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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