The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement

In this historical reevaluation of the Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Workers, Pawel keeps the narrative bouncing between alternating and key figures like Eliseo Medina, an early recruit turned organizer; Chris Hartmine, a protestant activist minister ; and Ellen Egger, an intern who stayed for the long haul. This technique allows Pawel to convey the complexity of a movement often identified with a single man. Steeped in the recordings and primary source materials from these years, Pawel recreates the era-but with an awareness of the ironies and contradictions made plainer by hindsight. While noting Chávez's instrumental charisma, she also records heretofore cloaked internal conflicts among disgruntled union leaders chafing under Chávez's strict concept of sacrifice, his social conservatism and his adamant hold on power, which in the 1970s led to damaging purges of leaders he accused of disloyalty . The book's unexpected scar tissue and its arc of decline present some contrast to the continuing if dispersed legacy trumpeted in Randy Shaw's recent Beyond the Fields, but these accounts are ultimately complementary and necessary historical revaluations of this important labor and social history.