The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

by Miriam Pawel
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

by Miriam Pawel

eBook

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781608197149
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date: 03/25/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 560
Sales rank: 906,203
File size: 6 MB

About the Author

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Union of Their Dreams, widely acclaimed as the most nuanced history of Cesar Chavez's movement. She is a Pulitzer-winning editor who spent twenty-five years working for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and lives in Southern California.
Miriam Pawel is an award-winning reporter and editor who spent twenty-five years working for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She was recently an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow and a John Jacobs Fellow at the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part I March 1927-April 1962

1 Home 7

2 Sal Si Puedes 15

3 The Priest, the Organizer, and the Lumber Handler 24

4 Cesar Finds His Calling 32

5 Staying Organized 40

6 The First Disciples 45

7 David vs. Goliath, Round One 52

8 No Hay Mal Que Por Bien No Venga 63

Part II April 1962-July 1970

9 Viva La Causa 77

10 Chavez in Command 91

11 The Strike 105

12 Beyond Delano 117

13 The First Big Test 132

14 Chavez the Leader 143

15 The Fast 157

16 The Celebrity 172

17 The Boycott 182

18 Contracts 197

Part III July 1970-June 1975

19 A Very Different Strike 213

20 Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz 229

21 Staking a National Claim 239

22 Brother Against Brother 248

23 The Perfect Villain 260

24 The Seeds Are Sown 273

25 The Saint and the Sinner 285

26 The End of the Nonviolent Viet Cong 299

Part IV June 1975-November 1978

27 Elections in the Fields 311

28 The Crosby Era 323

29 The Cultural Revolution 335

30 Slough Off the Old 348

31 Mecca 360

32 Trapped 371

33 The End Game 384

Part V November 1978-April 1993

34 From Dream to Nightmar 401

35 Una Sola Union 416

36 Playing Defense 429

37 Chicano Power 438

38 Selling the Brand 448

39 The last Fast 455

40 Three Funerals 465

Epilogue 473

Acknowledgments 477

Bibliography 479

Notes 487

Index 535

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