Who Started The United Farm Workers Union The Story Of Cesar Chavez Biography Of Famous People Children S Biography Books

Cesar Chavez was one tough fellow. He dared to speak out against the injustices that he saw around him, particularly his workplace. It was because he was brave that the United Farm Workers Union was created. Reading about the life led by individuals who made it to history books will instill powerful lessons of skills and other values. Such is the case of this biography book. Grab a copy now!

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Winner of the California Book Award A searching portrait of an iconic figure long shrouded in myth by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of an acclaimed history of Chavez's movement. Cesar Chavez founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation. He rose from migrant worker to national icon, becoming one of the great charismatic leaders of the 20th century. Two decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino leader in US history. Yet his life story has been told only in hagiography-until now. In the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, Miriam Pawel offers a searching yet empathetic portrayal. Chavez emerges here as a visionary figure with tragic flaws; a brilliant strategist who sometimes stumbled; and a canny, streetwise organizer whose pragmatism was often at odds with his elusive, soaring dreams. He was an experimental thinker with eclectic passions-an avid, self-educated historian and a disciple of Gandhian non-violent protest. Drawing on thousands of documents and scores of interviews, this superbly written life deepens our understanding of one of Chavez's most salient qualities: his profound humanity. Pawel traces Chavez's remarkable career as he conceived strategies that empowered the poor and vanquished California's powerful agriculture industry, and his later shift from inspirational leadership to a cult of personality, with tragic consequences for the union he had built. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez reveals how this most unlikely American hero ignited one of the great social movements of our time.

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.

From the Jaws of Victory:The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement is the most comprehensive history ever written on the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of the United Farm Workers, the most successful farm labor union in United States history. Based on little-known sources and one-of-a-kind oral histories with many veterans of the farm worker movement, this book revises much of what we know about the UFW. Matt Garcia’s gripping account of the expansion of the union’s grape boycott reveals how the boycott, which UFW leader Cesar Chavez initially resisted, became the defining feature of the movement and drove the growers to sign labor contracts in 1970. Garcia vividly relates how, as the union expanded and the boycott spread across the United States, Canada, and Europe, Chavez found it more difficult to organize workers and fend off rival unions. Ultimately, the union was a victim of its own success and Chavez’s growing instability. From the Jaws of Victory delves deeply into Chavez’s attitudes and beliefs, and how they changed over time. Garcia also presents in-depth studies of other leaders in the UFW, including Gilbert Padilla, Marshall Ganz, Dolores Huerta, and Jerry Cohen. He introduces figures such as the co-coordinator of the boycott, Jerry Brown; the undisputed leader of the international boycott, Elaine Elinson; and Harry Kubo, the Japanese American farmer who led a successful campaign against the UFW in the mid-1970s.

Examines the fight of the United Farm Workers Union.

Mexican-American civil rights and labor activist Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) comes to life in this vivid portrait of the charismatic and influential fighter who boycotted supermarkets and took on corporations, the government, and the powerful Teamsters Union. Jacques E. Levy gained unprecedented access to Chavez and the United Farm Workers in writing this account of one of the most successful labor movements in history-which also serves as a guidebook for social and political change.

In its heyday, the United Farm Workers was an embodiment of its slogan “Yes, we can”—in the form “¡Sí, Se Puede!”—winning many labor victories, securing collective bargaining rights for farm workers, and becoming a major voice for the Latino community. Today, it is a mere shadow of its former self. Trampling Out the Vintage is the authoritative and award-winning account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers and its most famous and controversial leader, Cesar Chavez. Based interviews conducted over many years—with farm workers, organizers, and the opponents and friends of the UFW—the book tells a story of collective action and empowerment rich in evocative detail and stirring human interest. Beginning with the influence of the ideas of Saul Alinsky and Catholic Social Action at the union’s founding, through the UFW’s thrilling triumphs in the California fields, the drama concludes with the debilitating internal struggles that effectively crippled the union. A vivid rendering of farm work and the world of the farm worker, Trampling Out the Vintage is a dramatic reappraisal of the political trajectory of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and an essential re-evaluation of their most tumultuous years. Winner of the 2012 Hillman Prize in Book Journalism.

Presents a brief biography of Cesar Chavez, describing the life and accomplishments of the Mexican American labor leader who founded the United Farm Workers union to promote better wages and working conditions for migrants and other farm workers. Includes photographs.