Forged Under the Sun/Forjada Bajo el Sol: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas (Women & Culture)

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.

Maria Elena Lucas grew up in a Mexican American migrant farm family of 16 children in the Rio Grande Valley linking Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. In this narrative, Lucas tells of being poor most of her life, with an abusive father, a submissive and superstitious mother, and a husband and tyrannical mother-in-law who treated her like a servant and forced her to take care of the household for an extended family even while raising seven children of her own. She experienced physical and verbal abuse as she tried to cope with the attitudes toward women in Mexican culture and the racism, farm labor exploitation, and sexual harassment in American culture. While working as a migrant in Onarga, Illinois, she became a successful organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union. Her deep religious beliefs and the poems and plays she wrote gave Lucas the strength to rise above the senseless cruelty to become a writer, artist, and activist in women's causes. This is truly a moving autobiography of an extraordinary woman.
- Irwin Weintraub, Rutgers Univ. Libs., Pis cataway, N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.