And A Little More Chávez

I was really interested in what Kaitlyn had to say both about the interview technique (or lack thereof) of Studs Terkel Ceasar Chávez's childhood. Naturally, the best course of action was to steal her source and check it out for myself.

I'm really surprised about how little actual 'interviewing' Terkel did. I can only recall him asking a single question to Chávez throughout the entire interview. I'm not sure if this is the mark of a master interviewer, or the mark of a mad man but in either case the technique worked magnificently. Chávez opened up and spoke about some very deep experiences from his childhood, a migrant farmer during the depression. Many of the events that Chávez spoke of were haunting to consider, namely the poverty and discrimination that he faced as a childhood, and a reflection on how these events shaped his later activism.

However, Chávez's recollections were equal parts astounding and scattered. If Terkel opened him to speak so freely about his childhood, the interviewer also open an unrelenting floodgate of emotion and experience. I felt that the interview felt more like an intimate conversation among confidantes than an attempt to record memories for posterity. I think that Terkel would have been better served guiding the direction of the conversation both to give the listener a sense of continuity as well as to create a coherent narrative. Perhaps Terkel failed in this regard, as the collection of experiences given to us by Chávez are practically indecipherable without some beforehand knowledge of the man himself. Whether this is an outgrowth of Terkel's method or the result of proper research about the topic prior to the interview is beyond me.

In any case, despite the shortcomings of this interview. Anyone interested in a more intimate at historical figures than we are accustomed to should look to Terkel as an entertaining, albeit slightly depressing, source of entertainment.