Nonviolence in Context: César Chávez, the Chican@ Movement, and a Poetics of Deferral

ABSTRACT

In this essay I argue that César Chávez’s 1968 “Speech Breaking the Fast” put on display the concrete effects of a poetics of deferral, a form of rhetorical agency capable of negotiating the tensions between nonviolence and Chican@ identity. Drawing from rhetorical and Chican@ studies scholarship, I posit that Chávez’s poetics supplied an alternative to the violent turn within Chican@ activism in the latter 1960s. From my reading of the delivery and design of Chávez’s speech, I conclude that his appeals resonated with Chican@ ideals and validated the performance of Chican@ identity through nonviolence.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Drs. John M. Murphy and J. David Cisneros for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. I also thank two anonymous reviewers, whose feedback contributed substantially to improving this article. Finally, thanks to Dr. Ned O'Gorman for his scholarly generosity and insightful feedback. Any errors found in this essay are of my own doing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term “Chican@” as a shorthand for Chicana/o throughout the essay. While I acknowledge that “Chicanx” might be a more inclusive gesture for contemporary scholarship (see, Blackwell and McCaughan, 2015), the historical movement was not quite as inclusive. Because my essay concerns a historical perspective of the movement more generally, I follow Holling and Calafell’s assessment of the -@ suffix to convey a broad sense of “gender inclusivity and equity” (Holling and Calafell 2011, 16).

2. All references to Chávez’s speech text come from the version which appears in Medhurst and Lucas’ edited volume Words of a Century, titled “Cesar Chavez: Speech on Breaking His Fast” (Chávez, 2008). Citations accord with the paragraph breaks in the anthology.