“Trayvon Martin…Oscar Grant…Eric Garner…” A list of names of people murdered at the hands of police is being read. A crowd of 800 is standing, listening intently as the names continue. “Michael Brown…Sean Bell… Philando Castile…” The audience has been asked to stand and remain standing until they hear a name they don’t recognize. The room is heavy with collective grief and the swelling of suppressed rage as the names continue.
“Akai Gurley…Tamir Rice…Sandra Bland …” As the names change from male to female, a few people begin to sit. “Eleanor Bumpers… Aiyana Stanley Jones… Alberta Spruill…” More people sit down. Soon there are ripples, then waves of people sitting throughout the hall. “Alesia Thomas… Alexia Christian… Aura Rosser…” The trickle of names has widened to pour over a stunned audience until no one is standing. They are hearing the names and seeing projections of photos of cisgendered and transgendered women whose lives have been erased from the news cycle. Singer Abby Dobson’s exquisite vocalized repetition of “Say her name…say her name…” lifts the names melodically higher into the rafters of the Cooper Union Great Hall, a space where presidents, suffragettes, poets, and organizers have found a platform of free speech for more than a century. The vast list of names is an act of historical restoration and resistance, part of a concert program by The Dream Unfinished Orchestra, programed July 13, 2016 on the one year anniversary of Sandra Bland’s death. Dobson and Kimberlé Crenshaw are enacting #SAYHERNAME, inscribing women’s narratives into the struggle for #BLACKLIVESMATTER. The participatory theatricality of their action radically undermines the pernicious marginalization of women’s stories, perspectives, and agency.1
Two decades have passed since Kathy Perkins and I coedited the original edition of Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. I’m writing the introduction to this new edition at a moment of national turmoil following the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the enormity of the dawning ramifications. Much of the vitriol of the Republican campaign centered on the criminalization of immigrants, violence towards women, and the dehumanization of both. The campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” was thinly veiled code for “white again,” exacerbating racism and harkening back to a pre-Civil Rights era of Jim Crow, voter disenfranchisement, immigrant exclusion, and second class citizenship for women. The new regime’s agenda endangers national security and the public good—while bolstering the foundations of structural racism and misogyny. The need for the voices in this anthology—and the voices of the vast diversity of the people of this country—is critical. In another era, Martin Luther King said, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”2
Women are answering that call on the streets in protest, on stages and screen, in social media and spiritually centered creative practices, in electoral politics, community organizing, and personal choices; they are boldly transforming the world they encounter. Women of color and our communities embody the transformational promise of a new America. The plays of this volume are evidence of this change—artistically brilliant, original, eclectic, and not simply relevant—they are written for a future that is already present in a demographically shifting America. The legislative gains of Civil Rights activism and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have made possible a truly pluralistic democracy. The U.S. Census Bureau has projected an unprecedented population shift: that by the year 2042, for the first time, people of color in aggregate will outnumber the historic Caucasian majority in a growing country of 439 million. That shift has already occurred in the birth rate of children of color, in the majority of metropolitan areas from New York City to Chicago to Dallas, and the states of California, Hawai‘i, New Mexico, and Texas. As women of color in the theater, we are no longer the counternarrative. We are the narrative.
Yet, as this country transforms from the ground up—its institutions have lagged behind, remaining largely male and white. The #OscarsSoWhite social media protest about the failure of the 2016 Academy Awards to nominate any actors of color was symptomatic of larger inequities. Whatever the outcome had been of the 2016 presidential election, racial and economic inequality are deeply institutionalized. A New York Times photo-collage, “Faces of American Power,” documented 500 of the most powerful people in American culture, business, education, and government and found only 44 people of color. The list included CEOs of the largest companies, the U.S. Senate and Congress, presidents of Ivy League universities, studio executives who decide which Hollywood movies and television shows get made, recording executives who determine what music is produced, publishers and critics who decide what books are read, and media executives who oversee what news is available.3
Risking a growing distance from the U.S. population, the leadership of the American theater largely conforms to this picture of the last century. In their analysis of the leadership of 74 American regional theaters, researchers Sumru Erkut and Ineke Ceder found little progress from when they began their study in 2013–2014: “…there were no executive directors of color, female or male, and only 6 people of color had artistic director positions—5 men and 1 woman. Not much has shifted since then.”4 Arts philanthropy has furthered this inequity. In its landmark report, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy found that out of all the funding that goes to the arts, the majority goes to large organizations with budgets greater than $5 million, which are only 2% of the entire sector. These organizations focus primarily on Western European art forms, and their programs serve audiences that are predominantly white and upper income.5 Strategies to redress this inequity are being supported by concerned philanthropies and progressive grantmakers. But many approach the work as emergent under titles such as “Future Audiences,” “Future Collaborations,” and “Future Leaders.” While these are necessary and laudatory efforts, they implicitly postpone a truly 21st century American theater to the future and perpetuate the minoritization of work and leadership that exists now.6
Defying their characterization as a nascent phenomenon, theater makers of color are building cultural movements while giving insight into parallel and intersecting universes. On Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit musical Hamilton asks in afterword, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Alexander Hamilton’s widow, Eliza, replies, “I put myself back in the narrative,” offering a brief glimpse of a woman who would go unrecognized, if not for a relationship to a founding father.7 Meanwhile, elsewhere in New York City and across America, theater artists of color give the resounding reply—they have a long history of passionately telling their stories, against tremendous economic odds. Catalyst: Moving the Black Theatre Legacy Forward was organized in 2014 by Sade Lythcott and Jonathan McCrory, a new generation of artists leading the 49-year-old National Black Theatre in Harlem, NYC. They addressed systemic issues of sustainability, recognizing that for “over 300 years, Black Theatres from across the country have tirelessly documented, articulated, nurtured, and given breath to the often forgotten narratives of the nameless, voiceless, and underserved people in our communities. Despite this vital and important work, we find many of our institutions are perpetually on the brink of extinction.”8 The Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists (CAATA) began with six theater Asian-American theater companies in 2003 and in 2016 partnered with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the largest American theaters, to hold a third national convening “to respond to social injustice and inequality in American culture and what we, as theater practitioners, can do about it.”9 The Latino Theater Commons, began with a group of eight Latino/a theater makers in 2012 and has grown to a steering committee of over fifty from across the country working to transform the American theater through values based in service, radical inclusion, transparency, legacy and leadership cultivation, and advancement of the art form.10
Future-focused theaters know that to perpetuate outdated paradigms risks irrelevance and shrinking audiences. What was once a project of benevolent multicultural inclusion has now become a forecast of a new American cultural milieu, one that has been revitalized and can possibly be sustained by a wide array of voices, aesthetics, and stories. According to Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater, “If the American theater is to fulfill its democratic promise, it has to embrace artists who represent the bracing diversity of our country, and our world.”11
The playwrights of this book are fearless in the worlds they enter, disrupt, and conjure. They are of a particularly fertile era of intersectional artistic creativity and social response. More playwrights of color are breaking through the glass ceiling, emerging from marginalized and underresourced serial development programs, to garner full commissions and productions in large budget theaters. And theaters that have long held dedicated missions to produce their work are reinventing the play laboratory and other formats, like the short play, to be central, not ancillary, to artistic mission.12
For example, Noor Theatre, dedicated to artists of Middle Eastern descent, is an Obie award-winning company in New York City, cofounded by two women, Maha Chehlaoui and playwright Lameece Isaac. Like other artistically vital theaters, it develops theater, produces world premieres, and presents copartnered events. But it has shaken up the model of the short play festival not just to give exposure to a variety of unique voices, but also to redefine theater’s role in society.
Chehlaoui, Noor’s former executive director, described a board member’s desire for a way the theater could respond to the onslaught of news in a post 9/11 America. Given that Noor’s first production, like most new plays, took seven years from inception to production, the challenge was not just one of expediency, but of how to remain true to theater making and creativity. And Chehlaoui questioned, “Why is it all on us? Just because we are Middle Eastern, we have to answer all these questions that the entire world has participated in creating and that affect us all.” Also implicit was the denial of Americans in recognizing our involvement in over a decade of being at war on several fronts. Noor’s answer was to create 48 Hour Forum, a program Chehlaoui playfully described as a “recipe.” The project creatively speaks to a 48-hour news cycle by involving a culturally diverse group of theater makers.13
Recipe for 48-Hour Forum
Ingredients:
5 playwrights
5 directors
20 actors
News articles of interest
3 jars
Preparation Method:
In 3 jars, place:
20 slips of paper, each with one actor name
5 slips of paper, each with a different number, the total of which cannot exceed the number 20 (e.g. 5,3,2,6,4)
the news articles
Playwrights and directors are paired by the theater in advance, based on the potential to work together, but pairings are not announced until the clock starts on 48 hours when the playwright and director pairings are revealed. Each playwright/director pair draws a piece of paper from the number jar; that is the number of actors with which they have to work. Next, each playwright/director pair draws from the jar containing actor names; the number that will be their cast. Finally, from the last jar, each playwright/director pair draws a headline/article.
Total cooking time: 48 hours
Result: Theatrical op-eds at the rate of a news cycle
Kristen Adele Calhoun, coassistant editor, and I selected the fourteen full-length plays, two dance-dramas, three solo performance pieces, two one-acts, and one radio play of this anthology leading with our instincts as theater makers. Kristen, an accomplished actor, hungered for roles for actors that would be substantive, thrilling, and exceptional. As a director, I sought revelatory plays that would captivate and challenge audiences. We both listened and looked for authors writing significant, meaningful works that would amplify the theatrical literary canon. And we looked for plays speaking in an urgent way about the multiplicity of perspectives and experience of women of color.
The Bechdel-Wallace Test has become the standard cultural meter of gender equality in the theater. It asks whether a play, film, or other work of fiction feature: 1) at least two women, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something other than a man. In a demographically transformed America, challenged by a growing racial divide, might we similarly apply a 2042 Test as a cultural measure of racial equality? A 2042 Test might ask, particularly if the narrative takes place in a location that has already achieved the 2042 populations shift, does a play, film, or other work of fiction feature: 1) at least two people of color, who 2) are present not just to further the story line of white male or female characters and 3) who are central to the narrative. Applying this standard calls out the imperative for the production of a myriad of unheard narratives. It also challenges embedded cultural norms that exist within a society vexed with growing de facto segregation. Look, for example, at the genus of New York City-based popular TV series from Friends, to Sex and the City, to Girls—each located within the most racially cosmopolitan, multiethnic city in the world. We joke about how the prefix “White” could be added to each title to acknowledge the disconnect between the segregated world of the characters and their global environment.
Do the plays of this anthology pass both tests? Certainly, they are the embodiment and spirit of 2042. But as I write this, I can hear in my head a conversation I once had with my friend James Baldwin, “What about Giovanni’s Room?” We were talking about why he chose to write the novel with white protagonists. And like Giovanni’s Room, these plays defy expectation and limits. Is the Bechdel-Wallace Test even relevant to plays like Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, by Quiara Alegría Hudes, or Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, by Marisa Chibas? When history, media, and curriculum converge to erase or distort the narratives of both women and men of color, the cultural measuring tape of western feminism falls short. Each of these works speak with their own fiercely independent voices; at the same time, these works are in fascinating conversation with each other. Hudes brings forward three generations of Puerto Rican men to poetically weave a genealogy of human experience through the crushing legacy of war, from WWII to Vietnam to Iraq. Eschewing categorization, she writes, “We are annihilators of reason and embracers of duality….We are the hackers of the status quo.” Chibas also mines the collision of history and family. Passionately personal and keenly political, her one-woman play confronts the exclusion of her father and uncle from Cuban history. She equates surviving with remembering, “Telling these stories is both an act of defiance and reconciliation.”
The major themes of the book include: the relationship of women to each other; their relationship to family/community; the impact of history and the remaking of history; violence and war, particularly as experienced through the bodies and spirits of women; identity and voice; boundaries of geography, love, and being. The contestation of borders, sovereignty, and identity is seen in two stylistically divergent plays: Hannah Khalil’s Scenes from 68* Years set in Palestine and Israel and Vickie Ramirez’s Stand-Off at Hwy #37, which takes place at the border of a small town in upstate New York and the Haudenosaunee reservation. Khalil’s point of departure is the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. A bricolage of skillfully linked scenes at the checkpoints of occupied Palestine, it reveals the human cost of ongoing conflict with poignant power and unexpected humor. In Stand-Off at Hwy #37, an elder deliberately places her chair on the border of the reservation, blocking the path of an encroaching highway construction project. Reversals of positions and shifting loyalties between different Native characters and multi-raced National Guardsmen unfold as the confrontation escalates beyond the daily grind of survival to the tipping point of resistance.
Two dramas, Hansol Jung’s achingly beautiful Cardboard Piano and Katori Hall’s transcendent Our Lady of Kibeho, probe war and trauma on the African continent, in Northern Uganda and Kibeho, Rwanda, respectively. Religion, more so than faith, is central to Hall’s and Jung’s works. In Cardboard Piano, a traumatized boy soldier stumbles into a church during the secret wedding of two girls who show him compassion, but in turn become the target of his homophobia. A chance reunion a decade later tests the limits of forgiveness and the fragility of repaired souls. Hall’s Our Lady of Kibeho, based on an actual incident, is set in the innocent time “Before,” ten years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. A Tutsi convent school girl has a rhapsodic vision of the Virgin Mary that spreads to her disbelieving Hutu classmates. The mysteries of the heavens darken to a prophetic vision of hell on earth to come.
Contested space takes another form in Tammy Haili‘opua Baker’s He Lei No Kākā‘āko, which explores the shifting boundaries of ties to heritage and land in the rapidly gentrifying Kākā‘āko neighborhood in Honolulu. Hawai’i. In telling the stories of local people, Baker makes a critical distinction between being “house-less” for people for whom the land has historically been their home. Lines in the Dust, by Nikkole Salter, also explores neighborhood fault lines, but in the form of restrictive school district zoning. She unfolds the relationship between two African-American women who are determined to give their children opportunity through education. Commissioned to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the play underscores that while segregation has ended legally, de facto segregation persists. One of its most pernicious manifestations is inequality in the educational system.
The all-women cast of Tanya Saracho’s kinetic Mala Hierba, set in a Texas border wracked with cartel executions, kidnappings and gang wars, has a parallel in the menacing women’s world of Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, which takes place in civil war-torn Liberia. The women of Eclipsed endure a coerced kinship as “wives” defined by rape and war; they live confined by a brutal, unseen rebel commander. The women of Mala Hierba are also circumscribed to a world created by a violent, never seen man, but, in contrast, the boundaries of their lives are within a luxury narco compound. The abused trophy wife of a drug trafficker yearns to escape, hungers for the woman she loves, struggles with the seduction of an excessive material lifestyle, and is cognizant of the economic lifeline she plays for her extended family. These women are survivors of bodily horror who struggle to remember who they were, even as they grapple to remake their destinies.
Humor, even in the most chilling circumstances, is a tool of both Gurira and Saracho and many other playwrights of this volume, who deftly move their dramas forward with wit and irony. It’s the aesthetic choice of Cuzi Cram, author of The Wild Inside; Kristina Wong, in her solo work, Wong Street Journal; Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader in the touching comedy, Food and Fadwa (Ecklit il Hob); and Marcie Rendon in The Adventures at Camp KaKeeKwaSha and the Magic Musky Casino! Cram, an actress who challenges stereotypical media depiction of Latinos in the media and on stage, muses on unrealizable love and desire. The play deploys magical realism to converge a tour guide, a talking 200-year-old tortoise, and a TV sit-com “family” on a trip to the Galapagos. Kristina Wong’s hilarious Wong Street Journal is a self send-up that incisively comments on race and gender on the internet and the search for legacy based on her 2013 trip to Northern Uganda to volunteer for a women’s micro-finance organization. In Food and Fadwa, Lameece Issaq’s and Jacob Kader’s protagonist is a resilient young Palestinian woman, Fadwa, who copes with humor by inventing an imaginary cooking show. Living under the volatility and indignities of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the show she creates is as funny as it is revealing of her complicated family and absurd social context. Also influenced by the reach of media, The Adventures at Camp KaKeeKwaSh by Marcie Rendon was produced as a radio podcast by Raving Native Radio. It targets a youth audience, following the adventures of a zany crew of diverse Native adolescent campers.
Crossing transnational borders and the metamorphosis of women as immigrants and transplants is delicately, yet very differently revealed in two dance dramas from the South Asian diaspora: Etchings in the Sand, by Ananya Chatterjea and Meena Natarajan; and Clothes, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. In Etchings in the Sand, memory blends with imagined moments – the fragments of memories that endure within and the unanswered questions of what might have been. The adaptation of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s exquisite short story, Clothes, allows women to embody both men and women characters, as it follows the evolution of a young village girl in India through a traditional arranged marriage and discovery of self far from her origins.
Like the aforementioned Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, two other plays courageously confront deeply rooted U.S. trauma – and like Elliot, their settings are interstitial. In Gunshot Medley, set in “The Hereafter,” Dionna Michelle Daniel channels her anguish about the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina church massacre of nine African Americans, the national epidemic of killings of black people by the police, and the keloid scar of slavery in America. The ancestral realm becomes a place to exorcise the deep spiritual and psychic wound of racism. Kathryn Haddad’s post 9/11 Zafira the Olive Oil Warrior resonates as future-fiction, in a Minneapolis where Muslims have been rounded up in concentration camps, like the Japanese Americans of WWII. A cautionary tale for our times, Zafira lifts a curtain on where xenophobia and nativist hysteria can lead the country. Larissa FastHorse also turns to history, unspooling an inspired point of departure in What Would Crazy Horse Do? She was confounded by a 1926 flyer she found that advertised a pow wow sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan. She imagined contemporary characters seeking to adapt and thrive. Two Native American siblings of a tribe that is confronted with extinction find the first woman leader of the Ku Klux Klan at their door. She wants to spin the KKK as relevant to contemporary times. They consider a dangerous deal after discovering a mutual distrust of the U.S. government and a shared desire for racial preservation. Lynn Nottage, in her extended monologue N*GG*, mines an American trauma deeply rooted in language, race, racism, history, and present. Her storyteller is baffled, stung, and affirmed by the blatant and nuanced uses of the N word in a continuous exploration.
Complex mother/daughter relationships, secrets, and the extent to which women go to protect each other are the intersection between the Sun Sisters, by Vasanti Saxena, and Our Voices Will be Heard, by Vera Starbard. Lesbian relationships and a gender spectrum of characters are embedded in plays throughout the collection; the Sun Sisters, by Vasanti Saxena, is an engrossing and fresh take on the coming out genre. Transformation cuts across gender, the generational divide, cultural norms, and love itself as a dying mother and daughter reconcile. In Our Voices Will be Heard, Vera Starbard weaves a contemporary story of child abuse, with a Tlingit myth of the Wolverine Woman, a shunned, lone brave survivor. The play asks, as it shatters silence, does the survival of the clan necessitate the denial of the individual?
These plays await your voice, embodiment, and production; they are the conversation that needs to happen and the performance to inspire the many voices that will surely follow. Dolores Huerta’s rallying cry urges on new generations of women, “Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.”14 These women playwrights—path makers and voyagers—assure our presence, as they call us undeniably to the future.
Roberta Uno
New York City
1. Lee, Eun, The Dream Unfinished. October 3, 2015. Accessed August 22, 2016. http://thedreamunfinished.org. Founded by Eun Lee in New York City, The Dream Unfinished is an activist orchestra which supports New York City-based civil rights and community organizations through concerts and presentations. Begun in 2015, it creates a platform for classical musicians to show solidarity with activists in the #BLACKLIVESMATTER movement. http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/ #SAYHERNAME is an initiative of the African American Policy Forum urging attention to police violence against Black women by offering a resource “to help ensure that Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice, policy responses to police violence, and media representation of victims of police brutality.” In addition to names cited, they listed: Danette Daniels, Duanna Johnson, Eleanor Bumpers, Frankie Ann Perkins, Gabriella Nevarez, India Kager, Janisha Fonville, Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore, Kendra James, Yam Livingston, LaTanya Taggerty, Malissa Williams, Margaret Laverne Mitchell, Meagan Hockaday, Michelle Cusseaux, Miriam Carey, Mya Hall, Natasha McKenna, Nizam Morris, Pearlie Golden, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Shantel Davis, Sharmel Edwards, Shelly Frey, Sheneque Proctor, Shereese Francis, Sonja Taylor, Tanisha Anderson, Tarkia Wilson, Tyisha Miller, and Yvette Smith.
2. King Jr, Martin Luther. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Speech, Riverside Church, New York, NY. April 4, 1967.
3. Park, Haeyoun, Josh Keller, and Josh Williams. “Faces of American Power, Nearly as White as the Oscar Nominees” New York Times. February 26, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/26/us/race-of-american-power.html
4. Erkut, Sumru and Ineke Ceder. “Women’s Leadership: Research Results and Recommendations” Accessed on August 23, 2016, http://howlround.com/women-s-leadership-research-results-and-recommendations. This article’s main thrust is a set of practical, thoughtful recommendations addressing gender-bias in hiring.
5. Sidford, Holly. Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change. Washington DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, October 2011, http://www.ncrp.org/files/publications/Fusing Arts Culture Social Change.pdf.
6. The Grantmakers in the Arts Racial Equity group is advancing efforts towards an equitable and just arts field through research, identifying barriers and best practice, and forums for discussion and exchange. http://www.giarts.org
7. For cultural critiques of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, see Monteiro, Lyra D. “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the BlackPast in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.” The Public Historian 38, no.1 (2016) and Thelwell, China A. “Hamilton Missed a Chance to Highlight the Haitian Revolution” Miami Herald August 6, 2016.
8. http://media.wix.com/ugd/25c546_a5d46080ad7749409df997b299677078.pdf “The National Black Theatre To Host Catalyst: Moving the Black Theatre Legacy Forward.” Press release, July 24, 2014. For further information see http://www.nationalblacktheatre.org/catalyst--moving-the-legacy-forward Accessed August 23, 2016.
9. http://caata.net Accessed August 23, 2016. CAATA was spearheaded by: Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, East West Players, Ma-Yi Theater, the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), Second Generation and Mu Performing Arts.
10. http://howlround.com/latina/o-theatre-commons
The Latina/o Theatre Commons, in partnership with HowlRound, is a national movement that uses a commons-based approach to transform the narrative of the American theater, to amplify the visibility of Latina/o performance making, and to champion equity through advocacy, art making, convening, and scholarship.
11. Oskar Eustis book jacket endorsement for Monologues for Actors of Color.
Uno, Roberta. Monologues for Actors of Color: Men. Psychology Press, 2000.
12. Some examples are: http://www.thenewblackfest.org/, http://www.harlem9.org/48hours-in-harlem, http://www.firethistimefestival.com/, http://victorygardens.org/ignition/, https://actorstheatre.org/humana-festival-of-new-american-plays/, http://www.culturaldc.org/performing-arts/source-festival/, http://www.fridakahlotheater.org/, http://www.townestreetla.org/#!10-minute-play-festival/c57j, https://www.bu.edu/bpt/our-programs/boston-theatre-marathon/, http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/performances/1mpf/, https://www.osfashland.org/experience-osf/upcoming/every-28-hours.aspx
13. Recorded interview Maha Chehlaoui, Founding Executive Director, Noor Theatre and the author June 2, 2016, New York City. I’ve taken the liberty to describe the program as a recipe.
14. Rallying cry of labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta during the United Farm Workers of America strikes.