Jessie de la Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker

I bought this book for my college writing class because it was required for our course. What I wasn't aware of was how good it was going to be. The novel Jessie De la Cruz gives the first hand account of Jessie and what it was like being a farmworker throughout her life. The book starts up with what it was like growing up as the daughter of farmworkers, and then she continues by telling her experiences as an adult working the fields. She tells about the Cesar Chavez’s movement to help and protect workers, who were otherwise treated badly by those who employed them. After reading the book we had to write a research paper on one topic from the book, either pesticides, their movement La Causa, Cesar Chavez, or those who were unknown heroes in the movement like Jessie. The book was super helpful in writing my paper and it was very well written which helped in my paper, and strengthened my topic. I was able to gain a lot of knowledge in reading Jessie De la Cruz and I would definitely recommend it to anybody who wanted to learn more about La Causa and how it impacted farmworkers.

Great read and so informative

This was an educational read. I don't really know what else to say other than that. If you don't know anything about hispanic workers coming into America, this is something you should look into. If you do have a little idea about it, don't just assume you know the facts.

Great read!

This is a fine contribution to the body of writing re: the farm worker struggle and the creation of the United Farm Worker Union.However, I must point out the obvious. In the first part of the book we read how utterly poor these migrant Mexican farm workers are; as they work the fields they live in primitive conditions. I am tired of reading how farm workers live in hovels, eat beans and tortillas, are illiterate and yet still continue to toil in these jobs and worse still they even get married and birth children to perpetuate this cycle of miserable poverty.If life is truly unbearable then why do these people continue to slave away? Too many books like this, detail the suffering of the working poor and thereby glamorize it. I understand some people are dirt poor but then for God's sake stop the madness!The glorification of the farm workers struggle has left them as the only legitimate prophets of Chicano History. As a boy I was ashamed to hear of the deprivation of the Mexican farm workers and I often heard my Black classmates laugh that they would never stoop to such low levels of work and how stupid Mexicans were for participating in it. (It was hard to argue w/ this logic.There is an urban legend that Cesar Chavez asked the Border Patrol to deport illegal aliens working in the field and breaking his strike. Here we have documentation of this .In Chapter 6 page 80 there is a frightening scene where Jessie recounts how she called on the Border Patrol (and then shamed the Border Patrol Agents for their inaction; including a telephone call to her Congressman) to detain some illegal alien farm workers. She had little reservations in turning these workers in to La Migra; a lot more could be written about this. Just another nail in the coffin of poor workers from Mexico who simply have no alternative. Again, I am tired of seeing Mexican people and Mexican-American people portrayed as just one step above beasts of burdens w/out the self-respect to seek other employment.Jessie tells how her family bought land to farm and sell their own produce. I am encouraged by that. The only way to improve your work conditions is to be your own boss. I would have suggested the union organizers should move to the big cities in California and open a supermarket that sold union harvested crops. This would have been a great publicity tool for the union and it would have helped some farm workers to get out of the field and enter the small business world. Such a supermarket could have supplied Latino restaurants and any union sympathizer could have bought vegetables thereby demonstrating the real demand for "fair trade" produce.

I like the book because it was very interesting for me. It reminded me of my parents who work in the fields. How they come home hungry, tire and dirty. When my family and I came here we didn't had anything any family who could help us out. My family suffered a lot. When I was reading the book I got into it because the same reason I felt like there were talking about my family. In the end it got more interesting because Jessie talk about her life how she helped Cesar Chavez. I think they did a lot for all Mexicans people. I enjoyed reading the book.