Top Menu

Harvesting celery = 8 hours football practice …… Lettuce Wars reviewed in Science & Society

Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California

Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California
By Bruce Neuberger
350 pp, $22.95 pbk, ISBN 9781583673324

Reviewed by Marcial González
Science & Society, vol. 80, no. 2, April 2016

In Lettuce Wars, Bruce Neuburger tells the story of his experience as a volunteer farm labor organizer with the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) in Salinas, California, during a ten-year period beginning in the spring of 1971. Lettuce Wars is a memoir, but the author’s fascinating personal story never overshadows the history of the farmworkers movement that it also documents.

Neuburger had been a student and a political activist in Berkeley. His main political training came from his involvement with the Revolutionary Union (RU), which became the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the mid-1970s. In 1971, Neuburger began working full-time in the agricultural fields of the Salinas Valley, mainly in lettuce and other truck crops, to support himself. His decision to work in the fields was inspired partly by the Cultural Revolution and by the Chinese communists who encouraged youths from the cities to work and live among peasants in the countryside as part of their political training…. Neuberger describes in great details the various kinds of labor he and other workers performed in the fields… Harvesting celery is ‘like eights hours of football practice.'”…

Read the entire review in PDF: Lettuce Wars_S&S_April 2016

Comments are closed.