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    Cesar Chavez: A Hero for Everyone
    Cesar Chavez: A Hero for Everyone
    Cesar Chavez: A Hero for Everyone
    Ebook56 pages44 minutes

    Cesar Chavez: A Hero for Everyone

    By Gary Soto and Lori Lohstoeter

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    About this ebook

    ¡Viva la causa!
    ¡Viva César Chávez!
    Up and down the San Joaquin Valley of California, and across the country, people chanted these words. Cesar Chavez, a migrant worker himself, was helping Mexican Americans work together for better wages, for better working conditions, for better lives.
    No one thought they could win against the rich and powerful growers. But Cesar was out to prove them wrong -- and that he did.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAladdin
    Release dateJun 25, 2008
    ISBN9781439108895
    Cesar Chavez: A Hero for Everyone
    Author

    Gary Soto

    Gary Soto's first book for young readers, Baseball in April and Other Stories, won the California Library Association's Beatty Award and was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. He has since published many novels, short stories, plays, and poetry collections for adults and young people. He lives in Berkeley, California. Visit his website at garysoto.com.

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    • 4/5
      I used this book in my ELD class in California with New Comers from Mexico. It was a good narrative to both teach about the history of the Farmworkers and worked as a beginner English book for middle schoolers.

    Book preview

    Cesar Chavez - Gary Soto

    CHAPTER ONE Seeing for Himself

    IN HIS 1953 Mercury station wagon, Cesar Chavez pulled into Corcoran, California. It was late summer, 1962. With a few other recruiters from the organization he would later call the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), he was there to go door to door, telling farmworkers about a new union that would help them.

    Corcoran was a small California valley town of about five thousand people. Most of these people were Mexican Americans. They were poor and often lived in barrios or labor camps. They worked in the fields that surrounded Corcoran, harvesting grapes in the summer and picking cotton in the fall.

    Corcoran had a history of labor problems. In 1933 it had been the site of a farmworkers’ strike. The cotton pickers were paid by piecework. This meant that they didn’t get paid by the hour but by how much they picked. The pickers were asking for better pay and fairness from the farmers, who occasionally cheated them. If you picked cotton, you dragged a sack—or sacko, in Spanglish—until it was so full it was too heavy to drag anymore. Then a farmer or his foreman would weigh the sack. Sometimes farmers would trick the workers with scales that weren’t properly balanced. Other times they might fire a worker for resting for ten minutes. This worker was usually fired at the end of the day, and he would only get a portion of his wages, never what he deserved.

    Cesar was only six when the strike broke out, but later as young man he read and heard about it. He knew that the strikers had been beaten and shot and sometimes killed by armed farmers.

    Cesar did have personal memories of Corcoran. When he was a boy, his family used to travel up and down California’s Central Valley looking for work. One summer, in the early 1940s, they stopped in Corcoran to pick cotton. But the contractor, the person who hired the workers and was responsible for paying them, ran off with their hard-earned money.

    Now Cesar walked from house to house. He introduced himself in Spanish. He explained to the person who came to the door—a man or woman who was tired from working in the field—about the desperate need for justice for the farmworker.

    What is it you want? a man might ask.

    Cesar’s answer would be that he wanted to start a movement to make life better for farmworkers.

    By 1965 Chicanos—Mexican Americans—would call that movement simply, la causa, the cause to change how farmworkers were treated. The cause, also, to change how all Mexican Americans were treated in small rural towns and in the larger cities.

    ¡Viva la causa!would become the chant of the farmworker.

    CHAPTER TWO Beginnings

    CESAR’S DESIRE TO fight injustice probably started when

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