The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers
May 12th 2010mikeUncategorized
After reading The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s fine account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), I re-read an article I wrote for the Nation magazine in November 1977. In this essay, “A Union is Not a Movement,” I leveled some harsh criticisms at the union and its famous leader, Cesar Chavez. In response, the union’s chief counsel, Jerry Cohen, one of the major characters in Pawel’s book, threatened suit against the magazine. At the time I was upset, thinking that maybe I should have been more careful in what I had said. However, as The Union of Their Dreams makes clear, I need not have been, since everything I said was true. And then some. Read More
We left Yuma and drove due north on lonely US 95, through desert mountains, and stopped a few miles past the farm-worker town of Blythe to see the Blythe Intaglios (more formally, “geoglyphs”). These are large-scale designs on the land surface created by removing the rocks and pebbles on top of the soil—called “desert pavement”—to reveal the whitish earth underneath. They are estimated to be anywhere from 200 to 2,000 years old. There are many geoglyphs around the world, but these are the most famous in the United States. They were discovered by a pilot in 1931. The largest, a human figure, is 171 feet long. Some Indian groups say that this represents the creator of the Earth. Karen stood on the fence that surrounds this intaglio and took a picture. We love to find and look at ancient rock art, although we learned in an exhibit at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City that some Indians do not like the term “rock art,” since, as they point out, there is a very good chance that those who made petroglyphs, pictographs, and geoglyphs had practical and not artistic motivations. The striking nature of many of the images, however, might suggest otherwise. 
