Miriam Pawel searches for the man behind the myth in her new book, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez .
Cesar Chavez is arguably the greatest community organizer in American history. He rose up from obscurity and poverty and built a movement for poor farm workers, battling to ensure them protections other groups of workers had long been afforded. And Chavez is a hero not just for Mexican-Americans — most of the farm workers he helped were Mexican migrants — or for Californians, but for anyone interested in nonviolent social change. He apprenticed first under an organization funded by Saul Alinsky, and he studied the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. And yet, despite piles of hagiography, no one had yet written a definitive biography of the man. That awkward state of affairs, ladies and gentleman, has changed.
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez is Miriam Pawel's new book, out now from Bloomsbury, and it is a meticulously researched account of the great and complicated labor leader. A former journalist at the Los Angeles Times, Pawel has been studying Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) for nine years, sifting through archives and crisscrossing the country conducting interviews, including with my dad, an attorney with the union in the 1970s. Over the last month, she and I emailed back and forth, and out of our exchanges pieced together the following interview.
Miriam Pawel
Bloomsbury
