When I saw the Chavez National Center earlier this summer, the solemnity of the center caught my attention as I parked.
It sits on 187 acres in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, at the end of a winding forest road. Around it are old buildings (houses, barns, trailers) that are what remains of La Paz, the network similar to a kibbutz that Cesar Chavez established in the 1970s and where his last resting position is located.
Andrés Chávez, executive director of the center, waiting for me at the entrance.
Andrew is Caesar’s grandson.
“Do you see those steps here?” said when we started our visit. He gestured toward the road to his grandparents’ grave, surrounded by roses in front of a five-peaked fountain to those killed as they protested the United Farm Workers movements. “I used to skate here before school. “
How many to be sacred land that Andrew also knows as the home of his formative years.
The two-bedroom space where Caesar and Helen lived?Andrew recalled the “stacked” Christmas parties in which Helen gave away socks to her grandchildren. kitchen that Andrés plans to reopen to receive visitors?As a child, he cleaned dishes and swept floors at Network Foods and was paid with cheeseburgers.
We passed by the renovated headquarters of the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation, the two organizations through which the union leader presented his revolution of people’s power. We enter the guest center, which gives a short documentary about the history of the place, photos of the movement, a reproduction of a peasant’s hut and that of Chávez as he left it at the time of his death in 1993, to the overflowing libraries. and a notebook with a to-do list.
Andres pressed a button to launch a short annotated program complete with projectors in other parts of the desktop.
Nothing happened.
“Huh,” said a shy Martha Crusius. No would prevent playing, and now she would probably not play at all. “
Crusius is the National Park Service Program Manager who helped prepare documentation to identify Caesar E. Chavez National Monument, committed in 2012 by President Obama and comprised of the graves of Cesar and Helen Chavez, as well as the visitor center.
Andres smiled. “We have paintings to do here. “
He has been at the Chavez National Center since April, but had already made a call for himself in the Central Valley beyond his pedigree. He helped launch one of the few latino-organized political radio demonstrations in California and helped implement Vaccine 19 Kern County. Lately he is coordinating the logistics of the final leg of the United FarmWorker march from Delano to Sacramento, which is scheduled to end this Friday.
Friends and family circle see in Andrew the secular and spitting symbol of Caesar, down to the same smile and warm eyes, empathetic face and healthy hair.
“He’s a very strategic and brilliant thinker,” said Lynnette Zelezny, president of Cal State Bakersfield, who appointed Andres to its Latino/Latino advisory committee. Dolores Huerta to convince the university senate to propose ethnic studies. “Andres has this ability to bring other people together. It’s a magnet.
“He doesn’t make thunderous speeches that give chills. He just talks to people, just like my father,” said Paul Chavez, who runs the Cesar Chavez Foundation and is Andres’ father. “He is aware of the message he has. But it is a romantic perception that the two are similar. Everyone is his own man.
The 28-year-old played down any comparison or ambition on his part to repair his own image. His task now is to raise his grandfather at a time when he said interest in Caesar is greater than ever.
“A lot of other people have looked at each other over the years and asked themselves, ‘What else can I do?'” he said at the end of our tour. So they looked back on history. And they located the farmworker movement. The UFW has never been big. But there were millions of other people who felt inspired.
“He was a great guy,” Andres concluded when, despite everything, we sat on a bench in the shade of an oak tree. “But there are fewer and fewer people who have worked with him. A lot of young people don’t know what my Tata did,” using an affectionate term in Mexican Spanish that roughly translates to “Abuelito. “
Andrew never met his grandfather, who died nine months before Andrew was born. But he meets at the UFW almost from the moment he can walk. His father, aunts and uncles continued the work of their patriarch through the organizations he had created.
However, proceeding in the circle of family affairs is not predestined.
He left La Paz at the age of 18 and received a bachelor’s degree in public administration in 2016. He then moved to Sacramento to paint with a nonprofit that focused on agricultural education and then the California State Fair.
“I didn’t know what I was looking to do,” he admitted.
About a year after his concert, Andres his father.
“He said, ‘I have the idea, I have the idea to come back,'” Chavez said. “Me to be part of the movement. “
Paul hired his son as an assistant on a 10-year strategic plan for the Cesar Chavez Foundation, which deals with everything from housing to education, curriculum and public fitness initiatives.
“Being in the movement, you’re exposed to other people, but you’re from the outdoor world,” Paul said. “We knew we needed another goal, and it was clear that he was the one to do it. “
When the position of director of the Chavez National Center opened and Andres expressed interest, Paul had a frank verbal exchange with his son about the promise and danger of the position.
“I said, ‘Listen, yum, of course, there are a lot of benefits to being your grandfather’s grandson,'” Paul said. how to deal with conditions that many of us elders put on the defensive.
Paul was referring to revelations in books and newspapers over the past 20 years about Caesar’s treatment of former colleagues who tarnished his reputation in some progressive circles. the call of their patriarch as they abandon the plight of immigrant painters.
It’s an afterlife that Andres is more than willing to talk to me about.
“There were some things he could have done better, we recognize that,” Andres said calmly. term. “
I asked him about his grandfather’s use of the term “wet back” and his long-standing opposition to illegal immigration, positions that have made him a club of anti-immigrant activists.
“Is this something we are proud of? Absolutely not,” Andres said. I don’t care about the staff, my Tata cared. We want to get context like that.
Maintaining and protecting his grandfather’s legacy is part of Andres’ day-to-day job as director of the Chavez National Center, which also helps manage the monument with the National Park Service. He oversees the renovation of La Paz’s old buildings in time for the centennial of Chávez’s birth in 2027, while also making the domain an excursion destination.
“The young people of the village deserve to be here in the desert, this will be one of the few times they leave an urban environment,” he said.
He wants to bring his grandfather’s presence further into the fashion age, with gestures as big as a book of his quotes and as small as a Spotify playlist (Cesar is a big jazz fan, with Coleman Hawkins as one of his favorites).
Most importantly, Andrew needs the global to know that Caesar more than the fields.
“Every cause of my Tata is a topical issue,” he said. “His concepts were radical for his time. Vegetarianism. LGBT equality. Environmentalism. Police brutality. He even did yoga before it became common. A lot of what is known because it is quite bright now, but there is much more.
We looked at the parking lot, where more and more people appeared.
“Now there are a lot of Subarus,” he joked, “instead of Chevys. “
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