Sacramento, California, United States
Marc Grossman was Cesar Chavez's longtime press secretary, speechwriter and personal aide, and directed international media coverage of his April 1993 funeral in Delano, Calif. He still serves as communications director for the Cesar Chavez Foundation, spokesman for the United Farm Workers of America and was technical advisor for Diego Luna’s 2014 major motion picture Cesar Chavez. Among his duties with Chavez was responsibility for the union's press relations; helping Chavez with speeches, correspondence, public statements and commentary pieces; serving as the UFW founder's personal aide; traveling with him across much of North America; and advancing his nationwide tours. Until Chavez's death in 1993, Grossman continued working closely with the legendary civil rights and farm labor leader on all his major speeches, writings and news events. Grossman, 67, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in American history from the University of California, Irvine in 1972, and a master’s degree in journalism at U.C.L.A. in 1973. He began his activism with the UFW in the late 1960s as a grape boycott organizer. Grossman has performed extensive research about Chavez from the perspective of the people who knew him the best—his close family and friends. It includes lengthy transcribed interviews with Chavez’s widow, Helen, and his brothers and sisters. The editors at the University of California Press asked Grossman to write the new forward to Peter Matthiessen’s classic 1969 biography Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution when it was re-issued in 2014. Grossman has written more than a dozen books, including his latest, the autobiography of pioneering Latino political leader Richard Alatorre entitled, Change From the Inside: My Life, the Chicano Movement and the Story of an Era, published in 2016 by Berkeley Public Policy Press at the Institute of Governmental Studies, U.C. Berkeley.