Cesar Chavez, the labor organizer and founder of the United Farm
Workers of America, was, perhaps, an unlikely hero. In this
biography, his early life is shown to be fairly typical for a boy
in a close-knit family of Mexican Americans who worked the land in
Arizona and California and endured hardship and discrimination. His
story reveals the underside of the American Dream, and his later
successes in helping farm workers and building a union to represent
them are a testament to something extraordinary in a seemingly
ordinary man. As a young man, Chavez looked for a way out of the
fields in the Navy but only found similar ethnic hatred. He married
and started a family soon after his discharge and returned to the
fields. Chavez hated the injustices meted out to his family and
other migrant workers. They were on American labor's last rung,
thousands of individuals making a pittance for their back-breaking
work, living in desperate and inhumane conditions, poisoned by the
pesticides, with few rights or leaders on whom to lean. The migrant
workers found a champion in Chavez, who started to see the
possibilities of making a difference for those in need. He began to
work for a social service agency in California and met a priest who
inspired him to read and learn about figures such as Mohandas
Gandhi. From that point on, his labor activism is legendary. In the
context of the times, with the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and
race riots raging, Chavez is shown to slowly build the farm workers
labor movement, along with colleagues such as Dolores Huerta. Using
the nonviolent examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., from
the 1960s until his death in 1993, Chavez launched strikes,
boycotts, marches, and his famous hunger strikes to force
concessions from the big growers for better conditions and pay for
the workers. His union lobbied Congress on behalf of the farm
workers. Chavez and his supporters faced police and grower
brutality, government surveillance, and death threats, and he was
jailed several times. Like Gandhi, his example is for the ages.
General
Imprint: |
Greenwood Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Greenwood Biographies |
Release date: |
September 2005 |
First published: |
September 2005 |
Authors: |
Roger Bruns
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 156 x 11mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
168 |
Edition: |
New |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-313-33452-8 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-313-33452-8 |
Barcode: |
9780313334528 |
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