November 10th 2008 • Printer version

Law School Professor Steven Bender Wins Oregon Book Award

The University of Oregon School of Law is pleased to announce that Professor Steven Bender has won the 2008 Oregon Book Award. Professor Bender's book, One Night in America: Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, and the Dream of Dignity (Paradigm Publishers 2008), was among five nominees for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction.  This is the second year in a row that an Oregon Law professor has garnered top honors in this category. The award was presented by Literary Arts, an organization that supports and celebrates Oregon writers and publishers.

Bender frames his history of American Latino political participation within a study of the friendship of Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez, who first met during JFK's presidential campaign. RKF oversaw outreach to Latinos, while Chavez headed the largest voter registration organization in California. Later, Chavez turned to rural union organizing of immigrant agricultural workers and called for help from RFK, who backed their 1966 strike. His backing of Chavez and the union, their shared belief in nonviolent activism, and their commitment to Catholic teachings on the poor created a bond between the son of Irish wealth and the Mexican farm worker. In turn, Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union worked to help RFK win the 1968 California primary from which Bender dates the decline of Chavez's union. After RKF's assassination, union political enthusiasm waned, and President Nixon sought to undermine the Farm Workers legally and economically. In the face of the anti-immigrant movement that began in 2006 and some anti-Hispanic vitriol from 2008 GOP candidates, Bender issues a plea for a revival of the RFK-Chavez concern for the dignity and well-being of the poor. He conveys both the fact and the emotion of the Latino dream for uplift, as shared by Chavez and RFK. 

--    Library Journal

The reverberations of a single night -- June 4th, 1968 -- continue to be felt in Mexican American politics. Insinuating an alternative, brighter path to that tragic history, one in which Bobby and Cesar cemented their friendship, a path where disillusionment gives way to enthusiasm, is the courageous purposes of this book. Viva Bender!

--    Ilan Stavans, author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language