4 stars: Very good

From the back cover: Cesar Chavez's life and work transformed American society, and his name is synonymous with the struggle of American migrant farmworkers for dignity and justice. Yet he was also a complex man who often frustrated his coworkers. In the years before his death in 1993, the UFW was often divided by conflicts. This book chronicles both the triumphs and the crises and provides a moving testament to the enduring importance of Chavez and his legacy.

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This book is loaded with photographs, as its actual a companion piece to a documentary which I've not yet seen, but will. Growing up in CA I am ashamed at how little I knew about Chavez or even the farmworkers themselves, and how bad their plight was. I had heard of the hunger strikes, which lasted in longer duration than Gandhi's and solidfied his friendship with Bobby Kennedy. I did not know that he started the strike when some of the farmworkers used violence-- he did it to tell them that they must be nonviolent in their approach. His first strike lasted over a month, and was broken with Kennedy and Helen Chavez by his side. This book did a fabulous job of educating me to his vital role in our history. Furthermore, it resonated that you fight harder for something that is taken away than for something that you never have (usually). An incident in Chavez's early life sent him on this path of fighting for the workers-- many, but not all, Mexican (and he was US born) to have a better life. I was saddened to research and see that UFW is all but dead now, and it gave me pause to wonder what life is like for those workers now, vs. in the 70s when UFW was at its peak, or in 93 when he died. A fabulous read.

Quotes that resonated (many):

The loss of the family farm left an indelible mark on Cesar Chavez, who never forgot the memory of his family's dispossession. 'Maybe that is when the rebellion started'. The Chavez property was first taken by the state and sold at a public auction, and it eventually fell into the hands of the company that would later be part of Bruce Church Inc., a giant vegetable company. This irony did not escape him. 'If we'd stayed there, possibly I would have been a grower.' The experience of landownership, Chavez thought, made it easier for his family to stand up to some of the abuses they encountered as migrant workers. 'Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on the land, and I knew a different way of life. We were poor, but we had liberty. The migrant is poor, but he has no freedom.

Chavez wasn't in uniform when he deliberately chose a seat in the white-only section (of the theater). For many years, Cesar and his parents had stood up to farm supervisors who had tried to cheat them or push them around, but the choice he made in the movie theater was his most brazen act of civil disobedience. Many Mexicans at the time accepted the segregated seating because they had known nothing else, Chavez said.... After an hour [at the jail, with no charge] the sergeant gave Chavez a lecture and released him.

Conveniently, charges of un-Americanism also became an easy weapon to intimidate people and beat back challenges to the status quo. Americans who were pro-union, against segregation, and for voting rights all became suspect, and Chavez was no exception. It was shortly after he plunged so enthusiastically into voter registration that he had his first brush with the FBI, which would later shadow Chavez and the UFW through two decades, as their farmworkers rights movement moved inexorably across the country.

"We took every case of violence and publicized what they were doing to us. By some strange chemistry, every time the opposition commits and unjust act against our hopes and aspirations, we get tenfold paid back in benefits." Chavez said. But with his own ribs bruised by punches on the picket lines, he knew the discipline it took to keep hostility in check. "Love is the most important ingredient in nonviolent work--love the opponent--but we haven't really learned yet how to love the growers.... maybe love comes in stages. If we're full of hatred, we can't really do our work. Hatred saps all that strength and energy we need to plan."

Most Chicanos and Filipinos involved in the new farmworkers movement had tasted bigotry all their lives, and they were quick to compare Delano uprising to the South. The modern civil rights movement, they wrote in 'El Malcriado' "began in the hot summer of Alabama ten years ago when a Negro woman refused to be pushed to the back of the bus. The Negro is willing to fight for what is his, and equal place in the sun. Sometime in the future they will say that in the hot summer of California in 1965, the movement of the farmworkers began."

[in hearings regarding the farmworkers plight, being arrested prior to any action taken place, Sen Robert Kennedy said] "Could I suggest that in the interim period of time, in the luncheon period of time, that the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?" ... After the hearings, Kennedy headed for Filipino Hall, where incredulous farmworkers, who revered his late brother, heard him declare his support for the grape strike. He even went so far as to march on a picket line at the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation's 4400 acre ranch where Helen Chavez had worked.

Even after contracts were signed, supervisors made a point of resisting the new work rules. Teofilo Garcia remembers a foreman laughing scornfully when his crew tried to take the 10 minute break guaranteed by the contract. A Puerto Rican shop steward had to produce a copy of the rules, his hand trembling in fear. Garcia and the other workers were impressed by his courage. The resentful foreman finally acknowledged the contract and the crew took what for some of them was the first workday break of their lives. "Before the union, we were 'rancheros del rancho' "hicks from the sticks". After that vote, everyone became brave, even me." says Garcia, now in his seventies.

More than three thousand farmworkers packed the corridors of the courthouse and knelt in quiet prayer outside. Cesar, who for two weeks had consumed nothing more than water and a few ounces of bouillion and eucharistic wafers, leaned on Cohen's shoulder as he entered the building. When flashes from the cameras exploded in their faces, Cohen asked "Are you ok?" Cesar looked up and winked. [The opposing side's] lawyer asked the judge to remove the farmworkers because they were a disruptive presence. "The presiding judge said 'Well if I kick those farmworkers out of the courthouse, it'll be another example of goddamned gringo justice.' Cohen recalls. From that day on, "that courthouse became our turf." Giumarra dropped the contempt charges.

[After an Arab farmworker was killed in a protest]. "There was a visible change in Cesar. He felt personally responsible...for the life and death of people in the union. And he didn't feel it was worth it."--Luis Valdez

On July 1, 1975, he embarked on his least noticed by toughest "peregranacion", a thousand mile march throughout California. Chavez began by touching a fence at the US - Mexico border in San Ysidro, then strode with sixty supporters north to Sacramento and then south again, through the San Joaquin Valley to La Paz, just as the grape harvest was getting underway. All along the way the procession stopped almost daily to hold rallies and collect farm election petitions from laborers. At the end of each day of walking, Chavez would mark the spot where he had come to stop, drawing an X into the ground with a stick or pushing a twig into the soil. The next morning, he'd lead marchers out to the same spot to resume the journey. In some places, there was no one around, and it could have been easy to cheat and skip a few miles. But Cesar would insist on finding that mark each day.

[When Cesar's mother died] "Juana Estrada Chavez does not need any of us to speak well of her this day. The simple deeds of a lifetime speak far more eloquently than any words of ours about this remarkable woman and the legacy of hope and strength that she leaves behind." [it strikes me this could be said about Cesar as well].

Paul Chavez tries to sum up his father's life and his legacy with a story. A reporter was interviewing Chavez, probing for the reasons below the surface that motivated him. "My dad says ' Let me see if I can explain it to you in its simplest sense.' He talked about going to eighth grade and having to stop going to school to help put food on the table. He said 'I don't ever want to have another parent make the decisions that my parents made. That's why I'm doing this, and why I'm going to keep doing this. Very basic.'"

Cesar always wanted the idea behind the union to be respect, and for the 'patron' to share the riches he is able to earn. ( )