By the circulation desk from March 28-April 7, 2025
Delano
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In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farm workers went on strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. More than a labor dispute, the strike became a movement for social justice that helped redefine Latino and American politics. The strike also catapulted its leader, Cesar Chavez, into prominence as one of the most celebrated American political figures of the twentieth century. More than forty years after its original publication, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, based on compelling first-hand reportage and interviews, retains both its freshness and its urgency in illuminating a moment of unusually significant social ferment.
César Chávez, the Catholic Bishops, and the Farmworkers' Struggle for Social Justice
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César Chávez and the farmworkers' struggle for justice polarized the Catholic community in California's Central Valley during the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike. Because most farmworkers and landowners were Catholic, the American Catholic Church was placed in the challenging position of choosing sides in an intrafaith conflict. Twice Chávez petitioned the Catholic Church for help. Finally, in 1969 the American Catholic hierarchy responded by creating the Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Farm Labor. This committee of five bishops and two priests traveled California's Central Valley and mediated a settlement in the five-year conflict. Within months, a new and more difficult struggle began in California's lettuce fields. This time the Catholic Church drew on its long-standing tradition of social teaching and shifted its policy from neutrality to outright support for César Chávez and his union, the United Farmworkers (UFW). The Bishops' Committee became so instrumental in the UFW's success that Chávez declared its intervention "the single most important thing that has helped us." Drawing upon rich, untapped archival sources at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Marco Prouty exposes the American Catholic hierarchy's internal, and often confidential, deliberations during the California farm labor crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. He traces the Church's gradual transition from reluctant mediator to outright supporter of Chávez, providing an intimate view of the Church's decision-making process and Chávez's steadfast struggle to win rights for farmworkers. This lucid, solidly researched text will be an invaluable addition to the fields of labor history, social justice, ethnic studies, and religious history.
Cesar Chavez
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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.
Conquering Goliath
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Fred Ross, a living legend among those who work to empower the underdog and effect social change by means of grass-roots activism, tells the story of Cesar Chavez's first organizing effort. This is a fast-moving chronicle of a little-known battle pitting Chavez and a handful of farm workers against two hundred growers and powerful govrenment agencies in 1958, which led, four years later, to the launching of the United Farm Workers of America. Conquering Goliath illustrates Chavez's skill in calling attention to the plight of farm workers and in drawing people together in order to end discrimination and economic exploitation. In an against-all-odds triumph, he worked within the system, cultivating honest governement officials, documenting abuses, conducting citizenship classes, registering voters, and ultimately, restoring human dignity by defeating a grossly unjust practice.
An Organizer's Tale
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The first major collection of writings by civil rights leader Cesar Chavez One of the most important civil rights leaders in American history, Cesar Chavez was a firm believer in the principles of nonviolence, and he effectively employed peaceful tactics to further his cause. Through his efforts, he helped achieve dignity, fair wages, benefits, and humane working conditions for hundreds of thousands of farm workers. This extensive collection of Chavez's speeches and writings chronicles his progression and development as a leader, and includes previously unpublished material. From speeches to spread the word of the Delano Grape Strike to testimony before the House of Representatives about the hazards of pesticides, Chavez communicated in clear, direct language and motivated people everywhere with an unflagging commitment to his ideals. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.
The Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez
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Explores the life and works of the prophetic leader of California's United Farm Workers as the embodiment of an integrated Catholic social vision.
Cesar Chavez
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"[An] exceptionally interesting and intimate oral history . . . Against a background of motels and all-night cafés and strikes, the high relief in which the characters stand out is truly fascinating. Jacques Levy's biography of Chavez has unforgettable descriptive passages and fine photographs." --The Nation 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 Union in writing this account of one of the most successful labor movements in history which can also serve as a guidebook for social and political change. "[The] definitive work. The book's major contribution lies in its portrait of the man himself--deeply religious in an almost mystical fashion; a dedicated battler, but not a dedicated hater; a leader who not only will not ask, but will not allow his followers to make the sacrifices he has made." --Publishers Weekly "One of the heroic figures of our time." --Senator Robert F. Kennedy Jacques E. Levy (1927-2004), a prize-winning journalist, spent six years with Cesar Chavez researching and writing this book. Fred Ross Jr. is a spokesperson for the Service Employees' International Union and the son of Fred Ross, Chavez's mentor. Jacqueline Levy is the daughter of Jacques E. Levy and a high school science teacher in Sonoma County, California.
What Do Unions Do?
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One of the best-known and most-quoted books ever written on labor unions is What Do Unions Do? by Richard Freeman and James Medoff. Published in 1984, the book proved to be a landmark because it provided the most comprehensive and statistically sophisticated empirical portrait of the economic and socio-political effects of unions, and a provocative conclusion that unions are on balance beneficial for the economy and society.The present volume represents a twentieth-anniversary retrospective and evaluation of What Do Unions Do? The objectives are threefold: to evaluate and critique the theory, evidence, and conclusions of Freeman and Medoff; to provide a comprehensive update of the theoretical and empirical literature on unions since the publication of their book; and to offer a balanced assessment and critique of the effects of unions on the economy and society. Toward this end, internationally recognized representatives of labor and management cover the gamut of subjects related to unions.Topics covered include the economic theory of unions; the history of economic thought on unions; the effect of unions on wages, benefits, capital investment, productivity, income inequality, dispute resolution, and job satisfaction; the performance of unions in an international perspective; the reasons for the decline of unions; and the future of unions. The volume concludes with a chapter by Richard Freeman in which he assesses the arguments and evidence presented in the other chapters and presents his evaluation of how What Do Unions Do? stands up in the light of twenty years of additional experience and research. This highly readable volume is a state-of-the-art survey by internationally recognized experts on the effects and future of labor unions. It will be the benchmark for years to come.
The Words of César Chávez
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Cesar Chavez's relentless campaign for social justice for farm workers and laborers in the United States marked a milestone in U.S. history. Through his powerful rhetoric and impassioned calls to action, Chavez transformed as well as persuaded and inspired his audiences. In this first published anthology, Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback present Chavez in his own terms. Through this collection of words and analysis of his major speeches and writings, Jensen and Hammerback reveal the rhetorical qualities and underlying rhetorical dynamics of a master communicator. They also offer a rich source of the history of the farm workers' movement that Chavez led from the early 1960s to his death in 1993. The Words of Cesar Chavez offers an important new resource for scholars of public discourse, Chicano studies, and Chavez himself. It complements the authors' earlier study, The Rhetorical Career of Cesar Chavez, by providing the primary materials for that rhetorical profile of Chavez. Through his own words, Jensen and Hammerback present Chavez doing what he did best: teaching and influencing audiences who would enact his agenda to create a new and better world.
Cesar Chavez and la Causa
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In this powerful and moving biography of one of the greatest labor leaders in the history ofAmerica, students come face-to-face with an inspirational man whose trials and tribulations echoed the struggles of modernAmericaand whose courage, simplicity and faith changed agriculture inAmericaforever. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each of the titles in theLibrary of American Biographyseries focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. In addition, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times. This text focuses on Chavez, but also provides the much needed background of the farm workers movement, the formation of the UFW and the history of migrant workers in the U.S. This text incorporates the latest scholarship on Chavez’s life and times, but makes the story accessible to students in both survey and upper division courses in American history.
César Chávez
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Labor leader, social justice advocate, Chicano leader, and humanitarian are only some of the multifaceted renderings of César Chávez. Ilan Stavans has compiled essays and first-person narratives that capture the multiple dimensions of this storied figure. To that end, Stavans's collection of timely articles separates fact from fiction, or as he puts it the "objective is the opposite of hagiography." Broken into two sections, César Chávez explores a variety of topics central to understanding the actual person instead of a shadowy apparition. The first part, "Considerations" offers critical assessments of Chávez's life that utilize different approaches to understanding his life, including cultural studies critiques, historical narrative that provide invaluable context, and even eulogies following his untimely death. The second section, "Voices" includes personal reflections on Chávez's life that explore his religiosity, his role as an "everyman," and the decline of the United Farm Workers union. The title is certain to assist readers in better comprehending this groundbreaking labor leader.
The Union of Their Dreams
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The rise, fall, and legacy of the inspirational United Farm Workers movement, and the untold story of iconic community organizer Cesar Chavez. 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.
