Labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez expressed an interest in music from an early age. He grew up identifying as a pachuco, a young Mexican-American who wore zoot suits and listened to jazz, blues and swing music.
“A lot of people have no idea that the leader of the Farm Workers Union was this guy that had this urban soul inside him,” said filmmaker Luis Valdez, who first met Chavez when he was six years old.
(lively Pachuco swing music) - I first met Cesar in 1946 when I was six years old and he was a running partner of one of my cousins there in Delano.
They're both Pachucos.
And I didn't know it at the time, but that was Cesar.
(singing in Spanish) The Pachuco experience, which was his teenage youth, was born out of this cultural fusion.
The jazz age and swing music came together with Chicano culture to create the Pachuquismo, right?
- It was an identity.
It was the first generation of those Mexicano families who would come into the United States, the firstborn who were identifying themselves as being totally different than their mothers and fathers.
"I'm not Mexicano.
"I'm Chicano because I speak English, right?"
- He was of popular culture, man.
He was no different than any other Latino kid growing up in the United States, you know?
- He loved to dance.
Oh, he loved to dance!
- When I met Cesar, we were walking down the halls of KPFA over here on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and there was a poster there that was for the San Francisco Blues Festival that was featuring Jimmy Liggins.
And Cesar stopped and he looked and he goes, "Is he still around?"
And I said, I go, "You know who this guy is?"
He goes, "Oh, yeah!"
He goes, "I used to go dance to him "when I was a young Pachuco."
I said, I go, "You were a Pachuco?"
He goes, "Oh yeah, man!"
He goes, "And I love jazz and blues."
He goes, "Coleman Hawkins is my man!"
- A lot of people have no idea that the leader of the Farm Workers Union was this guy that had this urban soul inside him, right, and that his taste in jazz music was probably the finest expression of that flower.
- I went on a trip with him to New York about a month before he passed away.
During the day, we spent time going to different used music shops and used bookstores and he had a list of about a hundred of the top 100 jazz albums that he wanted to get.
And he literally would carry it around in his back pocket and pull it out and cross it off as he would find them, as he had purchased new pieces.
He really appreciated jazz and he used to scat with us all the time.
We didn't realize that what he was doing was scatting.
He would call us skitty bim bom and skitty bop bop and we just thought that he couldn't remember all of our names 'cause there were so many of us.
(Pachuco music continues) - What I had perceived of him as a young zoot suiter is not untrue.
He was, but he is more.
You can be that and a leader at the same time.
The leaders can come out of that field.
They don't have to come out of ivory towers.
They can come out of the rocks and the soil and the sand of Delano.
(Pachuco music continues) (music fades) (dramatic theme music)
