Ugly details about the Chavez family and the labor icon himself are radiating out of a public feud between Cesar’s sons Anthony and Paul Chavez. Anthony has filed a wrongful termination suit against his brother and has accusing Paul of withholding thousands in pension benefits from him. Paul runs the National Farm Workers Service Center on the Chavez family compound, just steps from Anthony’s home and his own. According to the New York Times, the Chavez legacy has drifted from helping farm workers into a string of purposeless organizations which do little beyond employ family members and cash in on Cesar’s cult hero status. “Paul cares more about building his assets than helping people,” said Liz Villarino, one of Cesar’s daughters who worked until recently as the Service Center’s controller. “He wants all the power to be the go-to person whenever people have questions about his father and his legacy and create his own little empire.” “Just because we are the children of Helen and Cesar Chavez doesn’t mean we are good people,” Anthony told a reporter, choking back tears. Or perhaps the apples have not fallen all that far from the tree. As labor historian (and noted union apologist) Randy Shaw has documented in “Beyond the Fields” the United Farm Workers founder has been posthumously transformed into “a national icon,” while his darker side has “been minimized or ignored.” The Ghandi-esque glow that surrounds him makes it difficult if not impossible to speak of the true reasons for the failure of the UFW– the unfettered megalomania of the elder Chavez and how that shaped both the children and the movement he spawned. Cesar Chavez was known to rule the UFW with an iron fist, swiftly purging any critics from his organizations and even going so far as to have them blacklisted and driven from the farm fields. Chavez made sure anyone who stood up to him was unemployable, even suing his detractors for libel. Then in the 1980s, just as the UFW was gaining traction in representing farm workers, Chavez lost interest in farm labor organizing and saw his true legacy as the father of a broader “Poor Peoples Union” that would focus more on the issues of the urban poor and less and less on the migrant farm workforce. Chavez went off the deep end, using cultish loyalty games to humiliate and isolate staff members he no longer trusted. By his death 1993, Chavez had dragged the United Farm Workers and its offshoot organizations down the rabbit hole with him and what remained after his death was a multi-million dollar cult of personality short one charismatic leader. Since his death and secular canonization other labor leaders, fancying themselves the next great labor icon, have looked to the Chavez model to see their “visions” realized. Most notably Andy Stern, not content with being a mere union president, saw himself as the next great liberator of the working poor and ran his organization accordingly.
