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"A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire."--Fred Ross

Raised by conservative parents who hoped he would "stay with his own kind," Fred Ross instead became one of the most influential community organizers in American history. His activism began alongside Dust Bowl migrants, where he managed the same labor camp that inspired John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. During World War II, Ross worked for the release of interned Japanese Americans, and after the war, he dedicated his life to building the political power of Latinos across California....

What is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants? To find out, Gabriel Thompson spent a year working alongside Latino immigrants, who initially thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent. He stooped over lettuce fields in Arizona, and worked the graveyard shift at a chicken slaughterhouse in rural Alabama. He dodged taxisnot always successfullyas a bicycle delivery boy for an upscale Manhattan restaurant, and was fired from a flower shop by a boss who, he quickly realized, was nuts.

As one coworker explained, These jobs make you old quick. Back spasms...

Lives from an invisible community--the migrant farmworkers of the United States

The Grapes of Wrath brought national attention to the condition of California's migrant farmworkers in the 1930s. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' grape and lettuce boycotts captured the imagination of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. Yet today, the stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and children working in California's fields--one third of the nation's agricultural work force--are rarely heard, despite the persistence of wage theft, dangerous working conditions, and...

American democracy is seemingly in retreat. Voting rates are at an all time low, citizens are disillusioned, and inequality continues to soar. But there is also a belief that change is possible. Calling All Radicals argues that we can reclaim our democracy in the old fashioned way -- through grassroots organizing. Gabriel Thompson draws upon his own experience of working within local communities to demonstrate its immediate impact. Some examples: When a brother and sister were being evicted from their home of 73 years, the community responded by staging a protest in front of the landlord's...

Mexican immigration has become one of the most polarizing issues and will remain a central issue in the coming years. Once Mexicans had a sizable presence in a few select states like California, Texas, Arizona and New York; today the fastest growing populations are in places like North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee..
What motivates people to risk their very lives, and why don't Mexicans just "play by the rules" and enter legally? How do they cope, living in a strange country among people that speak a language they can't understand? And after everything they have gone through,...