Cesar Chavez My Faith In Action Summary

The Gospel of Cesar Chavez: My Faith in Action, by Mario T. Garcia, uses Cesar Chavez’s own words to express his spiritual and religious personality and how it led him to organize a movement for a change in the farm workers’ lifestyle of America. Through his experiences and observations with religion and spirituality growing up, Cesar created his own myth by conveying nonviolence and self-sacrifice as the basis of his American religious experience. Thus, paving the way towards reform for farm workers. To be able to understand Cesar’s motive behind his movement, violence and nonviolence needs to be distinguished. A violent movement is a protest that is set up to achieve a goal by using violent acts (riots, house raids, etc.). Cesar mentioned that, “If we resort to violence…the violence will be escalated and there will be many injuries and perhaps deaths on both sides, or there will be total demoralization of the workers” (Garcia, 77). He created this idea that violence does not solve anything, and will only create bigger problems. However, a nonviolent movement is a protest

Cesar’s religious and spiritual perspective enabled him to unite people to reform the farm workers’ lifestyle. He created his own myths in order to gain millions of support from people who are either inside the struggle or outside of it. Cesar’s myth of nonviolence swayed the mass that money, weapons, and power are not needed to invoke change, but only commitment and patience are needed. His “militant nonviolence” style led many farm workers into believing and seeing Cesar’s vision that the struggle is possible to achieve. Through nonviolence comes self-sacrifice. Cesar’s myth of self-sacrifice is a feeling that you are fighting for something that will change the world. Only from within that one will realize that he or she is doing something right that will rejuvenate the future generations to