Arizona Republic: Film examines the influence of Cesar Chavez’s favorite singer, Ramón ‘Chunky’ Sánchez
Ramón Sánchez had many gifts — he was Cesar Chavez’s favorite musician, after all — but his greatest may have been branding: Everybody called him Chunky, and they meant it with affection.
“I guess for some people, it would be a disaster, but he just sort of took it on,” said Paul Espinosa, a filmmaker who knew Sánchez well. “Once you see him, you won’t be surprised.”
But Espinosa hopes people will see so much more. The former Arizona State University professor and veteran documentary producer has pieced together the story of Sánchez’s life, tracing how music carried him to the forefront of the Chicano civil rights movement.
The finished film, ‘Singing Our Way to Freedom,’ will make its Phoenix premiere on Thursday, with a screening at the Phoenix Art Museum. Tickets are $10. Espinosa will then sit for a question-and-answer session, talking about his project and the rippling effects of Chunky’s music.
“I really want people to see the power of music in the larger social justice work that I believe needs to be done today,” Espinosa said. “He was somebody that was very conscious of being somebody who was both Mexican and American. His music, he borrowed from both sides of the border in his music.”
Espinosa first met Sánchez at a rally in the late 1970s, around the time the singer joined with Cesar Chavez and the movement to organize migrant field workers. The two became close.
“He was somebody that I knew well,” Espinosa said, and in 2011 he decided the world should know him, too. “I just felt his story was worth telling to a larger audience.”
Sánchez was never part of that audience. He saw only pieces of the film before he died in 2016, at 64.
For something that became his life’s work, music began as an unlikely path. His hometown, the dust-covered farm outpost of Blythe, California, seemed to present only one opportunity: a life in the fields, like his father and everybody else in town.
But his mother loved Louis Armstrong, and she pushed young Chunky into music. He took it with him to San Diego, where affirmative action paved his way to college, Espinosa said. There he started playing at Chicano demonstrations and civil rights rallies.
Before long, he had become Chavez’s favorite musician and a frequent performer at his labor-rights rallies.
“We went in there, did two, three songs, and everybody was ready to go out and challenge the world,” Sánchez says in the film. “It was powerful. It was penetrating to the soul.”
The feature-length film opens with an immigration rally in San Diego. In the clip, hundreds of activists wave Mexican flags and chant in Spanish: “The people, united, will never be defeated.” Chunky is nowhere, and then he is everywhere. The screen cuts to a close-up, showing viewers the singer in his usual form: His hat is askew, his mustache flaps in the wind and a guitar is propped onto the belly that gave him his name.
“I do not ask for freedom,” he tells the crowd. “We are freedom!”
Then he starts to play.