Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers - Hardcover

Frank Bardacke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844677184 ISBN 13: 9781844677184

Publisher: Verso Books, 2011

Synopsis

The slogan 'Yes we can!'-in the form 'Si Se Puede!'-predates Obama's 2008 presidential campaign by more than four decades. It was the coinage of the United Farm Workers' cofounder Cesar Chavez: a man who led his organization to many victories and secured collective bargaining rights for California farm workers. A charismatic leader who continues to inspire much controversy, Chavez built the United Farm Workers into a major force and a voice for the Mexican-American community, previously excluded from national politics.

About this title

Review

A radically honest, uncompromising and often painful deconstruction of the legend of Cesar Chavez,Trampling Out the Vintage is one of the long-awaited books of our time. Having spent almost a decade as an agricultural worker in California's Pajaro Valley (where he still lives), Bardacke's account evokes the spirit of Steinbeck, resurrecting the true heroes of La Causa - the rank and file fieldworkers - and reminding us that the grapes of wrath still remain to be harvested for social justice. --Mike Davis

There's so much marvelous stuff in Frank Bardacke's book that's simply not been done before. At the book's core are the men and women who pick the crops in California's fields and orchards. Bardacke gives those people, mostly seen only in distant fields, a huge presence, one crackling with political vitality: those surges the UFW had no idea were coming; those moments when a strike spread like wildfire across the fields. Here are the farm workers, their skill and endurance, the world they built among themselves, the ways they shaped the history of the UFW. It is their story-refreshingly, sympathetically, and beautifully told- that makes this book stand apart and will make it stand forever. --Alex Cockburn

About the Author

Frank Bardacke is a teacher and labor organizer in Watsonville, CA who worked the fields in the Salinas Valley for seven years. He is also the author of Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons and a translator of Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1844677184
• ISBN 13: 9781844677184
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 784