The 27-year-old just stared at the photo of the young girl. Jose Barreto’s mother is 50; he had never seen a picture of her as a child. Now through a combination of chance and history and complicated threads, he sat in an El Centro kitchen, looking back four decades at a picture of a 10-year-old girl. […]
Thirty years ago next week, Cesar Chavez delivered one of his most memorable addresses, a speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Ronald Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected president in a landslide. The United Farm Workers union that Chavez had founded two decades earlier had lost most of its contracts and was in […]
“Crusades of Cesar Chavez” has gone on the road, to Texas and soon on to Arizona, and I’ll have more news about some great encounters in another post soon. In the meantime, I wanted to quickly post links to two terrific conversations about the book and Chavez that have been preserved as audio podcasts. […]
An Op-Ed piece I wrote that was published in the Los Angeles Times today, comparing the drama of the real events in the early years of the Delano grape strike to the way they are portrayed in the movie. One of the stories is about the arrest of Helen Chavez. Here is the real Helen Chavez on […]
It’s been a whirlwind first week! I’ve done about 25 interviews with local and national print, radio and television media — in studio, skype podcasts, and phone interviews. The conversations have been thoughtful and thought-provoking, touching on issues including immigration, movement-building, and of course, details of Chavez’s life. I’ve also written a couple of pieces, […]
Carlos Almaraz was a brilliant artist whose short life intersected at significant moments with Cesar Chavez and the farm worker movement. In one of his last stories for the Los Angeles Times, Reed Johnson (whose terrific cultural reporting will be sorely missed as he moves to the Wall Street Journal’s Brazil bureau) wrote on March […]
Thanks for stopping by. In the era of tweets, Facebook posts, and selfies, this blog is intended to be a spot to reflect in slightly greater depth on subjects I follow and care about. For almost a decade, I’ve been writing in various places about farmworkers, the UFW, Cesar Chavez, agriculture, and related subjects like […]