Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also...

I'm reading another book, concurrently, called "The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement" by Susan Ferriss and Ricardo Sandoval. My awesome mom bought it for me a while ago and I finally got back to reading it... Here are some quotes...

"It's better to die on our feet than live on our knees"

- Epifanio Camacho

"As the sun rose over the Sierra Nevada to the east, strikers took up their positions at each of the ranch's twenty entrances... Suddenly, a blast of engines from an empty field behind the pickets silenced the crowd. Two men poised atop tractors jerked their machines into gear and began lumbering toward the pickets, dragging sharp-edged plow disks behind them. Bearing down as if they were driving tanks into battle, they drove within a few feet of the strikers, churning up choking clouds of powdery dust. The pickets and Bishop Sumner were soon covered in grit. But the Schenley foremen didn't stop. They seemed to relish this mission, driving back and forth continuously, showering the crowd with fine Delano dirt. Finally, after watching the spectacle from a distance, the grape pickers who'd crossed the picket line were so disgusted they, too, decided to leave the field. 'After almost an hour, when we are unrecognizable with dust, and our throats are hoarse with yelling and choking, we see the thrilling sight of a worker's car heading toward us through the vines,' recalls union volunteer Eugene Nelson... 'Their admiring looks seem to say: After seeing what you went through, your persistence in the face of all that, it was impossible not to join you.'

"Some of the growers tried to appel to pickets' sense of loyalty. 'They were like members of our family. We gave them a place to live all year long,' one grower said of his Filipino workers. His kinship apparently had its limits. When pickets suggested to him that he could have averted the strike with a twenty-cent raise, the man grew angry. 'We'll let the grapes rot first,' he snapped..."

"The Dispoto brothers sprayed pickets with pesticides, threatened them with dogs, and showered them with obscenities... Other ranchers sometimes tested strikers by walking up to picket lines and stomping on toes, punching men in the ribs, and issuing racist taunts..."

I can't even begin to imagine... they sacrificed their safety, their security because they saw beyond their small circumstances to a bigger vision of freedom. Granted, there are serious issues in the U.S. with workers today (as well as around the world), but how amazing to see people fight for truly good causes. Their courage boggles my mind... Why don't we learn about this in school? I'll post an incredible story of love later... no time now...