[In Sal Si Puedes Peter Matthiessen] prefers the typewriter equivalent of the cinema verité, shoulder-held camera approach over the rehearsed, Mennen-deodorized, color-enhanced sound stage method…. As a consequence, Matthiessen records everything pretty much as it's happening and being said; and the reader is allowed to share in the surprise of experience with all its jostles, open-endedness and frequent lack of sequential progression. (It isn't until well into the book's second half that much is told of Chavez' childhood—Matthiessen waited for the recollections to surface from a more spontaneous stimulus than a writer's questioning).
The method left me feeling I had been there—walking with Chavez early one August morning along a highway at Delano's edge, eating matzohs and drinking Diet Cola at the end of the fast, picketing with Mexican-American and Filipino strikers (while Mrs. Zapata, a large woman, bellowed la causa's message to the laboring strikebreakers within the vineyard), even talking with furious but thoroughly human growers who believe the strikers are communists. Always, the shoulder-held camera—to which Matthiessen, despite his admiration for the strikers and their cause, refuses to attach ideologically selected filters. (p. 72)
James Forest, "Rendering to Cesar," in The Critic, Vol. XXVIII, No. 5, May-June, 1970, pp. 72-7.
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