No modern American union has a larger alumni association or a bigger shelf of books about itself than the United Farm Workers (UFW). Even at its membership peak thirty years ago, this relatively small labor organization never represented more than 100,000 workers. Yet, in the 1960s and ’70s, the UFW commanded the loyalty of many hundreds of thousands of strike and boycott supporters throughout the US and Canada. While the union is now a shell of its former self, the UFW diaspora — from young organizers who flocked to its banner to key farm worker activists shaped by its struggles — remain an influential generational cohort in many other fields: public interest law, liberal academia, California politics, labor and community organizing, social change philanthropy and the ministry. Like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) several decades later, with its “Justice for Janitors” campaigns, the UFW generated widespread public sympathy and support because it championed low-paid, much-exploited workers — people of color courageously struggling for dignity and respect on the job. Its original multi-racial campaigns were inspiring and their legacy is lasting.

Most other late twentieth-century labor organizations had an inadequate social justice orientation and a far more insular approach; at best, they tried to improve workplace conditions for their own members, in a single occupation or industrial sector, and helped secure protective labor legislation for everyone else. Their appeals for solidarity from non-labor groups tended to be few in number and transactional in nature. Few unions, except during the 1930s, ever became such an important training ground for future organizers of all kinds or built as many lasting ties with far-flung community allies. As San Francisco lawyer, journalist, and housing activist Randy Shaw documents in Beyond The Fields, there is a strong historical link between the UFW in its heyday and myriad forms of progressive activism today. UFW alumni, ideas, and strategies have influenced Latino political empowerment, the immigrant rights movement, union membership growth, and on-going coalitions between labor, community, campus, and religious groups. During the 2008 presidential race, the union’s old rallying cry — “Yes, we can!” — even became the campaign theme of a former community organizer from Chicago who now resides in the White House. The same determined chant can still be heard, in its original Spanish, at marches, rallies, and union events involving Latino workers throughout the country.

Shaw’s book, and those by Miriam Pawel and Marshall Ganz, are not in the cheerleading tradition of earlier volumes written during the UFW’s glory days. Other writers about the union, including John Gregory Dunne, Jacques Levy, and Peter Matthiessen tended to be ardent admirers of its founder and president, César Chávez. The latest literature about farm worker unionism in California tries to explain, in more complex ways, how the union achieved its remarkable early success but then, ended up in a thirty-year downward spiral. Such questions are not just a matter of historical interest to academics and journalists. And they’re not just the personal concern of the many people, once connected to the union, who have contributed their own vivid memories and postmortems to Leroy Chatfield’s unusual online archive, the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project. In California and elsewhere over the last several years, Farm Worker veterans have found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades in the biggest inter and intra-union conflicts since the UFW squared off against the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, when it became an agribusiness-ally four decades ago. These high-profile fights have, ironically, involved the two unions — SEIU and UNITE-HERE — which have the most UFW alumni in their leadership and staff. The deep disagreements about union structure and strategy that triggered recent civil warfare, within labor’s progressive wing, contain a distinct echo of the internal tensions and struggles within the UFW recounted by Shaw, Ganz, and Pawel. Controversy over the role of union democracy, membership dissent, and charismatic leadership is very much alive and still unresolved in the labor movement today,