The Union of Their Dreams
Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A generation of Americans came of age boycotting grapes, swept up in a movement that vanquished California's most powerful industry and accomplished the unthinkable: dignity and contracts for farm workers. Four decades later, Cesar Chavez's likeness graces postage stamps, and dozens of schools and streets have been renamed in his honor. But the real story of Chavez's farm workers' movement-both its historic triumphs and its tragic disintegration-has remained buried beneath the hagiography.
Drawing on a rich trove of original documents, tapes, and interviews, Miriam Pawel chronicles the rise of the UFW during the heady days of civil rights struggles, the antiwar movement, and student activism in the 1960s and '70s. From the fields, the churches, and the classrooms, hundreds were drawn to la causa by the charismatic Chavez, a brilliant risk-taker who mobilized popular support for a noble cause. But as Miriam Pawel shows, the UFW was ripped apart by the same man who built it, as Chavez proved unable to make the transition from movement icon to union leader. Pawel traces the lives of several key members of the crusade, using their stories to weave together a powerful portrait of a movement and the people who made it.
A tour de force of reporting and a spellbinding narrative, The Union of Their Dreams explores an important and untold chapter in the history of labor, civil rights, and immigration in modern America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this historical reevaluation of the Cesar Ch vez and the United Farm Workers, Pawel keeps the narrative bouncing between alternating and key figures like Eliseo Medina, an early recruit turned organizer; Chris Hartmine, a protestant activist minister ; and Ellen Egger, an intern who stayed for the long haul. This technique allows Pawel to convey the complexity of a movement often identified with a single man. Steeped in the recordings and primary source materials from these years, Pawel recreates the era-but with an awareness of the ironies and contradictions made plainer by hindsight. While noting Ch vez's instrumental charisma, she also records heretofore cloaked internal conflicts among disgruntled union leaders chafing under Ch vez's strict concept of sacrifice, his social conservatism and his adamant hold on power, which in the 1970s led to damaging purges of leaders he accused of disloyalty . The book's unexpected scar tissue and its arc of decline present some contrast to the continuing if dispersed legacy trumpeted in Randy Shaw's recent Beyond the Fields, but these accounts are ultimately complementary and necessary historical revaluations of this important labor and social history.
