Cesar Chavez founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation. He rose from migrant worker to national icon, becoming one of the great charismatic leaders of the 20th century. Two decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino leader in US history.
In the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, Miriam Pawel offers a searching yet empathetic portrayal. Chavez emerges here as a visionary figure with tragic flaws; a brilliant strategist who sometimes stumbled; and a canny, streetwise organizer whose pragmatism was often at odds with his elusive, soaring dreams. He was an experimental thinker with eclectic passions—an avid, self-educated historian and a disciple of Gandhian non-violent protest. Drawing on thousands of documents and scores of interviews, this superbly written life deepens our understanding of one of Chavez’s most salient qualities: his profound humanity.
Pawel traces Chavez’s remarkable career as he conceived strategies that empowered the poor and vanquished California’s powerful agriculture industry, and his later shift from inspirational leadership to a cult of personality, with tragic consequences for the union he had built. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez reveals how this most unlikely American hero ignited one of the great social movements of our time.
Miriam Pawel is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who spent twenty-five years as a reporter and editor at Newsday and the LA Times before becoming an author and independent historian. She is the author of The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. This event is cosponsored by the Glendale Latino Association.
05/28/2014 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Come for food, vote at the Annual Meeting and stay for a program featuring a just-published biography of Cesar Chavez.