Week 10

Latin American Boom
In the 1950's after world war II, Latin America had increasing economic prosperity, and as a result of its it's new-found confidence gave rise to a literary boom. This explosion of literature writing is what is commonly known as the Latin American Boom. It put Latin American literature on the world map in the 1960s and 70's. The notoriety of the writings was sparked when the work of a group of Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. These latin- american writers challenged the status-quo of Latin American literature. Their work was experimental and was out of the norm of what was commonly wrote during that time. Also, many of these novels were somewhat rebellious from the views of that time's Latin American culture. Authors crossed traditional boundaries, experimented with language, and often had interwoven styles of writing in their literary works. Political unrest in countries such as Cuba at this time influenced the literary boom as well. In the years from 1960 to 1967 was when the major works of the boom were published. Jorge Luis Borges, though not really a Boom author was influential source of the new latino writers.

Popular boom authors and the works during that time were;
Borges: Ficciones, A Personal Anthology, El Aleph and Other Stories Cabrera
Infante: Three Trapped Tigers
Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral, The Lost Steps, Reasons of State
Cortazar: The Winners, Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories
Donoso: Coronation, This Sunday, The Obscene Bird of the Night
Fuentes: Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Change of Skin, Terra Nostra
Garcia Mirquez: No One Writes to the Colonel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch
Guimaraes, Rosa: The Third Bank of the River, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, The Buenos Aires Affair
Rulfo: Pedro Paramo Sarduy: From Cuba With a Song, Cobra Vargas
Llosa: The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral

Cesar Chavez and the United Farm workers
I wrote about Cesar Chavez because I was very interested to find out the whole story of how Cesar struggled to help the migrant farm workers in the United States whom we Americans have exploited over the years.

Cesar Chavez was born near Yuma, Arizona.in March of 1927. It appears that it was many of the events that took place in Cesar's early life that probably had the greatest influence and ignited his drive for agricultural farm worker reform. When Cesar was young, his family was swindled in a land deal by dishonest locals (Caucasians). Cesar's father had agreed to clear eighty acres of land and in exchange he would receive the deed to forty acres of land that adjoined the home. An agreement was made and subsequently broken which caused Cesar see very clearly the white man's unfair treatment of Latinos first hand. He would never forget that.

In 1938 he and his family moved to California to look for work. He thought the only way out of his low social status was work his way up the ladder and send children to college. He and his family worked in the fields of California from Brawley to Oxnard, Atascadero, Gonzales, King City, Salinas, McFarland, Delano, Wasco, Selma, Kingsburg, and Mendota. In California again, there was more mistreatment. In school, speaking Spanish was forbidden. He violated that rule and was disiplined many times. Some schools were segregated and he remembers having to listen to a lot of racist remarks and seeing signs that read whites only. He and his brother, Richard attended thirty-seven schools. Because his father had been in an accident and because he did not want his mother, Juana, to work in the fields, he only made it to eighth grade, quit school and became a farm worker. While at first Cesar didn't believe in education, that all changed. He said that the end of all education should surely be service to others - a belief that he practiced until his death in April, 1993. He joined the Navy at the age of seventeen where again he experienced discrimination. Cesar returned to San Jose where he met one of his his mentors, Father Donald McDonnell. They talked a lot about farm workers and strikes. Cesar then began reading about St. Francis and Gandhi and nonviolence. After Father McDonnell came another very influential person, Fred Ross. Through the support of Ross and McDonald,

In 1962, Cesar founded the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Workers - commonly known as the UFW. In the beginning, the union struggled. By 1970 the UFW got grape growers to accept union contracts and had effectively organized most of that industry. At one point in time they had over 50,000 dues paying members. The primary reason for that success was Cesar Chavez's tireless leadership and nonviolent tactics that included the Delano grape strike, his fasts that focused national attention on farm workers problems and the 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento in 1966. Cesar Chavez and the union sought recognition of the importance, fair treatment and dignity of all farm workers. It was the beginning of a cause that was eventually supported by organized labor, religious groups, minorities, and students. Cesar Chavez had the foresight to train his union workers and then to send many of them into the cities where they were to use boycotting and picketing as their as their weapons.

At the end of his life, Cesar, who was now the president of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO was in Yuma, near where he was born, was helping UFW attorneys defend the union against a lawsuit brought by Bruce Church Inc., a large Salinas, CA based vegetable producer. The company demanded that the farm workers pay millions of dollars in damages resulting from a UFW boycott of its lettuce during the 1980's. Rather than bring the legal action in a state where the boycott actually took place, such as California, Church and Co. looked around for a friendly court in the conservative, agribusiness state of Arizona-where there had been no boycott activity. He died of natural causes while helping defend the union.


The impact of Cesar Chavez
Here are a few examples of what people said about the impact and work of Cesar Chavez;

“No one ever really thought about the farm workers until he came. Just to hear him talk about his goals, it was a mesmerizing experience and you never forgot it.”

"Before Cesar and the movement, we didn’t even have water or bathrooms in the fields. Now, wherever we go there is a truck with water following us.”

"What we see today — benefits, wages — are here because working people came together."

"When you come together you get a better say ... that’s what (Chavez) preached, and he lived by these standards.” "

"A lot of the wineries here started to have decent wages, people starting supporting farm worker housing. They recognized what Chavez was trying to do, and several of them went out of their way to be decent employers.”

He had a simple message: We’re people and are not afraid of anything when it comes to our future. We’re here to work, not to beg.”



Sources
http://bostonreview.net/BR03.2/coleman.html http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/history468/Cesar%20Chavez%201984.htm (Address by Cesar Chavez, President, United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO, The Commonwealth Club of California from http://www.ufw.org/commonwealth.htm site) http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?inc=history/07.html&menu=research http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/aa/chavez http://www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2007/03/29/news/local/doc460bb80051500110500492.txt Educational Institutions, Libraries and newspapers are all commonly accepted credible and frequently documented sources of information

Comments on Students work from last week

Susan wrote about the book, The rise of African slavery in the Americas (David Eltis) because it gets down to the truth about slavery and how the slaves came to be here.

Theresa wrote about architecture and said that Another priority of the conquerors was the conversion of the indigenous people to Christianity. They created a new type of architecture for this purpose: a large, open-aired sanctuary called an atrio.

Kim wrote that Prior to Hatai’s independence, there was a French custom to eat soup on New Year’s Day, however blacks were not allowed to participate because they were not “upper class”.

Julsia wrote that Our Lady of Guadalupe has been celebrated for 16 centuries. Guadalupe is an icon for Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ.

Nancy wrote that José Martí is a national hero of Cuba. He was a political activist, a revolutionary, a poet, a journalist, a college professor of literature, and a consul.

Candice wrote about Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. He declared his revolt against Spanish Rule. He stood on his pulpit on September 16th, 1810 and made what was known as the battle cry for Mexican independence.

Jamison wrote about Simón Bolivar. He was a liberator who organized and led thousands of military forces, to free the northern portion of South America from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century.

Shannon wrote about Jose Marti. One thing she found very compelling about Marti was his intense passion for his cause of Cuban independence but even more so for the cause of the decency of mankind.

Gray wrote about Gran Columbia. The area covered country's that are known as Venezuela, Ecuador, And Panama. Also parts of Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil and Guyana.

Maria wrote about Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz and said the interesting thing that she discovered about her was that she defended woman's rights (which was very uncommon in that period of time).