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

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.A" 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.A" Alex Cockburn

The slogan Yes we can!A"-in the form Si Se Puede!A"-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.