The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography
*Starred Review* Pawel, rigorous and captivating, follows her history of Cesar Chavez’s crusade to protect farm workers’ rights, The Union of Their Dreams (2009), with a zestful, dramatic, and redefining biography of the innovative, daring, and persevering activist. Raised by his strong mother to embrace sacrifice and help others, Chavez (1927–93) dropped out of school to work in the fields to support his destitute, homeless family, joining the ranks of California’s exploited Mexican American migrant workers. Driven by his social conscience, pragmatic genius, and motivational ardor; inspired by Gandhi; and mentored by the highly unorthodox Father Donald McDonnell and Saul Alinsky disciple and community organizer Fred Ross, Chavez created a scrappy and revolutionary labor union for “the poorest, most powerless workers in the country.” Pawel thoroughly chronicles every aspect of Chavez’s battles against California’s politically dominant produce growers, from audacious strikes to the now legendary national grape boycott to his penitential fasts. As she insightfully dissects Chavez’s troubled relationships with his inner circle and each phase in the rise and fall of his increasingly complex and mismanaged organization, Pawel portrays a visionary civil rights leader whose fame and near-beatification engendered tragic misuses of power, but who improved countless lives and raised global consciousness. Chavez’s epic story, told so astutely and passionately by Pawel, is essential to understanding today’s struggles for justice and equality. --Donna Seaman