Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Obama’s Yes We Can Echoes Chavez’ Sí Se Puede

By Carol Mell, 2-12-08

	How does "Yes We Can" sound to old farmworkers and community activists who often chanted Sí Se Puede since the days of Cesar Chavez. Here they celebrate Cesar Chavez Day, March 31, 2003 in San Luis, Arizona. Chavez died a few blocks away ten years earlier.

As the daughter of a blue-collared, red-necked, snoose-spitting, knee-jerk Republican and a tree-hugging, left-leaning, sign-carrying, Nader-hawking co-chair of the Green Party in Oregon, I don’t like to talk politics. My folks got a divorce and I’ve been tongue-tied ever since.

This year I’m breaking my silence to say why I didn’t vote for Hillary though I wanted to vote for a woman.

“I’m doing it for my daughters,” I told myself but they made it loud and clear they wanted no part of the female version of a Clinton White House.

One of the twins is no doubt remembering how she learned about oral sex from the first President Clinton. During all the hoopla ten years ago about what Bill did or didn’t do and just how much of either, my then fifth-grader was lounging around on the couch during the news hour. A bullet list appeared over a picture of Clinton including the words, “oral sex.”

I glanced at her hoping the words would pass right through but like rocks in a sieve, they stuck. She rose like a trout to a fly, jumping to her feet screaming, “EEEW, EEEW,” with a look of shock and awe on her wide-open face.

An interviewer asked Hillary recently if Bill would have an office in the White House. To heck with an office, will Bill get an intern? Gives you the heebie jeebies, don’t it?

Nowadays, we hear Barack Obama’s supporters chanting, “Yes we can.”

I’m not a Latina but like those guys who say, “I’m not a doctor but I play one on television,” I have some insights into the real thing. I learned Spanish in Colombia, was the border reporter in Yuma, Arizona, a job which included getting up at 3 a.m. to meet with farmworkers in San Luis and running around the desert talking to illegal border crossers. Before that I worked for a faith-based immigration agency assisting farmworkers with English and citizenship.

So, to hear Obama chanting the English version of, “Sí Se Puede,” the famous rallying cry of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers has a strong resonance with Spanish speakers. I admit that at first it sounded strange but there is some honesty in the way Obama is using it.

The Chavez family had a ranch near Yuma where Cesar and his siblings lived until they lost their land and became migrant workers when Cesar was 11. He died in San Luis in 1993. I met many of his cousins, old friends, enemies and supporters.

Both Chavez and Obama came up as community organizers but unlike Chavez, who had an eighth grade education, Obama had his Harvard law degree. Only a selfless man would do community organizing on the south side of Chicago when he had such choices.

Community organizing was coming to Yuma when we lived there. I witnessed that having a fancy degree counts for less than having humility, patience, and a genuine ability to listen. These are grassroots models that work with people one by one, not for any one particular purpose but for goals the organized identify for themselves. The idea is to build leadership and organization from the ground up. In Yuma they started out by asking farmworkers to tell their stories, first to each other, and next to English speaking faith and community leaders. The effect was powerful. Within two years over 400 people, both immigrants and old-timers, were standing on the steps of the capitol telling their legislators what they needed and expected of them.

When I heard that Obama didn’t send his people to the halls of power in South Carolina, but to the barbershops and beauty salons, I knew he’d learned his lessons well.

After Super Tuesday, a radio analyst said the Clinton campaign explained Obama’s surprising gains by the fact that he simply outspent them. The reporter pointed out that Clinton depends on a small number of large donors while Obama has not yet tapped out his supply of small donors.

This is why Obama talks more about what we will do than what he will do because his money comes from us.

I don’t think Chavez would have minded the Obama campaign borrowing his slogan. His old companions, and enemies, too, complained that Chavez surrounded himself with outsiders—Jews, Protestants, Filipinos and those Easterners, the Kennedy’s but Chavez knew well that the movement wasn’t about race but justice.

When organizer Fred Ross, with the Industrial Areas Foundation, found Cesar Chavez in 1952 he was living in a barrio near San Jose, California named, “Sal Si Puedes,” which means, “Get out if you can.”

We’re in a peck of trouble around the world, Mister Obama, so I hope you’re right about the “Yes We Can” part. If you get elected my prayer for you is, “Sal Si Puedes,” and if it be possible, please take the nation with you.

You are danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well--vote, that is.

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