Word: migrants
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...have promised to wear black armbands at work, as have some doctors and dentists. Two too leaders of American Reform Judaism, Boston's Rabbi Roland Gittlesohn and New York's Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, urged their 700 synagogues to participate. Exerting his influence beyond the cause of his migrant workers for the first time, Mexican-American Leader Cesar Chavez has asked his followers to observe the day. The moratorium leaders expect thousands of sympathizers not allied with organizations to wear armbands or simply observe moments of silence on the job. That does not mean, of course, that everyone agrees...
...however, personifies the Chicanos' bleak past, restless present and possible future in quite the manner of Cesar Chavez. He was the unshod, unlettered child of migrant workers. He attended dozens of schools but never got to the eighth grade. He was a street-corner tough who now claims as his models Emiliano Zapata, Gandhi, Nehru and Martin Luther King. He tells his people: "We make a solemn promise: to enjoy our rightful part of the riches of this land, to throw off the yoke of being considered as agricultural implements or slaves. We are free men and we demand justice...
...migrant farm worker, the Mexican American has a life expectancy of about 48 years v. 70 for the average U.S. resident. The Chicano birth rate is double the U.S. average?but so is the rate of infant mortality. More than one-third live below the $3,000-a-year level of family income that federal statisticians define as poverty. Eighty percent of the Mexican-American population is now urban, and most live in the barrio...
...Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck awakened the American conscience to the hapless life of the migrant farm worker. That was exactly 30 years ago. The stoop laborer in the fields today is still a forgotten man among U.S. workers, often little better off than he was at the time of the loads' tribulations in Depression-era California. In 1969, the field worker is more likely to be a Chicano-a Mexican-American-than an Okie. And the grapes of Steinbeck's title are at the focal point of one of the decade's longest and most wrathful...
There's this young guy just out of the Army. He's kind of on the bum. Works at a migrant-labor camp in California picking cucumbers. Gets canned for fighting. Finds another job as a motel handyman. Falls for his former boss's girl friend, who is trouble. A little bit psycho; likes to make it on tombstones. She leads him on and talks him into a big job: stealing $50,000 worth of the migrants' payroll. Then comes the doublecross...