Man of Fire: Selected Writings

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Man of Fire The Working Class in American History Editorial Advisors James R. Barrett Alice Kessler-Harris Nelson Lichtenstein David Montgomery Man of Fire Selected Writings Ernesto Galarza Edited by Armando Ibarra and Rodolfo D. Torres University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield Frontispiece: Ernesto Galarza, man of fire. Courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Introduction, commentary, and compilation © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937514 Among the extraordinary persons who have made the farm workers’ cause their own, one of the most exceptional is Ernesto Galarza, a wiry man with a shock of graying hair and penetrating eyes under full black eyebrows, a brilliant speaker and writer, a doctor of philosophy from Columbia University. Galarza fought, at times simultaneously and almost single-handedly, the power of agribusiness, federal and state governments, and Big Labor. In the uneven contest, he may seem to have lost, as the world usually reckons winning and losing. But social movements have their own secret reckonings. Galarza kept alive the embers of the farm labor movement in California during a long night in which they came close to being extinguished altogether. So Ye Shall Reap, 1970 by Henry P. Anderson, activist scholar, public intellectual, and lifelong friend and confidant of Ernesto Galarza ...