Chávez César - An organizers tale speeches

PENGUINCLASSICS

AN ORGANIZERS TALE

CESAR CHAVEZ was a civil rights and labor leader, a farmworker, a crusader for nonviolent social change, and an environmentalist and consumer advocate. He was born on March 31, 1927, near his familys farm in Yuma, Arizona. His family lost their farm in the Great Depression and became migrant farm workers when Chavez was ten. Throughout his youth and into his adulthood, he migrated across the Southwest, laboring in the fields and vineyards, where he was exposed to the hardships and injustices of farmworker life. After achieving only an eighth-grade education, Chavez left school to work in the fields full-time to support his family. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1946 and served in the western Pacific in the aftermath of World War II. Chavezs life as a community organizer began in 1952 when he joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), a prominent Latino civil rights group. While with the CSO, he coordinated voter registration drives and conducted campaigns against racial and economic discrimination primarily in urban areas. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chavez served as CSOs national director.

In 1962, he resigned from the CSO to found the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers of America. For more than three decades Chavez led the first successful farmworkers union in American history, achieving dignity, respect, fair wages, medical coverage, pension benefits, and humane living conditions for hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. Chavez led successful strikes and boycotts that resulted in the first industry-wide labor contracts in the history of American agriculture. His unions efforts brought about the passage of the groundbreaking 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act to protect farmworkers. Today it remains the only law in the nation that protects the farmworkers right to unionize.

A strong believer in the principles of nonviolence practiced by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez effectively employed peaceful tactics such as fasts, boycotts, strikes, and pilgrimages. In 1968 he fasted for twenty-five days to affirm his personal commitment and that of the farm labor movement to nonviolence. He fasted again for twenty-five days in 1972, and in 1988, at the age of sixty-one, he endured a thirty-six-day Fast for Life to highlight the harmful impact of pesticides on farmworkers and their children. Chavez died on April 23, 1993, in San Luis, Arizona.

ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five-College 40th Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Riddle of Cantinflas (1998), The Essential Ilan Stavans (2000), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), Dictionary Days (2005), The Disappearance (2006), and Love and Language (2007). He is the editor of, among other works, Growing Up Latino (1994), The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (1998), and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003). He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Hall of Fame Award, Chiles Presidential Medal, the Rubn Daro Medal, and the National Jewish Book Award. Stavans writes a newspaper column syndicated throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

SPEECHES

Edited with an Introduction by
ILAN STAVANS

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Penguin Books 2008

Copyright Cesar E. Chavez Foundation, 2008
Introduction copyright Ilan Stavans, 2008
All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:
Marcher, an interview with Cesar Chavez, by Daniel Chasan, The New Yorker, May 27, 1967.
By permission of Daniel Jack Chasan.
Sharing the Wealth, by Cesar Chavez, Playboy Magazine, January 1970.
By permission of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.
Introduction by Cesar Chavez to Forty Acres: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers by Mark Day. Copyright 1971 by Praeger Publishers, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Chavez, Cesar, 19271993.
An organizers tale : speeches / Cesar Chavez ; edited with an introduction by Ilan Stavans.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0155-8
1. Chavez, Cesar, 19271993. 2. Labor leadersUnited StatesHistory20th century. 3. United Farm WorkersHistory20th century. 4. Migrant agricultural laborersLabor unionsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. Mexican American migrant agricultural laborersHistory20th century. I. Stavans, Ilan.
II. Title.
HD6509.C48A24 2008
331.8813092dc22 2008006934
[B]

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.