About the Author:
Susan Ferriss worked as a free-lance reporter in Central America in 1983 and later produced a documentary film The Golden Cage about Mexican migrant workers in California.
She covered immigration, investigative reporting and general assignment at the Monterey Herald before joining the staff of the San Francisco Examiner. She became the Cox Newspapers Mexico correspondent in June 1997.
She is the co-author along with Ricardo Sandoval of the book The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement, published in 1997 by Harcourt Brace.
Ricardo Sandoval is a award-winning reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, in Mexico City. He is the co-author along with Susan Ferrissl of the book
The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement".
Review:
When the Chavez family lost its farm in Arizona in 1938 during the Depression, they moved to California and became migrant workers. Cesar was outraged by the exploitation, racism, and brutality that migrant farmworkers were forced to endure. His strong religious convictions, a dedication to nonviolent change, and a skill at organizing led to the establishment of the United Farmworkers (UFW) union. "La Causa," as it was called by supporters, became an important movement for self-determination in the lives of California's Mexican American and Filipino farmworkers. The successful nationwide grape and lettuce boycotts and public support exposed the injustices of California agribusiness and resulted in the first collective bargaining agreements and union hiring halls for migrant workers. Authored by two journalists who covered Chavez and the farmworkers, this companion volume to a PBS documentary traces Chavez's life and the events and people that helped shape it. Recommended for labor and agriculture collections.?Irwin Weintraub, Rutgers Univ. Lib., New Brunswick,
(Library Journal )
Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers union, was a man of principles and piety, dedicated, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., were, to strategies of nonviolent protest. Still controversial, Chavez is, nonetheless, beginning to fade from our collective consciousness. To preserve his story, two filmmakers, Rick Tejada-Flores and Ray Telles, created a PBS documentary titled The Fight in the Fields, and journalists Ferriss and Sandoval wrote and compiled this powerful, photo-filled biography. They trace Chavez's path from a happy childhood on his family's Arizona farm to the fields of California, where the Chavez family landed after being forced from home during the Depression and the great drought. Chavez never got over his shock at the brutality of farmworkers' lives and the blatant racism they endured. He founded the United Farm Workers union in 1962 to fight for basic human rights, devoting himself to union work at night after picking cotton all day with his wife to support their eight children. All that Chavez accomplished by organizing strikes, protests, and the now legendary grape boycott, was heroic in nature and profound in effect. (Booklist - Donna Seaman )
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.