Memoir
Date Published: May 3, 2022
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKensi
ANTONIO, WE KNOW YOU follows the life of a migrant farmworker kidnapped at age four, trafficked through age ten at a famous California Ranch, until being saved from an attempted suicide and taken under Cesar Chavez's wing. Antonio eventually graduated from law school, become a labor lawyer, and found the strength and resilience to be reunited with his long-lost family after 24 years. Antonio aims to offer hope in desperate circumstances in sharing the legacy of his family and reflecting the dignity and sacrifices of their difficult Chicano life.
Excerpt
PROLOGUE from the Author
I WAS BORN IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA in late August of 1955, as
Antonio Salazar y Bailon, to Petra and Jesus Salazar. I am the eleventh of
fourteen children. My earliest memories are being in the fields with the rest
of my family. We were on the national crop-picking circuit until my father’s
accident, which resulted in the amputation of his arm and qualified us for the
first public housing in Arizona.
Few would guess if you saw me in my capacity as an attorney
working in federal court representing large international unions for decades
and Native Americans from California to the Sioux Nation for twenty-five years,
and a husband with a loving, forty year marriage, what I overcame to be this
person.
Through it all, I have taken heart in the statement I once
heard when a group of workers were standing around Cesar Chavez talking about
my character. At the time I was a 17 old college student, who had met Cesar
Chavez at age 15 when I was in high school working as a farmworker. As they
discussed whether they could trust me and depend on me to do the right thing, I
overheard my mentor Cesar Chavez reassure them. He turned to me and said,
“Antonio, we know you, we know you well.” He affirmed that he knew I would
always serve my people. That statement has served to lift me up in the darkest
days and pushed me onward when I no longer felt an ounce of strength or hope to
carry on—that statement is my guiding light and this memoir an extension
through which the world could know my story. It illuminated the journey of
faith that I was going to make it. It reminds me that I have had saviors along
the way who knew me. They saw into my soul and intervened at crucial moments.
This memoir is an attempt to tell my story so that you can know me and find
hope in these words. See the sorrows I have endured, the abuse that almost
broke me but never did, and the beauty I have found.
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