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About this Book
Quiet
and unobtrusive, Cesar Chavez took on a seemingly impossible task with a
simple admonition to those who doubted him. “Sí se puede”—yes, it can be done—he
would insist.
Chavez was a migrant farmworker by birth and by trade. Although he was
extremely well-read later in life, his formal education ended after the
eighth grade. He never owned a house. He didn’t own a car. He never made
more than $6,000 a year.
For more than 100 years, organizers, on the behalf of farmworkers, had
been unsuccessfully trying to form a union. Chavez had a better idea; he
took the battle from the few and gave it to the many: to the farmworkers
themselves and to the American consumers in communities throughout the
nation.
Chavez’s sharpest spear was nonviolence, his most devastating sword,
the boycott. With these two weapons and an undying dedication to
justice, Chavez awakened America to the plight of the migrant
farmworker. In doing so, he improved the lives of thousands of
farmworkers and taught important lessons about justice and
self-sacrifice to countless others.
In this collection
of firsthand accounts by those who knew him best, a portrait of an
uncommonly complex man, both driven and focused, yet humble, empathic
and exceedingly principled, emerges. The reader gains an understanding
of the yoke Chavez chose to place onto his own shoulders as well as the
ideals he employed to accomplish for the migrant farmworkers what many
predicted would be impossible.
The more than 45 contributors range from the famous—Edward James Olmos,
Henry Cisneros, Martin Sheen, Coretta Scott King, Jerry Brown and
others—to members of the Chavez family, to UFW staff, to the farmworkers
themselves. Illustrated by the compelling black and white photographs of
George Elfie Ballis, who began photographing the farmworker movement in
the 1950s.
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