Cesar chavez biography pdf

Book Reviews Cesar Chavez: A Triumph ofSpirit. ByRichard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garda. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. xviii, 206 pp. $19.95, ISBN 0-8061-2758-9.) Cesar Chavez. The book lacks endnotes, but the bibliographical essay, with citations organized in categories, is helpful. The repetition, frequent typos, and numerous factual errors in Cesar Chavezshould have been corrected by a careful proofreading before publication. For instance, Chicago's Mexican population in the 1920swas 19,362, not 1,000,000; the Hollywood Film Council, not Ernesto Galarza, made the movie Poverty in the Valley ofPlenty; riots engulfed twenty-two cities in the summer of 1967, not 1966;Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968 occurred on June 5, not June 6; and the sociologist C. Wright Mills was not one of the New Left's leaders, since Mills died in 1962. This biography is useful as a general survey of the life of Cesar Chavez. Unfortunately, the emphasis on broad coverage is at the expense of analytic depth in sorting out Chavez's personality.Jacques E. Levy's book, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography ofLa Causa (1975), which remains the best study of Chavez and La Causa, provides a more judicious history than Griswold del Castillo and Garda offer. A thorough and engaging history of Cesar Chavez and La Causa remains to be written. Zaragosa Vargas University of California Santa Barbara, Caltfornia Mexican American YouthOrganization: AvantGarde ofthe Chicano Movement in Texas. By Armando Navarro. (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1995. xxiv, 288 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-292-75556-2. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-29275557-0.) The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave the most significant display of MexicanAmerican alienation and discontent with the American system. The movement marked the coming of political age of a new and more defiant generation of Mexican Americans who militantly identified themselves as "Chicanos" - an earlier urban (barrio) and working-class term of ethnic identity among Mexican immigrants and their offspring. In a bolder and more challenging manner than previous political generations of Mexican Americans had displayed, Chicanos protested against the historic exploitation of and discrimination against people of Mexicandescent in the United States. Armando Navarro's excellent study of the MexicanAmerican Youth Organization (MAYO) Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Bath on July 1, 2015 Cesar Chavez by historians Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garda, part of the Oklahoma Western Biographies series, is the first of the host of books that will be written about the late Cesar Chavez. The authors view Chavez's life and his work with La Causa, the farm workers' movement, "as a biographical prism through which to examine the major events and issues that have affected Mexican Americans in the United States." The various strands of Chavez's initiation into what would become his lifework for La Causa are outlined, the influences that, according to the authors, made Chavez a moral reformer. This new biography is a chronological account that often sacrifices analysis for context. It provides the best assessment to date of the conundrum that undocumented Mexicanworkers posed for the United Farm Workers union. The presence of those workers forced Chavez to advocate fair treatment of Mexican immigrants while calling for restrictions on immigration from Mexico. The book falls short in giving insight into the exceptional life of labor organizer and activist Dolores Huerta and in integrating Huerta's relation to Chavez and her role in the farm worker movement. The chapter on how liberal intellectuals viewed Chavez is unconvincing. Framing their subject in the context of the popular upheavals of the 1960s, Griswold del Castillo and Garda correctly assert that the spirit of Chicano ethnic pride and solidarity was kindled by the noble struggles of Chavez and La Causa. Readers may be put off by the judgmental tone used in discussing the larger legacy of the 1960s. The book is marred by the lack of detachment in the authors, judgment of events, particularly when they stray from their evidence. This lack of balanced perspective is the major problem in 1093