The Grapes of Wrath, 1969
For more than a year now, table grapes have been the object of a national boycott that has won the sympathy and support of many Americans —and the ire of many others. The strike is widely known as la causa, which has come to represent not only a protest against working conditions among California grape pickers but the wider aspirations of the nation's Mexican-American minority as well. La causa's magnetic champion and the country's most prominent Mexican-American leader is Cesar Estrada Chavez, 42, a onetime grape picker who combines a mystical mien with peasant earthiness. La causa is Chavez's whole life; for it, he has impoverished himself and endangered his health by fasting....
Articles
From Cesar Chavez to the Denver Debate: Mexican-American Voters Finally Have Their Say
Last year, when Cuban-Americans observed the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro’s regime, the rest of the U.S. was in on it. Over...
Harvesting Labor Rights: Chavez’s UFW At 50
On September 30, 1962, legendary Chicano civil rights activist Cesar Chavez founded what would become the United Farm Workers of America—and with migrant labor a...
Let’s Name More Warships for the Long Overlooked
The recent decision by the Secretary of the Navy to name a new cargo ship after farm labor leader Cesar Chavez apparently has rankled conservatives in Congress...
PABLO ALVARADO: The New Cesar Chavez
Pablo Alvarado still remembers the terror he felt as a young, undocumented Salvadoran immigrant that morning in Woodland Hills, Calif., 13 years ago, when five...
LABOR: California Compromise
When Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal pushed through the nation's labor legislation in the '30s, one group of workers remained conspicuously unprotected: the farm...
Nation: THE LITTLE STRIKE THAT GREW TO LA CAUSA
ITEM: At a dinner party in New York's Westchester County, the dessert includes grapes. The hostess notices that her fellow suburbanites fall to with gusto; the...
LABOR: Render unto Cesar
In a bitter and sometimes violent struggle that dragged on for more than a decade, Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers Union battled the Teamsters in what the...
California: Cesar's War
As leader and prophet of "la Huelga," the California grape pickers' 35-month-old strike in the verdant San Joaquin Valley, Cesar Chavez, 41, has combined...
Churches: Victory in the Vineyards
Wearing rosaries and carrying a sequined banner that pictured the Virgin of Guadalupe, along with crudely lettered union slogans, 100 Mexican-American grape...
Vacation Robo-Post: What TV Shows Shaped America?
The Library of Congress recently issued a list of books that defined and influenced our country. For this Independence Day, we ask: what about the TV shows?
