Thread: SEIU:Medina Film to Revive Interest in 'Immigrants Rights'

Please go to source for link to the video.

New Documentary Released on UFW and SEIU Leader Eliseo Medina
by Randy Shaw‚ Dec. 04‚ 2008


The Santa Fe Film Festival unveils tonight a new video on the remarkable career of former UFW leader and current SEIU Executive Vice-President Eliseo Medina. Beyond Chron was sent a copy of the film, which can be viewed here. The video serves as a remarkable companion to my new book, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century, which traces Medina’s career from his days learning organizing in the fields from Fred Ross, Sr., through his recent efforts in boosting Latino voting and building the nation’s immigrant rights movement.

The fourteen-minute video, titled Tribute to Eliseo Medina, offers wonderful footage of UFW grape boycott activism and of Medina’s organizing of workers. It includes coverage of Medina’s fast during the University of Miami janitors strike in 2006, an exciting campaign that involved former top Clinton Administration officials battling labor leaders and that comprises a full chapter in Beyond the Fields.

Among those included in the film is Scott Washburn, a longtime UFW activist and current SEIU Arizona State Council Coordinator. As I describe in my book, Washburn was inspired to become an activist when he heard Cesar Chavez call out “Si Se Puedeâ€

Latino labor leaders (Eliseo Medina was an illegal alien, who was amnestied in 1986) are seeking to ride the coattails of the 1960's Civil Rights Movement. They are recruiting the children of Baby Boomers who were protestors---and who are the new product of our most recent educational trend: to enshrine the Sixties and Dr. Martin Luther King. The latter, in todays curriculum, are right up there with the Founders, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

The New Heroes need no longer come from Western Civilization. They can be people like: Nelson Mandela, Simon Bolivar, maybe even Che Guevara. So apparently it is not enough to be concerned with Americans and America's future; we now must factor in the rest of the globe as well.

Excellent post Captainron.

I have long understood that many of the earlier as well as the later progressives have viewed Marx's ambitions as still unfullfilled. The Soviets had failed in their attempt at a successful communistic government, or so the progressives believe.

With that in mind,
Captainron wrote,

So apparently it is not enough to be concerned with Americans and America's future; we now must factor in the rest of the globe as well.

The question that comes to mind is, are these people and or groups working from a political template with the purpose of implementing political ideologies, and if so, which ideologies, or, are they working and fomenting for the purpose of individual or group notoriety thus enriching themselves like any other hog at the trough?