Activist, labor scholar, and organizer Ernesto Galarza (1905–1984) was a leading advocate for Mexican Americans and one of the most important Mexican American scholars and activists after World War II. This volume gathers Galarza's key writings, reflecting an intellectual rigor, conceptual clarity, and a constructive concern for the working class in the face of America's growing influence over Mexico's economic system. Throughout his life, Galarza confronted and analyzed some of the most momentous social transformations of the twentieth century. Inspired by his youthful experience as a farm laborer in Sacramento, he dedicated his life to the struggle for justice for farm workers and urban working-class Latinos and helped build the first multiracial farm workers union, setting the foundation for the emergence of the United Farm Workers Union. He worked to change existing educational philosophies and curricula in schools, and his civil rights legacy includes the founding of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). In 1979, Galarza was the first U.S. Latino to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for works such as Strangers in Our Fields, Merchants of Labor, Barrio Boy, and Tragedy at Chualar.| Title Page Copyright Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Organization of the Book Part 1: Coming of Age in a Class Society In a Mountain Village On the Edge of the Barrio Part 2: Mexican Labor, Migration, and the American Empire Life in the United States for Mexican People: Out of the Experience of a Mexican Program for Action California the Uncommonwealth Part 3: Action Research in Defense of the Barrio Personal Manifesto The Reason Why: Lessons in Cartography Economic Development by Mexican-Americans in Oakland, California Alviso: The Crisis of a Barrio Part 4: Power, Culture, and History Mexicans in the Southwest: A Culture in Process The Mexican-American Migrant Worker—Culture and Powerlessness How the Anglo Manipulates the Mexican-American Part 5: Organizing against Capital Labor Organizing Strategies, 1930–1970 Poverty in the Valley of Plenty: A Report on the Di Giorgio Strike Plantation Workers in Louisiana The Farm Laborer: His Economic and Social Outlook Strangers in Our Fields Part 6: Letters from an Activist To Alfred Blackman, California Division of Industrial Safety, June 20, 1957. To Congressman James Roosevelt, December 20, 1957 Open letter to Members of the House of Representatives, co-signed by NAWU President H. L. Mitchell To Henry P. Anderson, April 2, 1958 To Henry P. Anderson, April 30, 1958 Letter to Henry P. Anderson, June 24, 1958. To Jack Livingston, AFL-CIO Department of Organization, and Norman Smith, AFL-CIO Organizer, May 5 To Norman Smith, December 5, 1959 To "Liberal Friends who live in the East," March 18, 1960 Part 7: Appendix Vale más la Revolución que viene Selected Bibliography Select Chronology Index | A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2013. — A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2013.
|Armando Ibarra is an assistant professor in the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin-Extension. Rodolfo Torres is a professor of urban and regional planning and urban studies at the University of California, Irvine. His other books include Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility.Constructing Identities in Mexican American Political Organizations: Choosing Issues, Taking Sides