The Words of Cesar Chavez (review)

Over the past two decades John Hammerback and Richard Jensen have blazed a trail for rhetoric and public address scholars who wished to examine Latino/a rhetorics and rhetors. Their seminal efforts have created an intellectual space for Latino/a scholars and for those whose project is the uncovering of rhetors whose oratorical contributions have been ignored. In previous efforts they have centered on the rhetors associated with the Chicano (student) and farm workers' movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In focusing on that significant period of social protest, rich with talented activists/rhetors, Hammerback and Jensen have convincingly demonstrated that César Chávez, United Farm Workers union organizer and champion for social justice, belongs in the company of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Stokely Carmichael. Like his African American counterparts, Chávez was "an extraordinarily skilled communicator who placed his discourse at the very heart of his career" (John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez [Texas A &M University Press, 1998], 3).

The companion work to Hammerback and Jensen's The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez, this edited volume contextualizes many of the significant public addresses during Chávez's time as the leader of the farm workers' union (the UFW). Covering a period from 1965 to 1993, Jensen and Hammerback's compilation allows readers to understand the strategies, language, and themes that Chávez employed to organize farm workers, to reach out to mainstream America, and to galvanize support for the farm workers. Readers are thus given insight into the single most important Mexican American, or Latina/o, rhetor in the history of the United States. Indeed, the tone, words, and arguments in Chávez's speeches compiled in this collection lend insight into the man and his vision for the farm workers' movement and the broader goal of justice and equality in the contemporary United States.

Readers are given the opportunity to examine important texts such as The Plan de Delano (1966), Jerry Brown's presidential nomination address (1976), and the address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco (1984). In all, Jensen and Hammerback have included 36 texts that provide the reader with a range of significant exemplars of Chávez's forensic, epideictic, and ceremonial styles. It is an impressive collection suggesting that Jensen and Hammerback had heretofore unequaled access to a variety of sources for these works. Jensen and Hammerback have done well to seek out the most significant texts and have gone to great lengths to present a coherent representation of Chávez at his best—and at his critical moments as leader and chief rhetor of the UFW.

We know that Chávez spoke often, but his extensive corpus is not well catalogued. The publication of this collection effectively serves that purpose and for that reason alone contributes to the fields of public address, Chicano/a and Latino/a studies, and social movement studies. But, as a companion to their previously published rhetorical biography, this text rounds out a project that foregrounds Chávez as a flawed, but moral and committed man doing his best to advocate for the dispossessed and marginalized. Readers of this collection may well ask when the third installment of this project, the audio and the visual components needed to truly capture Chávez's delivery and his effect on audiences, will arrive. For now Jensen and Hammerback have demonstrated how archival research and attention to details can produce important contributions to the recovery of rhetorical discourses produced by rhetors from the margins.

The introduction to the text as well as to each chapter provides the foundation for scholarly and student readers alike. Jensen and Hammerback open the text by providing the reader with a brief biographical background of Chávez and a historical contextualization...