Algerian Sculptor Molds a Kinship With Chavez

With each curve he caresses into the clay and chicken-wire frame that will eventually become a bronze monument to Cesar Chavez, Khalil Bendib presses much of himself into the grooves.

First, there is his admiration for the historic battles the Chicano labor leader fought for migrant farm workers. Then there are his childhood memories of the bloody war for independence in his native Algeria. And finally, there are his own battles for better treatment of Arabs in Los Angeles.

Bendib, 38, sees little difference between the plight of the campesinos in California and the problems his people have faced.

“We lived the same lives,” the lanky Diamond Bar artist said. “People like Chavez, [Mohandas] Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were heroes to us as children because they accomplished so much for their people without having to wage such a horrible war.”

And so he donates his labor on the three-piece sculpture that will eventually depict a young campesino girl struggling with a wheelbarrow full of grapes, a raisin-skinned old man stooping to work with the notorious short-handled hoe that Chavez helped outlaw in 1975 and an exultant Chavez with arms raised as an eagle flies from its perch on his hand.

Bendib’s creation, endorsed by the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation and approved by the Los Angeles City Council, is scheduled to be installed in El Pueblo de Los Angeles Park, near Olvera Street, in 1997. He has raised about one-tenth of the estimated $123,000 cost of the work. Major fund-raising events are planned for the spring.

It was upon learning of Chavez’s death in 1993 that Bendib set out to commemorate Chavez’s legacy. Only now, after years of design and presentation meetings, has he finally begun to sculpt.

“It starts with the feeling,” he said as his fingers traced the sunken cheeks of the old man on a plaster miniature of the monument.

“I want to express the feeling of power and freedom Cesar inspired in his followers and to show the hardship and injustice these people still face. They’ve had a rough time of it.”

So too, he emphasizes, have Algerians, who won an eight-year war for independence from France in 1962. “For more than 100 years, [Algerians] had been exploited by the French who came and invaded our country. They found themselves working for slave wages and mistreated not just for being poor and powerless but for being the wrong race.”

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Bendib said he and his young schoolmates in 1960s post-revolutionary Algeria were inspired when they learned of the campesinos on the other side of the world waging their own rebellion for better working conditions under the banner of Chavez’s United Farm Workers union.

Yet even after Chavez’s union won recognition from California’s growers and Algeria was free, discrimination still mottled his country, Bendib said. The campesinos “were really making progress and we had so much further to go.”

The artist said he spent several years of the war with his family hiding in Paris after his father--a radiologist and revolutionary in Algiers--fled government soldiers sent out to arrest him.

It was there, and later in Morocco, that the young Bendib noticed that “the people of color were the ones picking up the garbage, doing the dishes and scrambling for all of the dirty jobs with bad wages.”

When his family moved back to a liberated Algeria in 1962, Bendib felt the situation had not improved. The French merchants and landowners who remained in the young country still dismissed Algerians as “the dirty race,” he said. “You couldn’t help but feel like a foreigner in your own land.”

When he moved here from Algeria in 1977 for graduate studies at USC, Bendib felt a kinship with Chicano student activists.

“The connection was so obvious,” he said. The symbols of the movement--farm laborers, domestic servants, blue-collar workers--had the same “stoic faces” as Algerian laborers. “I realized that this kind of fight for basic rights happens everywhere.”

The rise of fundamentalism in the Arab world and the backlash it triggered in the United States in the late 1970s and early ‘80s created stereotypes that inflamed Bendib’s passions. He had always drawn pictures, but now he began submitting political cartoons to the campus newspaper. A cartoon protesting the 1985 Israeli bombing of Tunisia, showing the boot of an Israeli soldier marching over the Middle East and South Africa in step with a pro-apartheid soldier, sparked threatening calls to the paper, he said.

His participation in demonstrations coordinated by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee introduced him to Alex M. Odeh, a Palestinian American who served as regional director of the group and often walked into local synagogues and churches to initiate dialogue among Jews, Arabs and Christians.

“I was going through a lot of anger and he was such an advocate of peace. He was a real builder of bridges . . . the way we should all be,” Bendib said.

On that day in October 1985 when Bendib received telephoned threats for his cartoon on Tunisia, he heard that Odeh had been killed by a terrorist bombing in Santa Ana.

“I was shocked,” he said, orchestrating with his hands the emotion stirred by that memory. “Alex was such a sweet, generous person.”

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He went to work as a cartoonist for a San Bernardino newspaper and taught himself to sculpt. In 1993, he set out to commemorate Odeh’s work. Despite protests that the project elicited from some Jewish groups, he won approval from Santa Ana officials for a neoclassic design depicting Odeh as an Olympian figure of power and peace.

While working on that sculpture, Bendib learned of Chavez’s death.

“I immediately knew what my next project was going to be,” he said.

He quit his newspaper job and has worked on the Chavez project for the past two years, coordinating fund-raisers for materials when he’s not sculpting.

“Before I presented my ideas to the [Chavez] Foundation, I was worried that they would resent me for doing this because I am not Latino,” he said. “But they treated me like a brother and patted my back when they liked it.

“Deep inside, that made sense.”