Cesar Chavez did his cursillo in the late 1950s or early ’60s, according to his brother Richard.12 Richard’s uncertainty about the date comes from the air of secrecy that surrounded the early cursillos, and from Chavez’s own subsequent reluctance to talk about his commitment to the movement. The cursillo is a four-day experience, which a person goes through only once. The initiate has to be invited by a veteran who has remained active in post-cursillo activities. Each potential participant also has to be approved by the regional secretariat. He must have been baptized, should be a stable adult between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five, not be going through any emotional crisis, and be either an actual or a potential leader in the community. Although women can make a cursillo separate from men—but wives cannot go through the experience unless their husbands have done so first—the movement’s emphasis has always been on making Christianity a “manly” activity.
The four days are heavily rehearsed events. A leadership group of ten people, a mixture of clergy and laity, takes a few months to prepare for a cursillo that will intiate forty new members. On the first day, the initiates, thinking they are on a semiconventional Catholic retreat, are asked to meditate on their own sinfulness. They are prohibited from talking to one another, and all efforts are directed toward making them feel helpless and lonely. The first meditation is introduced like this: “Would you like to have the true story of your life filmed? Would you be able to view all your actions, your ambitions, your pretenses, your conversations on the screen without blushing? Would you want your friends to be present at the showing: Would you want your children, your mother, your wife, your sweetheart to know it?” The following three days are meant to resurrect the sinners, through singing, gifts, relaxed conversation, joyful witness in small groups, and a final meeting with family and friends, who welcome the revived initiates into the company of cursillo. It is all meant to produce an atmosphere of intimate spirituality, and characteristically the new cursillistas express feeling “joy,” “euphoria,” and “a new enthusiasm for life.”13
The new recruits then join the “army of militant Christians” who will combat the enemy of “lifeless Christianity.” The military language is quite pronounced in cursillista manuals. According to Hervas the cursillista mission is “(a) to look for militants; (b) to choose them; (c) to welcome them; (d) to train them; (e) to use them.”14 How to use them is not as clear as the injunction to use them. Cursillistas learn that in a good Christian life, “piety and study are the inhale, and action is the exhale.” A committed cursillista is expected to participate in follow-up weekly events with his fellow initiates and in monthly events with a wider group; to take responsibility for leading new retreats; and to participate in regular church activities with a new spiritual intensity. But what to do in the world, beyond becoming a better Christian and a cursillo leader, is left undefined.
Chavez participated in follow-up cursillo events after his initiation and ultimately used cursillismo’s silence on what the new initiates should do to his own organizational advantage. UFW organizers recruited farm workers from cursillo groups, sometimes even waiting for them as they left the last meeting of the four-day course, so that, in the words of Brother Keith Warner, they could “pluck fish from the river as they flowed out of the cursillo.”15 Cursillo leaders, both clergy and laymen, came to the aid of the early UFW while the more conservative Catholic bishops remained uncommitted. For a while, support for the UFW became the “exhale” of action for many cursillistas. The cursillista theme song, “De Colores,” became the UFW anthem.
Both cursillismo and Catholic Social Action assumed the existence of hierarchies within both the Church and society. The cursillista rhetoric of forming an “army” for Christ had its analogue among the legions of clergy who answered the call expressed in Rerum Novarum to work for social justice. Armies, like the Catholic Church, are not characteristically egalitarian. They depend on the willing submission of the lesser to the higher orders—as did Leo XIII. The word “democracy” does not appear in Rerum Novarum. To leave no doubt about his intentions, Leo followed that encyclical with another, Graves de Communi Re (“On Christian Democracy”), in which he warned that all Catholic initiatives in the secular world should be “formed under Episcopal authority,” and instructed Catholic clergy to be vigilant “lest any under the pretext of good should cause the vigor of sacred discipline to be relaxed.” In the United States, clerical advocates of Rerum Novarum on the left and the right fully accepted hierarchical prerogative.16
Chavez did not see anything contradictory in his commitment to both social justice and institutional hierarchy. His mixture of Mexican folk Catholicism, cursillismo, and the progressive tradition of Leo XIII was not shaken by Pope John XXIII’s sweeping move for democratic reform in the church by means of Vatican II. Although Chavez’s commitment to farm workers and the poor came before John’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra, and the subsequent articulations of liberation theology, Chavez never got interested in the work of low-level Catholic priests and Catholic laity in the slums of Brazil and the rural areas of Mexico and Central America. His autodidacticism led him to an idiosyncratic study of widely diverse political leaders and their theories of society and social change: St. Paul, Gandhi, John L. Lewis, Eugene Debs, Machiavelli, Charles Dietrich, Peter Drucker. None of the Latin American Catholic revolutionaries of the post–Vatican II era—Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian priest who was the main theoretician of liberation theology; Camilo Torres, the Mexican revolutionary priest of the late 1960s; Ernesto Cardenal and other Central American Catholics who were so important in the Nicaraguan revolution—made their way onto Chavez’s reading list.17
To a certain extent this was a matter of political convenience. After the brief spring of Catholic liberation theology, the low-level clergy who challenged church hierarchy often got themselves in serious trouble with their religious superiors. Chavez could not afford to be a religious rebel, as he was in the process of building a coalition that included the American Catholic hierarchy. But it was more than convenience. Chavez’s Catholic politics did not wander into the uncharted shores of post–Vatican II thought but instead remained where they had been formed, in Leo XIII’s combination of commitment to social justice, opposition to socialism, and acceptance of hierarchy.
Two years after they met, Father McDonnell passed Chavez on to the second man whom Chavez would later say “radically changed my life,” the community organizer Fred Ross. By then Cesar and his brother Richard had changed their own lives. Anxious to get out of the fields, they had gone with their cousin Manuel to Crescent City, near the California-Oregon border, where they found work as lumberjacks. No one liked the cold weather, so soon they and their families were all back in San Jose. Richard went to work as an apprentice carpenter and Cesar got a job in a lumberyard. They were no longer farm workers.
The sojourn in Crescent City did not diminish Cesar’s interest in Father McDonnell. Back in San Jose, Chavez continued to visit McDonnell and help him with his work. When Fred Ross came to town to set up a voter registration campaign among Mexican Americans under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee, Ross asked McDonnell, the local Spanish-speaking priest, if he knew anyone who might be interested in working on such a project. McDonnell suggested Chavez. Ross had to be persistent, as Chavez was suspicious of the white organizer and tried to duck him. But Ross finally worked his way into the Chavez household, and Cesar’s confidence.
For the next ten years, Ross would be Chavez’s immediate supervisor, the man who would