Frank Bardacke spoke on Tuesday, October 22. Bardacke is an educator and long-time community activist based in Watsonville, California and author of Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. The book tells the story of what farmworkers in California called "La Causa," interpreted by the broader public as the rise and fall of the UFW. It won the 2012 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and the 2012 book of the year award from the United Association of Labor Educators

Bardacke is a former fieldworker himself and served as a crew shop steward, fighting for workers' rights under the first United Farm Workers contract. He has taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, local community colleges, and an English as second language high school. He helped found the Third World Teaching Resource Center, organized to connect funding sources for broad based workers’ education. With concern for the Mexican-American/Mexican community, Frank has worked also with the Watsonville Human Rights Committee (WHRC) in efforts to defend equal access to education and medical services, decent working conditions, and safe housing.

For Bardacke's recent article, “The UFW and the Undocumented,” part of the Symposium: Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Workers, see International Labor and Working-Class History / Volume 83 / Spring 2013, pp 162-169.

Bardacke is the author of Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons: Land, Labor and Politics in the Pajaro Valley (1994) and a translator of Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (1995).