The movie César Chávez is ruling class propaganda. Some big lies are tied together with enough truth to make them convincing. By promoting Chávez as a Mexican-American civil rights hero, it aims to win Latino/a workers and youth to nationalism, pacifism, anti-communism and the Democratic Party.

Chávez is shown as a one-man organization. The movie has him picking grapes in the fields (a lie). They show him organizing the grape boycott in Europe single-handedly (another lie). In fact, an army of student and farmworker volunteer boycott organizers went from Delano to Los Angeles, Toronto, London and beyond. Other leaders of the United Farm Workers (UFW) are shown as "yes men" or left out entirely. Larry Itliong, the Filipino strike leader, has a series of quick appearances. Epifanio Camacho, whose militant leadership was the main obstacle to Chávez's pacifist sell-out, is slandered.

The movie pushes nationalism by leaving out the multi-racial volunteers and reducing the crucial role of Filipino workers. More importantly, it omits Chávez's racist attacks on undocumented immigrants— just like most of the books written about the UFW.

The UFW paper El Malcriado routinely referred to migrant workers as "wetbacks" as did Chávez in a TV interview on KQED. Racist words led to racist actions. The UFW turned over undocumented strikebreakers to the Migra in May, 1968. In the early 1970s, César's notoriously corrupt cousin Manuel Chávez organized the "Campaign Against Illegals," known officially as the "UFW Border Patrol" and unofficially as the "wet line," to physically attack migrants coming across the border. Some nonviolent saint!

The climax of the movie is Chávez's 1968 fast for nonviolence (see letter this page). During the strike, the growers' cops and thugs physically attacked workers and volunteers on the picket lines, hitting them with baseball bats, spraying them with pesticides, and at least once, driving a truck into a picket line. Strikers fought back militantly!

When Chávez began to ally with the Democratic Party, he needed to isolate the leaders who were dedicated to winning the fight in the fields without being bound by pacifism. Chávez used the fast to force pacifism down the throats of union members.
Epifanio Camacho, one of the most class-conscious and militant leaders of the union and the picket captain in 1968, is identified in the film as the cause of all the violence. His character is shown as nationalist, arrogant and isolated—another big lie. His leadership in the first UFW strike, among rose workers, is left out. So is his militant leadership on the picket line.

The filmmakers finally slander Camacho by inventing a "pledge of nonviolence," which the Camacho character signs at the end of the fast. This is a total lie—there was no pledge, and Camacho would never have signed it if there had been one.

The United Farm Workers started out as a union engaged in militant reform struggle, but for the bosses, and their mouthpieces in the movie industry, even militant reform struggle must be portrayed unfavorably. Epifanio Camacho said in his 2002 Autobiography:
"I learned that strikes are the best weapon in the economic struggle of the workers, but that for our total liberation, a strike is insufficient. To achieve liberation, it is necessary to adopt a more powerful weapon, the weapon of revolutionary struggle against the entire social-political regime."

Farmworkers in California today live in conditions that are at least as bad as the 1960s. The UFW is a collection of social service rackets making money for Chávez's relatives. It has only 5,000 workers under contract. Farm workers' wages are right at the federal poverty line, between $10,000 and $12,000 per year. On average, one farmworker dies every day on the job in the US, and hundreds are injured.

Meanwhile, the bosses need to win farmworkers and their sons and daughters to defend US imperialism in their wars—perhaps aboard the US Navy cargo ship Cesar Chavez. That's why they have promoted Chávez and his Mexican-American nationalism and pacifism in this movie, in the schools, and on postage stamps. It's up to us to answer these lies by reading and distributing Red Flag, to win farmworkers and all workers to the struggle for a communist world.