The Long Tough Struggle For Latino Farmworker's Rights

Grounds for Dreaming is a sweeping critical history of how U.S.-born and immigrant Mexican communities in agricultural California fought for equality and respect in a hostile climate of labor repression and xenophobia. Long before the seminal labor strikes led by Cesar Chavez, farmworkers wrote to newspapers, wore zoot suits, formed civil rights organizations, exercised their right to vote, and filed landmark lawsuits against agribusiness. Grounds for Dreaming is a history about Latinos’ longstanding and complex position in America’s economy and society, and the issues of comprehensive immigration reform and workers’ rights across borders.

“Lori Flores’s eloquent and deeply researched account…[is] an unusually potent vantage point from which to assess not only the forces behind much of our food production but also the making of American ideas of race and community, and our capacity for reform and social justice….the debut of an important new voice in American history.” –Karl Jacoby, Columbia University

Flores will be in conversation with David Bacon, author of The Right to Stay Home which Noam Chomksy describes as "Combining evocative personal narratives with penetrating geopolitical analysis, this compelling book vividly reveals the devastating effects on Mexico of the global class war of the past decades and their impact on the United States. Perhaps the most striking demand of the victims is 'the right to not migrate, ' the right to live with dignity and hope, bitterly attacked under the neoliberal version of globalization."

Admission is free.