This is a book about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative to middle-class assimilation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five contributors use memory--both personal and collective--to show the relationship between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual work are connected in these multicultural autobiographies of writers, educators, artists, political activists, musicians, and photographers and in the cultural work--the poems, stories, photographs, lectures, music--they produce. The consciousness that is revealed in this book makes evident the value of class identity to collective, democratic struggle. 

The Mexican Farm Labor Program—or bracero program as it came to be known—was from its inception in 1942 a highly controversial issue and became the focal point of an intense interest-group struggle; this struggle and its group combatants provide the centr