farm Workers’ Association) would hold giant benefit concerts to raise money for itself, and the 1940’s. Norman Granz had been a schoolteacher in Los Angeles when the zoot-suit riots happened in L.A. in 1943, and he put together the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in 1944 (the name came from Philharmonic Hall, the venue he got for it) featuring Nat “King” Cole, Les Paul, Illinois Jacquet, J. J. Johnson and others as a benefit for the defendants who had been arrested at the zoot-suit riots. Granz became one of the richest men in the world when he left teaching and became a full-time promoter of jazz concerts and a recording entrepreneur; he had that first concert recorded and it ultimately got released on a tiny folk label called Stinson and became a huge seller even though the performances were extended jam sessions and had to be cut into segments to fit the 3-minute 20-second limit of 78 rpm records.

The United Farm Workers attracted the attention and support of a lot of musicians, many (though not all) of Latino ancestry, including Carlos Santana and his brother Jorge (who led a Santana-like band called Malo; I’d always thought they had a mild success in the wake of Santana but they had a number four hit early on, “Suavecito”) as well as the members of Tower of Power (whose killer horn section got a lot of studio jobs for themselves – many records were even advertised as “Featuring the Tower of Power Horns”) and other acts featuring Latino musicians. I remember Malo basically for a famous promotional stunt that backfired big-time; for their second album, almost inevitably called Malo Dos, they had their band logo stenciled on tortillas with green food coloring, only by the time they got to their intended destinations most of the tortillas were muy malo indeed. Among the non-Latino musicians who were moved by the farmworkers’ struggle was Graham Nash, who wrote a song about it and recorded it live at London’s Wembley Stadium. The show featured footage from recording sessions held in 2016 at Fantasy Studios in the East Bay Area featuring musicians like blues singer Taj Mahal – who had descended from African-American sharecroppers and therefore knew first-hand about how wretchedly America treats the workers who feed it – both Santana brothers and Joan Baez. She’s shown in footage singing the song “Deportee” – credited in the film to Woody Guthrie but actually co-composed by Guthrie and his friend and singing partner Cisco Houston (Guthrie wrote a poem about a plane crash in Los Gatos that took the lives of 47 farmworkers on their way to deportation, and Houston set it to music) – and there’s also audio of a song about farmworkers she wrote herself. Also among the non-Latino artists who did benefits for the UFW were Kris Kristofferson, who’s interviewed here and said that his white-trash origins had made him aware of the oppression of rural people.

The United Farm Workers inspired not only musicians but also artists and theatre people. They inspired Latino-American painters to draw on the Mexican folk arts tradition the way the great muralists of the Mexican perestroika in the 1930’s – Diego Rivera, José Orozco, David Siqueiros – had and create stunning images that still resonate today. In 1966 Luis Valdéz and Agustín Lira founded El Teatro Campesino, a group of farmworkers who put on plays about the grape-pickers’ strike in Delano, California from 1965 to 1967 at the suggestion of César Chávez, who thought the union needed a theatre group to promote its cause and dramatize the issues involved. Valdéz and Lira protested that they had no actors, no time to rehearse (most of the cast members were busy doing other jobs, including farm labor) and nowhere to play. The solution was to perform their short plays, called actos, on the backs of flatbed trucks. Later Valdez would break through to the world of mainstream theatre and film when he wrote a play called Zoot Suit about the 1943 L.A. race riots (remember them?), which premiered on stage in Los Angeles in 1978 and was filmed in 1981 with Valdéz himself directing and writing the script. In 1987 Valdéz would make the superb film La Bamba, a biopic of Ritchie Valens, the first Latino-American rock star, which dramatized Valens’ Mexican-American origins (his real last name was Valenzuela) and included two performances of his signature song, “La Bamba,” one in traditional Mexican folk style and one in Valens’ version.

One of the things I liked best about A Song for César is that it didn’t make the same mistake other depictions of him have done and suggest he led the movement alone. Some sources acknowledge the importance of his long-time friend and colleague Dolores Huerta, who was among the interviewees for this film, but not many note the key importance of the third member of the founding triumvirate: Filipino-American activist Larry Itliong. In 1962 Itliong had been commissioned by the AFL-CIO to lead an Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (AWOC), the in-between step most of the great CIO unions had taken in their early days in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The problem was there was a long history of bad blood between the Mexican and Filipino workers that the growers had used to their advantage. Every time the Mexican workers attempted to strike, the growers used Filipinos as scabs; every time the Filipinos tried a strike, the growers broke it with Mexicans. When Chávez and Huerta launched the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA) in 1963, they went to Itliong and held their first mass meeting at a building in Delano actually called Filipino Hall, not only because it was the only venue they could get but to signal the need for unity among Mexican and Filipino workers. I was really gratified that this film devoted a few minutes to Itliong – not long enough to dramatize his real importance to the struggle, but enough to acknowledge him. The UFW was part of a full-scale racial reawakening among Latino people in the U.S., who adopted the word “Chicano” to describe themselves (it’s out of date now, but it’s certainly a far more appropriate designation than the horrifically ugly coinage “Latinx”!) and adopted both the rhetoric and the tactics of the African-American civil rights movement for their struggles for equality and justice.

I will never forget how horrified I was at the news that in 1969 seven Latino/a high-school students had been suspended in San Francisco for the horrible sin of speaking Spanish on the school playground; they became known as “Los Siete” and became a cause célèbre for the Bay Area Left for a time. Even the Latino musicians interviewed, including both Santana brothers, said the movimiento contributed to their music by encouraging them to reach beyond the Black and white jazz and rock musicians they’d been copying previously and incorporate elements of their own culture’s rich musical heritage into their styles. The UFW finally got legal recognition as a union after Jerry Brown (son of Pat Brown, the governor in office until 1966 and a frequent target of ridicule in the Teatro Campesino’s actos) took office as governor for the first time in 1975 and pushed through the California legislature a law which gave agricultural workers the same labor organizing rights the National Labor Relations Act had granted most industrial and commercial workers in 1935. Chávez continued as the UFW’s president until his death in 1993, and I remember hearing him speak at the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Most of his speech there focused on the use of pesticides in agriculture, and Chávez was even then sticking his neck out much farther than most union leaders, warning his audience that the products his workers produced might be unsafe for them because of the heavy-duty pesticide use to grow them. The UFW’s organization had a hard time adjusting from being a community movement to functioning as a labor union and doing the day-to-day work of not only organizing contracts but making sure the employers lived up to them. But their struggle remains an inspiring one, and in his commitment to nonviolence as a tactic (following in the models of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.), an example I dearly wish the oppressed people of Gaza would learn (and be able) to follow instead of either endorsing or tolerating the thuggery of Hamas!