Book Talk
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
2:00 pm
6275 Bunche Hall
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Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st CenturyPresented by: Randy Shaw, Director of San Francisco's Tenderloin Housing Clinic and Editor of the online daily newspaper, BeyondChron.org |
In Beyond the Fields, Shaw reveals the untold story of how the spirit of "Sí Se Puede" that began with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1960s still sets the course for today's social justice movements. Shaw finds that the influence of Chavez and the UFW has ranged far and wide: in labor campaigns like Justice for Janitors, in the building of
Latino political power, in the fight for environmental justice, in the growing national movement for immigrant rights, and in Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Shaw particularly emphasizes how UFW alum and former LACFL leader Miguel Contreras launched a Latino-labor electoral outreach model in Los Angeles that transformed city politics, then state politics, and now boosts Latino voting and progressive politics across the nation. Shaw also describes how Los Angeles became the birthplace of today's greatly expanded national immigrant rights movement.
SEIU Executive Vice-President Eliseo Medina praises Shaw's book as a "stirring account of how the UFW transformed people's lives," LeRoy Chatfield of the Farmworkers Documentation Project says it is a "must read" for former UFW volunteers, and labor scholar Ruth Milkman describes the book as "important, stunningly original and forcefully argued."
About the speaker
Randy Shaw is the Executive Director and Supervising Attorney of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic in San Francisco and editor of the daily progressive alternative online newspaper, Beyond Chron. Shaw received his J.D. from Hastings College of the Law in 1982, and started the Clinic while attending law school. During the past two decades, he has assisted thousands of low-income tenants and drafted several laws that have preserved and improved affordable housing. Shaw has also designed and implemented programs that have provided housing for thousands of homeless single adults, and THC is San Francisco's leading provider of permanent housing to this population. He is the author of The Activist's Handbook: A Primer (University of California Press, 2001) and Reclaiming America: Nike, Clean Air, and the New National Activism (University of California Press, 1999).
