Forged Under the Sun/Forjada Bajo El Sol: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas (Women and Culture Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472094327 ISBN 13: 9780472094325

Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr, 1993

Synopsis

The compelling oral history of a remarkable woman's life and political struggle

About this title

Review

Maria Elena Lucas has the ability to "look way back into people's eyes and see their hearts and minds and tell what's there. It's a different way of loving life, of seeing life." Born in Southern Texas in 1941, the oldest of seventeen children, Maria Elena Lucas and her family earn their living as migrant farm workers. It is a life full of hardships and poverty so pervasive that her telling of it can make for heart-wrenching reading. Married at sixteen, she defies family and religious traditions when, several years later, she leaves her husband, takes her seven children to Ohio, and works the farms there. In Ohio, she realizes her calling as an organizer for migrant workers. Initially setting up a social service agency with other women to ease burdens suffered by all, she eventually becomes a spokesperson for the Farm Workers Organizing Committee. It is work done essentially without pay and often without thanks. Her vision for a greater good carries her through the constant harassments from land-owners, migrant males who resent a woman expressing her opinions, or, on a hot, dry day in the fields, the glass of salt water given her to quench her thirst. Permanently disabled in 1988 by pesticide spray, Maria Elena Lucas continues to fight for the rights of poor, working women. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Lucas, a Chicana farm worker, organizer and poet, has lived a dramatic and arduous life, as exemplified in the song she wrote that provides the book's title. Oral historian Buss ( Dignity: Lower Income Women Tell of Their Lives and Struggles ) has sensitively integrated Lucas's diaries with her spoken memories, and included an introduction that provides context about life in the Rio Grande River Valley on the Texas-Mexico border, where Lucas has spent much of her life. Lucas recalls her early ignorance of any existence beyond poverty and how, knowing nothing of sex, she married at 15, only to find her husband violent. After leaving him and moving to an Illinois farming community, she organized a store boycott and a cultural festival. In 1981, she began her formal organizing career with the United Farm Workers in Illinois. Back in Texas, in 1988 she was sprayed with pesticides from a crop-dusting plane; two years later, in fragile health but still organizing, she won a small settlement. While Lucas's story is an inspiring one of grit and hope, she is hardly starry-eyed, recognizing how sexism persists in the larger society, her community and the union. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472094327
• ISBN 13: 9780472094325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Buss Fran Leeper