Trampling Out the Vintage. Frank Bardacke

      Praise for Trampling Out the Vintage

      “The best workplace study of labour in North America published in a generation . . . No history of California, no history of Mexican-American life and no history of agricultural production can be written again without the insights contained in these pages.”

      Paul Buhle, New Left Review

      “Bardacke is a talented writer, burning with rage against injustice, and his subject is one of the most attractive and charismatic figures U.S. politics has produced.”

      Francis Beckett, Guardian

      “The first comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the UFW, written from the viewpoint of the farmworkers who vitalized the movement known as ‘La Causa.’ ”

      San Francisco Chronicle

      “Superb.”

      Mother Jones

      “In the era of so many book-a-year authors, Trampling Out the Vintage has a lifetime-achievement feel. It skillfully tells the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the UFW, but what makes this a landmark book is its emphasis on the rank-and-file leaders, who are too often obscured by the long shadow cast by Chavez. It is these workers who are the heroes of Bardacke’s book—workers whose leadership was essential to the union’s success, and whose betrayal contributed to its eventual demise.”

      Nation

      “There’s so much marvelous stuff in Frank Bardacke’s book that’s simply not been done before. At the book’s core are the men and women who pick the crops in California’s fields and orchards, their skill and endurance, the world they built among themselves, the ways they shaped the history of the UFW. It is their story—refreshingly, sympathetically, and beautifully told—that makes this book stand apart and will make it stand forever.”

      Alexander Cockburn, coauthor of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

      “Magnificent and tragic history . . . Bardacke’s enormously insightful and nuanced book thus radically reconfigures the social, political, and moral narrative with which most Americans have understood the history of the farm worker movement and its leadership.”

      Nelson Lichtenstein, Dissent

      “You can take little sections out of the book and they’re the best thing ever written on the subject.”

      Harold Meyerson, Editor-at-Large at the American Prospect and Hillman Prize judge

      “Frank Bardacke’s long-awaited masterpiece is the kind of book that comes along only once in a generation, if we’re lucky. Not only is the research spectacular and his analysis of the United Farm Workers as a social movement nuanced and compelling, but he finally places rank-and-file farm workers at the center of the story as savvy and opinionated activists. Best of all, he’s a superb writer who’s constructed a gripping tale.”

      Dana Frank, Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz

      “It is the human beings that come alive here—union officials, organizers and workers—with their foibles, rivalries, and triumphs. Cesar Chavez emerges as a hugely complex individual with a full range of all too human traits. An extraordinary book about an extraordinary movement and man, and a story as inspiring as it is tragic.”

      Douglas Monroy, author of The Borders Within: Encounters between Mexico and the US

      “An expansive, readable study of one of the more meaningful struggles of the twentieth century and an instruction book for anyone interested in organizing workers to regain the wealth that they create.”

      International Socialist Review

      “The best history ever written of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez. Certain to become a classic of U.S. working-class history.”

      Upside Down World