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The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement (2009)

de Miriam Pawel

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6517401,887 (3.85)9
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.… (més)
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With a novelist's empathy and a historian's care, Pawel chronicles the well-known story of how Chavez built the first successful union for farmworkers--and the lesser known story of how he tore it down
  chicagofreedom | Oct 26, 2011 |
Ressenya escrita per a Crítics Matiners de LibraryThing .
Miriam Pawel presents an incomplete but illuminating history of the United Farm Workers (UFW) from 1965 through 1989. The book focuses tightly on the experiences of eight people in the movement, including boycott organizers, attorneys, a minister, and farmworkers who became team leaders and union organizers. Although Cesar Chavez is a dominant figure in the story, he is presented at a distance, always through others' eyes, and Pawel spends virtually no time explaining his background. For the reader, as for the focal characters, Chavez' leadership and legendary status is a given from the outset. This stylistic choice makes it easier to grasp how, for so long, movement and union members could defer to Chavez and overlook his flaws, while giving greatly of themselves to realize his dreams.

For students of advocacy movements, the central lesson of the story is that Chavez was a charismatic and idealistic movement leader, and a terrible administrator. Once the movement won -- institutionalizing, through state legislation in 1975, the right of workers to form a union -- Chavez should have stepped away from the fledgling UFW, turning it over to the gifted organizers and managers he had recruited. That would have freed him to build new movements -- a broad campaign for poor people, a utopian spiritual community, a community services organization. Instead, Chavez tried to have it all, refusing to hand over control of the union, but neglecting union business to pursue a series of experimental initiatives. The story Pawel tells is a tragedy -- for Chavez, who destroyed much of what he had built and turned on staff who loved him; for the farmworkers, many of whom lost contracts they had fought hard to win; and especially for committed union staffers forced out in a series of emotionally brutal purges.

While this book will benefit anyone interested in labor or advocacy movements, it has too narrow a focus to serve as the definitive account of the entire UFW. For example, Dolores Huerta comes across in this book as Cesar Chavez' hatchet woman, though she has had a distinguished career in Sacramento as a lobbyist for workers. Richard Chavez, Cesar's brother, comes across as a Cassandra who repeatedly warns Cesar against his mistakes but is ignored. The book is simply silent on Richard and Dolores' long-running relationship, which could hardly be overlooked in a book that wanted to address all facets of the UFW's history. In later chapters, Chavez' son Paul and son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez climb to leadership positions in the union, but are never sketched with any depth. The book also gives little sense of how the union has evolved since Cesar Chavez' unexpected death in 1993 (although Pawel published a long and highly critical article on that in the Los Angeles Times in 2006). Pawel has little to say about the theory of organizing, another dimension of the story that would have been interesting to understand better. But, with respect to its purpose -- capturing the experience of working for Cesar Chavez during the UFW's initial rise and fall -- the Union of Their Dreams does an excellent job. ( )
  bezoar44 | Aug 5, 2011 |
Ressenya escrita per a Crítics Matiners de LibraryThing .
The Union of Their Dreams presents a unique perspective of the farm worker movement, with individual chapters focused on some of the integral members of the movement that do not get much attention. Pawel does a good job portraying both the strengths and the faults of Chavez and the movement.

I would recommend The Union of Their Dreams to anyone that is interested in social movements or the history of the period. ( )
  kbondelli | Nov 24, 2010 |
Ressenya escrita per a Crítics Matiners de LibraryThing .
Miriam Pawel, in her book The Union of Their Dreams, chronicles the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers movement through the eyes of a handful of central participants. Pawal's approach is particularly valuable because it allows her to evade the hero worship and iconography that surrounds Cesar Chavez and his legacy. Instead, Chavez is sketched by others' relationships with him and the reader gets a much fuller picture of the UFW as an organization.

Earlier, I reviewed John Dittmer's The Good Doctors which explored a civil rights organization from its birth in the segregation-era South to its eventual dissentigration. Whereas the Medical Committee for Human Rights eventually fell prey to its diversified interestsand lack of strong leaders that diluted its clout, the UFW profiled by Pawal was an organization bound too tightly to a single charismatic leader. It reminds the reader that institutions have many ways to fail, no matter how much good they've effected.

Pawal's book is an important addition to the history of American labor, and is unique in its attention to the relatively anonymous participants. It was heartbreaking to read the stories of people who had poured their lives into the movement and been discarded and forgotten. Chavez played a major role in the UFW, but he was never alone.
  ToTheWest | Aug 31, 2010 |
Ressenya escrita per a Crítics Matiners de LibraryThing .
Heroes are funny things. We choose to put someone on a pedestal for any number of reasons, from the way they look to the way they sing to the causes they champion. But beneath the façade of every hero beats the heart of a human being, with all the quirks and foibles that make up all of our complex personalities.

César Chávez was a hero to many people in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the driving force behind making the plight of migrant farmworkers visible to the rest of America through boycotts of grapes and lettuce. With the founding of the United Farm Workers union, he and his dedicated staff fought for what most of us recognize as basic human rights: a safe workplace, a fair wage, decent housing, education for our children. Under his leadership, the UFW boycotts captured the attention of the nation and won major concessions from field owners to improve the lives of the workers. His accomplishments have been enshrined in American life: schools, parks, libraries and streets have been named after him, and the state of California officially celebrates his birthday as César Chávez Day.

As Miriam Pawel illuminates in The Union of Their Dreams: Power, hope, and struggle in Cesar Chavez's farm worker movement, Chávez's considerable accomplishments were not without setbacks. Over the years, his initial dedication to the cause of farm workers shifted to a determination to preserve his control over the organization he created. After farm workers at many farms and ranches in California won the right to hold union elections and chose the UFW to represent them, the union found it difficult to actually deliver on the promises it had made. Chávez could be capricious, transferring staff members out of communities in which they were working hard to win the trust of and organize workers. As the union grew, Chávez became preoccupied with fighting off what he perceived to be challenges to his authority from board members, resulting in midnight purges of staffers who had lived in poverty and dedicated their lives for years to the farm workers' cause.

Pawel creates her complicated portrait of Chávez indirectly, by telling the stories of nine of the UFW's most dedicated workers in alternating vignettes. The style allows us to get to know each of the workers well, but muddies the reader's sense of a coherent timeline of events, and sometimes leads to incidents being told twice and out of order. The Union of Their Dreams is not a hatchet job in any sense; Pawel does not try to demonize Chávez nor lay the UFW's failures solely at his feet. The most grievous flaw of the book, however, is the lack of representation from UFW officials who remained loyal to Chávez throughout the 1970s turmoil. But Pawel, a journalist by trade, has a very accessible writing style, and her informality creates an intimacy that makes the reader feel part of the story.

This book is a worthy read not only for for those interested in progressive politics, but also readers looking for insight into how organization are formed, grow, and are stifled by their success. It's a familiar story for anyone who has volunteered or worked for a nonprofit organization, but it seems especially poignant in this case, because the stakes were so high for so many people, and even more significant victories were so close. I came away from this book deeply impressed by the incredible accomplishments of a group of idealistic, committed men and women, and saddened by thoughts of the opportunities lost to power struggles, disorganization and petty quarrels. ( )
  rosalita | May 1, 2010 |
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The Union of Their Dreams paints a vivid portrait of the cost of leadership that stifles dissent and activists who accept being silenced for the sake of the struggle.
 
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The history of the United Farm Workers union begins and ends with Cesar Chavez, who had the audacity to single-handedly challenge California's most powerful industry, and the will to keep fighting for three decades. By the time he died in 1993, he stood alone again.
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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.

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