THE FIGHT IN THE FIELDS: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement.<i> By Susan Ferriss and Ricardo Sandoval</i> .<i> Harcourt Brace: 352 pp., $25</i>

In their introduction to “The Fight in the Fields,” authors Susan Ferriss and Ricardo Sandoval, award-winning reporters for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Jose Mercury News, respectively, ask a farm worker about the United Farm Workers Union. Her reply is forthright and unambiguous: “We older people, we know what it was like before. We know the union is good.”

For many Mexicans and Mexican Americans, for millions of others sympathetic to la causa and its larger-than-life founder, Cesar Estrada Chavez, that simple sentiment describes entirely the struggle Chavez and his comrades initiated 35 years ago to improve conditions for America’s farm workers. For them, the old maxim that the “worst union is better than the best boss” will forever hold true. That assumption underlies Ferriss and Sandoval’s account of events across a span of 70 years, beginning with Chavez’s birth in 1927 and ending in the years after his death in 1993. Their book, whose publication accompanies the release of a PBS documentary of the same name (to be broadcast on Wednesday), also coincides with the fourth anniversary of Chavez’s death, on April 22.

Ferriss and Sandoval have given life to a history that is as vital for the farm workers and the growers, who were the chief actors in a dramatic and emotionally exhausting battle, as it is for the citizens of California and the nation as a whole. The writing is crisp; the unfolding of events, clear; and the language, colorful and engaging. Nothing is presented in a dry or detached way. Their research is substantial, including a fair amount of digging through decades of farm worker-related legislation and interviews with dozens of union officials and supporters. The authors have clearly been able to accomplish what other writers failed to do: gain coveted “access” by the union to its headquarters at La Paz, the union’s secluded retreat on the slopes of the Tehachapi Mountains.

The granting of such access, however, seems to have come at a price. Ferriss and Sandoval are at pains, at nearly every turn, to dismiss or ignore or downplay the flaws, complexities, contradictions and ironies of a story that is neither so simple nor as obvious as they make it out to be.

For those of us born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley, however, the nuances of the tale of Chavez and the UFW are not so easily pushed aside. In my own Mexican American family, for example, there has never been consensus over Chavez and the movement he inspired and led. A generation ago, there were heated arguments at my grandparents’ dinner table. My grandfather, born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua (as was Chavez’s grandfather and namesake, Cesario), spent his entire life as a farm worker, a packing house foreman and, finally, as a small farmer himself. He knew hard work, injustice and racism. He had an unyielding sense of right and wrong. He also had an outright distaste for--and distrust of--Chavez and the UFW. Ever the loyal employee, my grandfather was far more sympathetic to farmers who put people to work in the fields than to those he regarded as agitators trying to lure people out of the fields for a strike.

His rigid view clashed with that of his five sons, who were part of a generation that was, in the 1960s, swept up in a push for radical social change. For them, the UFW was bravely standing up for dignity, justice and righteousness. While other families’ dinner tables all across America were embroiled in disagreement over civil rights or the Vietnam War, in the San Joaquin Valley my family (and many others as well) was locked in fierce generational combat over Chavez’s legitimacy as a leader and the goals of the union he founded.

Ferriss and Sandoval, alas, are not alive to any of this. Their view is simple (and simple-minded). Farm workers, good; growers, bad. At several points, they submit that much of the intractability of growers toward the union--and their reluctance to deal with Chavez--is to be attributed to out-and-out racism, to the mostly white growers’ prejudice that Mexicans are inferior and lazy workers who were lucky to be employed and that Mexicans did not deserve bargaining rights and would only squander disputed pay raises on gambling, drinking and other vices. Anyone who has spent any time in the San Joaquin Valley, a place where prejudices of all sorts die a slow death, will think that argument entirely plausible.

But it neglects an uncomfortable fact of which Ferriss and Sandoval make no mention: the existence, then and now, of hundreds of nonwhite farmers, including the Japanese American members of the Nisei Farmers League and even some Mexican American farmers who also refused to recognize the UFW and who were also critical and suspicious of Chavez. The authors take no note of how many of those farmers had themselves been interned by the authorities during World War II or had otherwise suffered racial discrimination.

More grievously, Ferriss and Sandoval gloss over the UFW’s spotty record with regard to illegal immigration--a record that, by the authors’ admission and verified by other sources, includes Chavez’s command to union workers to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service illegal immigrants serving as strikebreakers and the establishment by the union of the notorious “wet-line,” in which, in 1973, union officials manned outposts along the Arizona-Mexico border to physically stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States. Dwelling on such contradictions would have immeasurably complicated--and enriched--the tale they tell. It also would have introduced a degree of moral complexity without which Chavez simply cannot be understood.

Still, “The Fight in the Fields” is a necessary and important book. The authors thoroughly cover Chavez’s childhood; his work with the Community Services Organization; the forming, in 1962, of the National Farm Workers Assn.; the 1965 grape pickers strike; the 1966 march to Sacramento; the first boycott, also in 1966, of the DiGiorgio Fruit Corp.; the UFW elections; the legendary battle, beginning in 1967, against Giumarra Vineyards; Chavez’s 1968 fast, which catapulted the labor leader to national fame; the 1970 Salinas lettuce wars; the long, often violent conflict with the Teamsters over organizing field workers; the deaths of UFW workers who became martyrs for la causa; the titanic struggle, beginning in 1973, with E&J; Gallo Wineries; the first criticisms of Chavez and the UFW that its leader had grown too removed from the precarious day-to-day existence of the ordinary farm worker and whose increasing arrogance was responsible for declining membership and sinking morale.

Ferriss and Sandoval do a fine job of describing the great triumph, in 1975, of the passage of the National Labor Relations Act and the establishment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board; the defeat, the following year, of the UFW-sponsored Proposition 14, which sought permanent funding for the board; the 1977 introduction, by Chavez, of “The Game,” a controversial conflict resolution technique, into the organization; the beginning of defections, including those of Filipino supporters whose departure signaled the UFW’s transformation from labor group to Mexican cultural entity; the boycott over the use of pesticides in the 1980s; Chavez’s less-successful 1988 fast; the decline of the UFW in the early 1990s; his death in 1993; and, finally, the ascension to the throne of Arturo Rodriguez, Chavez’s son-in-law and current UFW president, who, in trying to restore credibility and increase membership, maintains a delicate balancing act between paying homage to Chavez’s near-iconic status and discreetly steering the union’s strategies from boycotts and back toward the field-organizing that it had so neglected under Chavez.

Chavez’s legacy is mixed. His own rise to a stature that overshadowed everyone and everything around him resulted in a union in which dissent was difficult if not impossible. His hubris was responsible for driving out of the union many of its founders. People such as Jim Drake, Al Rojas, Jerry Cohen, Marshall Ganz, Jessica Govea and Gilbert Padilla are acknowledged by Ferriss and Sandoval as major players in the UFW saga. They were. Alas, when the time comes for their individual falling-out with Chavez, whether due to a clash of personality or a difference in policy, the authors give short shrift to the concerns of the UFW dissidents. A single example will suffice: Ferriss and Sandoval devote just one sentence to the 1981 departure of Padilla, saying only that the union came to consider Padilla to be “not a team player.”

Interview Padilla, who now lives in Fresno, as I have, and he gives a much different--and more detailed--explanation for his painful exit from a union (and a cause) to which he had devoted much of his life. At the top of his list are the neglect of field organizing and the refusal of Chavez to permit himself and his decisions to be questioned, challenged or criticized even by close friends and long-time supporters.

“The Fight in the Fields” is, in the end, a romantic but incomplete account of a history that is still being lived in the “factories in the field,” as Carey McWilliams once wrote. It is but one side of a multidimensional drama that helped define California (and America) in the latter part of this century. Over the past three decades, workers have alternately flocked to the union and fled from it, contracts have been won and lost, blood spilled, alliances strained, ideals challenged, feelings hurt and friendships ended. Along the way, the union’s membership has--along with its public image--risen and fallen, risen again and fallen again. What is certain is that a new generation of Mexican farm workers now toils in the same fields in which their fathers and mothers before them worked, in surroundings improved by the hard work and blood sacrifice of the UFW (whatever the missteps and failings of its leadership), and yet have, as one field supervisor put it, no corazon (or heart) for the union, no first-hand or first-person connection to an organization that has, for so many long years, been struggling in their name and on their behalf. Only when their stories are written will the puzzle of this extraordinary history fall entirely into place.

SUSAN FERRISS will participate in the panel “Writing the West” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 19, at 4 p.m.