This book discusses and examines the organizational effectiveness of CATA (Comité de Apoyo a Trabajadores Agrícolas), a Puerto Rican Migrant Farmworkers organization, in New Jersey. It focuses on the relationship between change in organizational structure and effectiveness of the Puerto Rican Migrant Farmworkers movement as it underwent development. The author concludes that the Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers organizing movement is characterized as a migrant farmworker proletarian formation. The movement has historically shown conflict between democracy and centralism, theory and practice, and nationalism and paternalism.
This study serves as a successful model for organizing migrant farmworkers in this country.
This study serves as a successful model for organizing migrant farmworkers in this country.
"As the daughter of migrant farmworkers, and as an organizer in the fields of New Jersey, the author is exceptionally well qualified to understand the problem she is studying. ... Her approach to the subject is disarmingly objective, free of value judgments and even-handed. Thus, she documents the problems of the farmers with the same care that she examines the problems of the farmworkers. This is an important book because it depicts the means by which a powerless and isolated group managed to pull itself up, to educate itself, to demand its rights and to institutionalize its struggle into a viable mass-based organization. More than a book, this is a living testimony of the strength and resourcefulness of the seemingly powerless when given half a chance." (Olga Jimenez Wagenheim, International Migration Review)