The Wages That Cried Out from the Vineyards

In September 1962, Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez gathered farmworkers into a small hall in Fresno, California, to found the National Farm Workers Association — the organization that would become the United Farm Workers. Huerta had spent years listening to the stories of laborers in the grape fields and lettuce rows of the San Joaquin Valley: men and women who stooped twelve hours under a punishing sun, who breathed in pesticides without protection, who were denied clean drinking water in 110-degree heat — and who, at the end of the week, took home wages so meager they could barely feed the children waiting at home.…