In the 1960s, two groups of people set out to change the institutions that controlled their lives: farmworkers in the vineyards of California and students in the high schools of East Los Angeles.
This third book of the Chicano Civil Rights series tells how Filipino farmworkers led by Larry Itliong walked out of the Delano grape fields in September 1965, and how Cesar Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the Mexican American members of the National Farm Workers Association voted to join them. Together they built a union that growers and politicians said was impossible, carried a national grape boycott into supermarkets across the country, and won the first farmworker contracts and, in 1975, California's landmark farm labor law.
Three years later, about 15,000 students walked out of East Los Angeles high schools to protest overcrowded classrooms, dropout rates near 60 percent, and schools that punished them for speaking Spanish. Their teacher Sal Castro stood with them, and thirteen organizers were arrested for conspiracy.
Inside you'll find:
- The Delano grape strike, the march to Sacramento, the boycott, and "Sí, se puede"
- The Filipino manongs and the multiracial alliance that made the union possible
- Women who led strikes, from the cannery workers of 1939 to the Farah and Watsonville strikes
- Labor struggles beyond the fields: Salt of the Earth, the Texas melon strike, the Memphis sanitation strike, and the auto and postal strikes of 1970
- The rise of Chicano identity: Corky Gonzales, Reies López Tijerina, MAYO, La Raza Unida, and MEChA
- A personal chapter by co-author Armando Oscar Olmos about growing up in Boyle Heights
- The 1968 East L.A. Walkouts, the East L.A. Thirteen, and the walkouts that spread across the Southwest
Workers and Chicano Power shows how farmworkers and students, through organizing and courage, changed what seemed possible.