We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
TODAY'S CHICANOS David Chandler Strikes Again avid Chandler is a powerful man. He ^ is a physical and mental giant who brawls with life. Unlike most authors, he bypasses the library stacks to live a lusty "on the scene" involvement before weaving the fictional drama of his novels. To "researchâ his new novel "Huelga!" (published by Simon and Shuster), he moved to the great Central Valley of Northern California, hub of the struggle between Mexican-American grape workers and farmers. He holed up in grubby rooming houses and motels. In Delano where a strike was in progress, he introduced himself honestly to union leaders Jim Drake, Chavez, the Mexican-Americans, the growers ... as a writer. He refused to lie, to pose as a laborer (which had been suggested to him as a ploy he could pull off to assimilate into the community and gain confidences). Instead, he played it honest, withstood some painful jabs and angry pokes from those suspicious of any outsider moving into the middle of an explosive situation. Eventually he was accepted inside the Union Halls by Chavez and his associates, which gave him a closer opportunity to absorb, study, and feel the story behind "Huelga!" . . . the Strike . . . , and the world of the Chicano people. "Huelga!" means Strike! "My novel," says Chandler, "is about a strike and about Mexican-Americans struggling to find themselves. It's about the central dilemma of our time: how do we midwife change. .. violently or non-violently? What's violence? What's militance?" The people in his book dramatize these problems for black, red, Anglo, Arab, Jew, striking teachers, striking students ... the novel is the catalyst for you to feel into and beyond realities of headline screams, beyond television's spare, split-second visuals of today's news. To write "Huelga!" in the novelist's idiom, David Chandler lived in the state of Guanajauto for a year. He spent most of his time with his Mexican neighbors. David does not think of himself as a brown, black, yellow or white novelist. "A novelist has to wear the skin of all human beings." He was born in New York in Harlem "about fifty years ago". His father wrote for the Jewish Daily Forward. He was a working man. His mother cooked for small hotels in the Borscht circuit. They moved to Connecticut when David was "nine or ten years old". David was precocious sexually, physically, mentally, and by the time he was in high school, a product of rough neighborhoods and intellectual clouds, he had known profound love affairs. His literary appetite for Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne, Maugham, and Sinclair Lewis preceded his career as a novelist which began when he was twelve years old. He wrote a novel themed to ecology. . . the story of one man reclaiming the Sahara desert by bringing in water to make it green. "I see you are going to be a philosopher," grumbled his father, which David accepted as praise. High school strictures provided a "bummer" for Chandler. He got bad JO