“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”
~ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Disappointment is a human encumbrance. Disappointment in its many forms and intensity visits us all. Some disappointments slice closer to the bone because we have invested so much emotional energy into the person or institution.
A squalid secret that has to do with a family member, a revered institution, someone we looked up to as Moses among human beings is overpoweringly unmooring.
So it is with Cesar Chavez.
I never saw him in person. I came to the U.S., in 1971, just as the UFW was entering into its deepest struggle for farmworkers rights in the history of the United States with the Salad Bowl Strike begun in mid-1970. By 1978, the Farmworkers had won labor guarantees.
Dolores Huerta, 1972
In 1971-72, Dolores Huerta, the cofounder of the UFW, was the East Coast coordinator of the national grape boycott. One day, in a jam-packed auditorium at Hunter College in Manhattan, Huerta was on stage. I think Gloria Steinem was with her. The rafters shook with “Sí, se puede” (Yes, we can) , which she had coined and made into a battle cry. I was 22 and I shivered as I felt history course through me. Her agony at 96 today is unimaginable to me.
We are all made of clay.