Frank Bardacke
Frank Bardacke was active in the student and anti-war movements in Berkeley in the 1960's, He moved to California's Central Coast in 1970, worked for six seasons in the Salinas Valley fields, and taught at Watsonville Adult School for twenty-five years. He is the author of Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons: Land, Labor and Politics in the Pajaro Valley and Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, and a translator of Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
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Frank Bardacke wins the 2012 Hillman Prize in Book Journalism
Frank Bardacke was awarded the Hillman Prize in Book Journalism for his epic book Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, which was published by Verso Books in 2011 to rave reviews.
The Sidney Hillman Foundation's Hillman Prizes for Excellence in Reporting in Service of the Common Good are given to journalists whose work identifies important social and economic issues and helps bring about change for the better.
This year, the Foundation recognized stories about the struggles of families during the recession, fairness in immigration policy, flaws in education reform, contract workers on military bases, farm workers and battered women in prison.
The Hillman Foundation will present its distinguished annual journalism prizes, awarded every year since 1950, at a ceremony and reception at The Times Center in Manhattan on May 1st.
For a full list of this year's winners, visit Hillman's site.
Looking Back at the UFW, a Union With Two Souls: An Interview with Frank Bardacke in The Nation
Gabriel Thompson, author of Working in the Shadows (Nation Books, 2010) interviewed the author of Trampling Out the Vintage in the February 13, 2012 issue of The Nation.
Q: You spent six seasons in the fields, working on celery and lettuce crews. How did your time as a farmworker influence the way you approached the book?
A: If I hadn’t worked in the fields, there wouldn’t have been a book. I started just writing about farmworkers, telling the story of the UFW from the point of view of the militant rank-and-file lettuce crews. But that didn’t work. To make any sense of it, I had to tell the story from the point of view of the staff and the executive board as well. That’s the crux of it; that’s what’s so fascinating: the interchange between these groups. When they were working together, they were a very powerful force; and when in opposition, the union came undone.
Read the entire interview here.
Books
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Trampling Out the Vintage
A dramatic new history of Cesar Chavez and the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers.