This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 29, August 28-September 3, 2005
Homage to Philip Vera
Cruz: Revolutionary Worker and Filipino Labor Organizer In a
time of global crisis and fierce class war, in particular the renewed U.S.
imperialist intervention in the Philippines, the example of the life and work of
progressive Filipino worker and union leader, Philip Vera Cruz, has become more
necessary and inspiring. On July 21, 1994,
Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard of the State Legislature delivered a brief
homage to Philip Vera Cruz (1904-1990), a founding member of the United Farm
Workers, who died on June 10 at the age of ninety. Vera Cruz left a "legacy of
commitment and dedication to social justice," Rep. Roybal-Allard stated, which
survives "in the work of grassroots organizers" everywhere. From his arrival in
this country in 1926 as a "colonial ward," neither alien nor citizen, from
beleaguered Asian territory annexed by the U.S. after the Spanish-American War
(1896-98) and the Filipino-American War (1899-1902), to his leadership (together
with Larry Itliong) of the historic 1965 Delano Grape Strike, the course of Vera
Cruz's life followed a typical pattern—youthful initiation, crisis (peripeteia),
discovery--memorably delineated in Carlos Bulosan's classic life-history of the
Filipino migrant worker, America Is in the Heart (1948). In contrast to Carlos
Bulosan, now part of the ethnic canon in Asian American Studies, Philip is
almost unknown despite his being vice-president of the United Farm Workers from
its founding up to 1977. His 1992 memoir, edited by Craig Scharlin and Lilia
Villanueva, has not really circulated as widely, despite or maybe because of its
candid yet tempered criticism regarding the leadership style of Cesar Chavez.
Chavez's place in the pantheon of heroic Americans like Martin Luther King
appears secure. But Philip's name has remained in limbo. Except for a handful of
Filipino academics, most Filipino Americans (now larger in numbers than the
Chinese group), nor the Latinos whom he championed, I am sure, have never heard
of Philip Vera Cruz. Nor will his compatriots spend time and energy to find out
about Philip's life and his significant contribution to the popular-democratic
struggles of the working people in this country and around the world.
Before attempting an
explanation why, I want to pose the general problem of how to make sense of the
life of any individual, how to understand its distinctive physiognomy and
meaning. Are all human lives alike? Yes and no. We all belong to the natural
species of homo sapiens/faber, sharing common needs and aspirations. Praxis, our
interaction with nature to produce and reproduce our social existence, unites
all humans. However, we are all different because our lives are shaped by
multiple contexts in history, contexts which are often variable and
unpredictably changing, so that one needs the coordinates of the body, psyche,
and society to map the trajectory of any single individual's life-history.
Writing on Luther and Gandhi, Erik Erikson focused on the identity crisis of
individuals in the life-cycle framed by the structure of ideological world
images. He noted in particular identity problems as omnipresent in the "mental
baggage of generations of new Americans, who left their motherlands and
fatherlands behind to merge their ancestral identities in the common one of
self-made men… Migration means cruel survival in identity terms, too, for the
very cataclysms in which millions perish open up new forms of identity to the
survivors" (1975, 43). Philip was a survivor, indeed, but was he a self-made man
in the cast of the Anglo Horatio Alger models? Instead of following a
psychohistorical approach, I want to engage the challenge of Philip's testimonio
as a constellation of personal events, events that can be read as an allegory of
the Filipino community's struggle to fashion subjects capable of fidelity to
promises and commitments, and thus invested with self-respect and self-esteem.
Winning reciprocity and recognition, Philip held himself accountable to his
family, ethnic compatriots, and co-workers in terms of universal maxims and
norms that suggest a collective project for the "good life" envisaged within and
through the contingencies and risks of late capitalist society. Today, given the debate on
multiculturalism, the nature of identity is almost equivalent to cultural
belonging, to genealogy and affiliation. In the culture wars in which everyone
is engaged, whether one likes it or not, the politics of identity seems to have
repudiated any universal standard or "metanarrative," so that one's life can
only be situated within the frame of limited localities, specific zones of
contact, particularities of time and place. I do not subscribe to the
postmodernist doctrine of nominalist relativism—that only atomistic sense-data,
not general concepts, can provide experimental knowledge. As Charles Sanders
Peirce argued, consensual belief can be fixated at the end of any inquiry
provided we agree that the reasons for any belief are fallible and open to
modification. Whatever the position one takes in the dialectic of global and
local, the singular and the universal, it is difficult to avoid the question of
how to adjudicate the relative power of social/cultural and individual/psychic
factors in the shaping of subaltern lives. Nietzsche and Derrida cannot so
easily reject the Enlightenment legacy of doubt and critique without pulling the
rug from under their feet; such legacy, on the other hand, has been put on trial
by its victims—by feminists and by thinkers like Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Mariategui,
C.L.R. James, Edward Said, and others. I submit that the
life-pattern of an individual like Philip Vera Cruz is unique and at the same
time typical for a colonized subaltern in the U.S. Empire. But it is not
idiosyncratic since he, like thousands of his compatriots from the Philippines
(or other colonial possessions like Puerto Rico), was exposed to the same
political, economic and ideological forces that shaped the lives of the majority
of migrant workers in the U.S. in the last century. This occurred in varying
degrees, with nuanced complexities, depending on their ethnic/racial, gender,
class, and national positions at particular historical conjunctures. In the case
of the Filipino subject—the "nationals" in the first three decades of the last
century—the crucial context for understanding the ethos or subject-position of
this group is none other than the violent suppression of the revolutionary
struggle of Filipinos against colonial domination, first by Spain and then by
the U.S. This coincided then with the beginning of segregation enforced by
lynching mobs, the confinement of Native Americans to reservations, and mass war
hysteria against the "Black Legend" (leyenda Negra) during the Spanish-American
War. In this charged climate, nationality, racialized physiognomy, and social
class marked all Filipinos, and continues to mark them, as stigmata difficult
even for assimilationists to erase. Despite the defeat of the
anti-imperialist insurgency, Filipinos who grew up in the first three decades of
the last century absorbed the ideals and passion for independence which
saturated the milieu and resonated up to the outbreak of World War II. Philip's
will to autonomy is displayed in his realistic attitude to religion—for him,
"churches are only as good as what they do, not what they say" (2000, 80)—a
practicable stance easily harmonized with his emphasis on what he calls
traditional Filipino values of helpfulness, understanding, and loyalty.
The racialized subjugation
of the natives, the arguably genocidal extermination of over one million
Filipinos resisting U.S. aggression, continued through a dual policy of coercion
and "Benevolent Assimilation." Eventually the U.S. coopted the elite and used
the patron-client system to pacify the seditious peasantry. The Americanization
of the Filipino through selective education and the liberal habitus of a
"free-market" order, side by side with feudal or tributary institutions,
produced the subaltern mentality which one will find in most Filipinos then (and
up to now, in the professional stratum and the petty bourgeoisie in general),
particularly those recruited for work in the Hawaiian plantations, the student
pensionados sent by the colonial government, or those who, like Philip and
Bulosan, chose on their own to pursue the adventure of making their fortune in
the U.S. in the years of the Great Depression. Unlike in Iraq and
Afghanistan today, U.S. colonizing strategy in early twentieth-century drew from
the experience of the brutal taming of the American Indians and the
juridical/ideological policing of blacks, Tejanos, Chinese, etc. Class and
ethnic stratification via mass public education regulated the rigor of
industrialization while the few exceptional cases of successful careers gave an
illusion of mobility and possibilities of change. The gradual but inexorable
movement from the impoverished rural village to the modern city and then to the
North American continent replaced the lure of revolutionary ideals. The impact
of the defeat of the armed nationalist movement registered in different ways for
every Filipino migrant—one needs to qualify here that Filipinos were not
technically immigrants until the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in
1935 when entry of Filipinos was limited to 50 every year. One can say that the
primal scenario of defeat bred suspicion, not trust; however, every Filipino of
peasant or working-class origin had to settle account with that "curse" by sly,
cunning accommodation or by hidden forms of civil disobedience if she or he
wants to show fidelity to the promise of being responsible to family and
community. For Bulosan, the personal
experience of peasant revolts brutally put down by the U.S. in the twenties
allowed him to see in collective suffering a promise and hope of liberation. He
interpreted every episode in his life as part of this narrative of
transformation. Thus early union organizing by the CIO in the West Coast and the
popular front of intellectuals—especially the international front against
fascism in Spain and Europe--made it possible for him to withstand the cruelties
of the McCarthy repression in the fifties and the equally brutal suppression of
the Communist-led peasant uprising in the Philippines in the late forties and
fifties. The symbolic action of the native's laughter at his fate produced a
catharsis that helped him recover from disillusionment. Hence the pattern of
life for the Bulosan protagonist in his fiction is that of the young peasant who
gets his education from community/worker struggles, pan-ethnic solidarity with
all the oppressed (including women), and from his conviction that underneath the
ruin of his dreams, the temporary deprivations and exclusions, survives the
image of "America" as the embodiment of equality, dignity and material
prosperity for all, a condition that will be brought about by mass struggles and
personal sacrifices. It was a narrative of maturation, learning from collective
experience, and a celebration of universal togetherness, a belonging to a
redemptive fraternity. Bulosan arrived in Seattle in the thirties without any
possessions and died in Seattle in the fifties penniless, but supported and
acclaimed by a large vibrant community of workers and colleagues of various
ethnic and racial backgrounds throughout the country. With Philip Vera Cruz, this
typical narrative acquired some telling if commonplace deviations. It was a
narrative of emancipation, no doubt, but also a story of disenchantment and a
caustic tale of reserved affirmation of the human comedy. In broad outline, Philip's
life conforms to Bulosan's in that both were colonized subjects from the
Philippines, and both participated in the anti-capitalist reform-minded struggle
of multiethnic farmworkers, but they were also two unique individuals. As
Sartre once said in wrestling with the problem of how one can define the
individuality of members of the same group: "Valery is a petty bourgeois
intellectual, no doubt about that. But not every petty bourgeois intellectual is
Valery." Philip shared the same subject-position as millions of his countrymen:
"Because of our colonial education we looked up to anything American as good"
(2000, 11); but he diverged in overturning the dominant hierarchy of values,
valorizing integrity and faithfulness to one's words, solidarity, as the
universal measure. Key to the difference lies
in Philip's more independent temperament that was manifest early; for example,
he defied his parents in going to school despite their refusal or indifference.
Philip was able to pay for his passage from the sale of the last piece of family
property. His family did not go through the more arduous ordeals of Bulosan's
clan in strife-torn Pangasinan province. Philip accepted the beneficent claims
of U.S. education, not questioning its ideological function; so he finished high
school in Washington in between hoeing beets in North Dakota, earning income as
a busboy in a country club in Spokane, Washington, and doing various chores in
Chicago. In Chicago, however, Philip engaged in intellectual pursuits, he was
active in various community organizations; he also studied for a while at
Gonzaga University in Spokane before being drafted into the army in 1942. What
is unusual is that even though Philip learned the art of survival in the cities
where Filipinos were discriminated and ostracized, he did not experience the
violent racist attacks that Bulosan and other Filipinos suffered in California
and Washington in the thirties and forties. Philip quietly accepted subaltern
status so long as he could send money to his family back home. It was not until Philip
settled in Delano in 1943 and began working in the grape vineyards that he would
be exposed to the overt racial segregation, hostility, and institutional
harassment that Filipinos experienced every day. I think it was Philip's
knowledge of diverse settings, modalities of survival and adjustment, as well as
his uninterrupted devotion to supporting his brother and sister by regular
remittances, that enabled Philip to maintain some distance from the plight of
the Filipino community even while being categorized as belonging to that
politically and economically subordinated group. His civic consciousness was
dormant, his capabilities as a citizen untapped by any mediating political or
social institution that could turn them into actual powers. It is also revealing that
Philip did not display the more reflexive astuteness that Bulosan showed in his
dealings with compatriots, perhaps due to the latter's health problems and
physical inability to really earn a living. Philip was able to manage and still
save money to send home to his mother, a fulfillment of his vow to his father.
Despite accommodation to city life, Philip expressed an appreciation not for the
pastoral innocence of the countryside but for the independence of the farmer
cultivating productive land, for the self-disciplined industriousness of "simple
folk," which contrasted sharply with the deceit and betrayal rampant in urban
life. After leaving his birthplace, Saoang, Ilocos Sur, and "crossing the
Pacific in search of a better life, wandering around the U.S. for many years,"
Philip finally returned to a rural place resembling his natal village, though he
also was painfully cognizant of the disparity: "Saoang was green, lush,
tropical….and there was always the sight of the blue ocean that contrasted so
beautifully with the rolling green foothills that came down almost to the water,
whereas Delano is flat, hot but dry, with almost no green vegetation except
what's planted on the farms, and no bodies of water" (2000, 7). Philip celebrated the "Saong
tradition of migrant work" in the 1940s when the New Deal was being tested in
factories and fields. Despite his direct acquaintance with racism, Philip never
showed any tendency to chauvinist exclusivism; he acknowledged the influence of
his Anglo friend Bill Berg from New York—Philip would talk to Filipinos about
how "white people had also fought for freedom and are also revolutionaries, that
the minority in this country cannot fully succeed without the help of all
freedom fighters, whatever the color of their skin" (2000, 23). After the
victory over fascist Germany and militarist Japan, the U.S. entered the era of
the Cold War. Times changed and labor-capital antagonisms, muted by white
supremacy and Western chauvinism, simmered under the surface (for a good
historical background to the farmworker's movement, see Kushner 1975).
One of the major events
that produced a decisive swerve in Philip's life, even if not consciously
recognized in words, took place in his witnessing the 1948 Stockton strike led
by the veteran labor organizers Chris Mensalvas and Ernesto Mangaong, close
friends of Carlos Bulosan. Both organizers were officers of the Cannery Workers
Union, ILWU Local 37, in Seattle where Filipinos predominated. Of great
significance to Philip was Mensalvas and Mangaong's successful effort to thwart
the government's attempt to deport them under the anticommunist McCarran Act.
Earlier in his life, as field help or restaurant worker, Philip never
experienced any sustained involvement in strikes or worker protests. Philip is
silent about his views regarding the witch-hunt of left activists, nor does he
make any mention of the Huk uprising in the Philippines, nor Mao's triumph in
liberating China, nor of the Korean War. Instead he comments on why Filipinos
who entered the U.S. before 1936 (like himself) could not be deported because
they were nationals, not aliens. In any case, he emphasizes the importance of
the Stockton strike as "the first major agricultural workers strike" before the
1965 Delano strike. Philip's education
materialized in the school of arduous labor in households, restaurants, factory
and field, and in his solidarity meditations. Personal witnessing of farmworker
organizing, as well as the testimony of actual participants in the struggle for
humane treatment, helped shape Philip's trust in the competence and sustainable
strength of the organized masses to influence the course of their lives, even to
the point of converting their passive resignation into active
self-determination. Before touching on Philip's decision to resign from the UFW
as a critique of Chavez's top-down style, I want to introduce the two aspects of
identity, the idem and ipse identity, theorized by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur,
as pivotal elements in the construction of an ethnic autobiography. So far, what I have
reviewed are the events of Philip's development as reflexive protagonist of his
adventure in the U.S. This is a narrative of the development of character, what
Ricoeur calls the "self" (idem/sameness) as a permanent structure of qualities
or dispositions by which a person is recognized. This structure consists not
just of acquired habits but also learned identification with values, norms,
ideals, models, heroes, in which the person or the community recognizes itself.
This continuity of character should be distinguished from the self as ipse
(selfhood) embodied in the phenomenon of promise, "that of keeping one's word in
faithfulness to the word that has been given. Keeping one's word expresses a
self-constancy that, far from implying temporal changelessness, meets the
challenge of variation in beliefs and feelings…The continuity of character is
one thing, the constancy of friendship quite another" (1983, 106). The question
"What am I?" differs from "Who am I?," the former is sameness without selfhood
and the latter selfhood without sameness. ”I couldn't tell them some
of the truths about my life here because I wanted to make them believe that
America was good as I believed before I left. I had to struggle to make it good,
at least for myself. Most of my Filipino compatriots felt this way too, and
that's why very few of us wrote truthfully about our lives here to our families
back home. Many of us were guilty of fooling our families in the Philippines
into believing we were something here that we really were not" (2000, 29).
For the most part, Philip
never dwelt at length or in depth on the illusions most colonials cherished
about the United States. To be sure, the schooling and ideological apparatuses
of the state conditioned every native to believe in the equivalence of
prosperity and everyday life in the metropolis. So efficient was this mass
indoctrination that it had to take the daily ordeals of survival for these young
Filipinos to get rid of years of what Filipino historian Renato Constantino
calls "mis-education." An emblematic symptom of this may be found in Philip's
discovery of his ignorance when he disembarked from the ship that took him to
Vancouver: he saw that the wealthy class enjoyed themselves above the deck while
hundreds of his companions suffered in the steerage. This "shock of recognition"
precipitated a turn or reversal that reinforced the latent streak of
independence already manifested in his childhood. We can speculate then that
Philip's narrative of his life is an attempt to explain his character, the
habitus of the self shared with his ethnic group. But what distinguishes Philip
from the others, and in what way is this selfhood (ipse), a departure from the
typical paradigm of the immigrant fable of success in America? What kind of
moral or ethical subject is exemplified in Philip's decision to reveal his
judgment of Chavez as a consequence of his being faithful to the demand of the
larger Filipino community that was prior to his obligation to the bureaucratic
constraints or rules of being an official of the union? Philip's critique of
Chavez's authoritarian style is nothing new, as Frank Bardache (1993), Rodolfo
Acuna (1988), and others have elaborated on this on various occasions. Qualified
by profuse praise of Chavez's charismatic stature and his self-sacrificing
devotion to the welfare of the farm workers, Philip's objection to Chavez's
top-down management was long suppressed for the sake of the public image of UFW
unity. However, the struggle for popular democracy in the Philippines and in the
U.S. pre-empted Philip's devotion to UFW bureaucracy. It was only when Chavez
embraced the brutal Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, and invited the
fascist labor minister Blas Ople to speak to the UFW rank and file in the August
1977 Convention, while muzzling his own vice-president Philip, that Philip could
no longer restrain himself. This crisis is significant
for configuring Philip's narrative because it ushered the rupture, the ethical
choice, that defined his character from idem-sameness to ipse-selfhood: his
opposition to the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines
coincided with a national upsurge of radicalism among Filipino-Americans, in
particular the second or third-generation youth, who were mobilized in the late
sixties and seventies by the civil-rights and anti-war campaigns. This is the
youth that he appeals to at the end, his audience, his hope for a new future. No
such turning-point can be found in the early stages of Philip's life that equals
this episode in intensity and resonance. Patient and forgiving, self-effacing to
the point of seeming to be fatalistic or indifferent, Philip finally disrupted
postcolonial inertia and connected his present with other moments in his life
when he rebelled, contradicted abusive authority, and tried to help sustain a
community of honest, dignified, morally capable citizens of equal status.
In the section of his
autobiography, "The movement must go beyond its leaders," Philip opposed the
irrational cult of a leader and the suppression of criticism which deprived
union members of "their right to reason for themselves." Capability for moral
choice needs to be actualized by democratic public institutions such as unions,
etc. Notwithstanding the praise of Chavez by Peter Mathiessen, the biographers
Richard Griswold del Castillo, Jacques Levy, Joan London, John Gregory Dunne,
and others, Philip's reservation may be explained by his identification with the
plight of his compatriot Larry Itliong who initiated the Delano grape strike and
had never really been credited for his part in this historic event. Philip
regretted not having been closer to Larry whose self-contradictions, tied to the
apathy and suspicion of his ethnic group, limited his efficacy. Responding to
those who wanted to preserve the mythical aura of Chavez and the movement,
Philip writes: "For me, we need the truth more than we need heroes" (2000, 91).
He has broken from the circumscribed locus of family and ethnic kinship;
defamiliarized, he joins a larger family of citizens united by the solidarity of
civic cooperation and the humanizing telos of transformative political praxis.
Truth, in Philip's eyes,
concerned principles, not personalities. Although he resigned from the union
after he publicly distanced himself from Chavez's support of the Marcos
dictatorship, Philip remained supportive of the UFW and the entire unionizing
movement. Although he bewailed the fact that he sacrificed too much in his
struggle to survive (a duty to support his family in the Philippines) and
maintain his dignity as a Filipino assisting his community and fighting for
workers' rights, Philip was never bitter or cynical. He affirmed an
internationalism that transcended the narrow parochial claims of ethnicity,
racial affiliation, and nationality: "…I respect the differences between people
through their cultures, and I think all efforts, energies, and money should be
concentrated to serving the people instead of making profits for a select group
or country here and there." The narrative climaxes with
an invocation to his successors, the youthful workers whose representatives here
may be the editors, Scharlin and Villanueva. Philip's message to the young
generation in whom rests the future of any country clearly serves as the
leitmotif of his chronicle: "The success of any positive changes in this country
depends on the strength of the workers and the organizations that hold the
workers together are the unions…. Nothing will really change in this country
without the total support of the working class" (2000, 154). He was seventy
three when he chose the popular, democratic resistance against the right-wing
Marcos dictatorship over Chavez's open support for it, a stand that also
confirmed his internationalist, progressive spirit of opposing capitalism as a
system whose destructive exploitative logic was the lesson and truth that Philip
wanted to impart by recording his life. In retrospect, Philip's
life is in search of a narrative scheme that would contradict if not interrupt
the commodified story of immigrant success, a narrative that would capture what
Sartre calls (with reference to Kierkegaard) "the singular universal" (1974,
141). It would be a narrative that would assume the world-historical objectivity
of human character but also recognize the active subject who fills the "holes of
history" and opens up the space for global transformation. Such is the lesson I
find from studying the autobiography of Philip Vera Cruz, a revolutionary
Filipino worker, who replied to the perennial question we often hear addressed
to us, ourselves as others: "Why don't you go back where you came from?" He
couldn't—until he could account for why he stayed and fought.
Acuna, Rodolfo. 1988. Occupied America: A
History of Chicanos. New York: Harper and Row.
Kushner, Sam. 1975. Long Road to Delano. New
York: International Publishers.
============================== E. SAN JUAN is
co-director of the Board of Philippine Forum, New York City, and heads the
Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting
professor of literature at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and
professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND
CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS
(Bucknell University Press). Three of his books in Filipino recently appeared:
TINIK SA KALULUWA (Anvil Publishing), HIMAGSIK (De La Salle University Press)
and SAPAGKAT INIIBIG KITA (University of the Philippines Press). © 2004 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
By
E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Posted by Bulatlat
The practice of belonging implies accountability. We have seen Philip prove his
faithfulness to his father and to his family by sharing his hard-won wages,
denying himself the opportunity for an education or even for a relatively
comfortable life. He has in effect been fulfilling an unspoken promise to
maintain his organic linkage with the community. This is itself a mark of
character as well as a sign of self-hood, although the practice of helping the
family back home is shared by the majority of Filipino workers in one degree or
another. Another sub-cultural characteristic of Philip's generation is what he
calls pride, the refusal or failure to convey the forbidding reality of their
lives to their parents and relatives back home. Everyone in the colony believed
in America as the "land of promise," a place where hard work would reward you
with success, status in terms of money and material possessions. Conditioned by
this ideological expectation, Philip and the "Manongs" lived a life of suspended
utopian longing, if not stubborn self-deception. Philip did not want to
disappoint his brother so he persuaded him not to follow and join him: "I was
trying to be truthful but at the same time I didn't want to tell him the details
of how hard life was here." Philip confessed the nature of the collective
predicament:
References:
Bardache, Frank. 1993. "Cesar's Ghost: Decline and Fall of the U.F.W." Nation
(26 July/2 August): 130-35.
Dunne, John Gregory. 1971. Delano. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Erikson, Erik. 1975. Life History and the Historical Moment. New York: W.W.
Norton.
Etulain, Richard, ed. 2002. Cesar Chavez: A Brief Biography with Documents.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.
Griswold del Castillo, Richard and Richard A. Garcia. 1995. Cesar Chavez: A
Triumph of Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Levy, Jacques. 1975. Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. New York: W.W.
Norton.
London, Joan and Henry Anderson. 1970. So Shall Ye Reap. New York: Thomas W.
Crowell.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. "Self as Ipse." In Freedom and Interpretation, ed.
Barbara Johnson. New York: Basic Books.
San Juan, E. 1998. From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience
in the United States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1974. Between Existentialism and Marxism. New York:
William Morrow and Co.
Valledor, Sid Amores, ed. 2004. The Original Writings of Philip Vera
Cruz. Unpublished manuscript.
Vera Cruz, Philip (with Craig Scharlin and Lilia Villanueva. 2000. Philip Vera
Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers
Movement. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: