Dolores Huerta

Hillary

I first learned about Dolores Huerta—labor leader, organizer, feminist, and activist for women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental justice—in 1965 because of the grape boycott, started by Filipino workers in California, that spread across the United States. I had babysat the children of migrant farmworkers through my church while their parents and older siblings worked Saturdays in the fields outside Chicago. Because of that experience, I had become interested in their lives, and I paid attention to news about farmworkers. Farmworkers, mostly Asian and Latino, lived in migrant camp housing. Their lives were full of economic hardship, physical and sexual abuse, and exposure to dangerous pesticides and contamination. They often had little power to demand better working and living conditions or fairer wages from their employers.

Dolores cofounded the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) with Cesar Chavez in 1962 to help the laborers who planted, tended, and picked the vegetables and fruits grown on American farms. By organizing together as a union, the workers could build the collective power they needed to bargain with the corporations that employed them. The UFW supported the California grape boycott and helped take it national. In 1966, Dolores negotiated a contract between the UFW and the Schenley wine company, which was the first time that farmworkers anywhere in the United States were able to shape a contract with an agricultural company. In 1975, thanks in large part to Dolores’s work at the helm of grape, lettuce, and wine boycotts, California passed the state’s first law recognizing the right of farmworkers to bargain collectively.

CHELSEA

Dolores was one of the first activists I remember hearing about. My mom would talk about her experiences babysitting the children of migrant farmworkers, and she told me then about the great Dolores Huerta and her fight for farmworkers’ rights, labor rights, civil rights, and women’s rights.

Dolores has spent her life fighting prejudice and injustice. Her father was a farmworker, miner, union activist, and state legislator in New Mexico, where she was born in 1930. After her parents’ divorce, she and her two brothers moved with their mother to Stockton, California. Dolores saw how hard her mother worked, between running a small hotel and being active in civic organizations and her church. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Dolores also became active in school and community affairs. Unlike many women in the 1940s, she went to college and eventually became a teacher. Within months, she discovered her life’s calling. “I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she said. “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Dolores was among the first voices to speak out against the use of toxic pesticides that threatened workers, consumers, and the environment. She was also on the front lines of protests and would be arrested twenty-two times over the course of her career for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. During a 1972 protest, she coined the UFW’s motto, “Sí, se puede,” which means “Yes, we can,” a mantra borrowed and made famous by Barack Obama in his 2008 campaign. When President Obama awarded Dolores the Medal of Freedom in 2012, he acknowledged that she had originated the phrase and thanked her for letting him borrow it.

Dolores’s organizing activities also included voter registration drives to convince eligible citizens to register and vote. Her efforts caught the attention of political candidates who sought her support. On June 5, 1968, she stood on the platform beside Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he delivered his victory speech after winning the California primary in that year’s presidential election. Dolores had a big smile on her face and a red UFW flag in her hair. Only minutes later, Kennedy and five other people were shot walking through the hotel kitchen. Kennedy died the next day. In the documentary about her work and life, Dolores, she says that Kennedy’s assassination felt like the “death of the future.”

Although Dolores and Chavez were cofounders of the UFW, he was often the public face of their struggle to obtain justice for farmworkers. Behind the scenes, Dolores was an experienced organizer and lobbied for legislative changes to achieve fair wages, medical coverage, pension benefits, and improved living conditions for workers. In one television interview they did together about their work, Chavez was asked about his leadership of the organization and protecting Dolores during protests. Dolores was asked about motherhood and whether she ever wanted to take a day off and go to a spa!

In September 1988, at the age of fifty-eight, Dolores was in San Francisco, peacefully protesting Vice President George H. W. Bush, who was then running for president. She was severely beaten by a baton-wielding police officer and suffered significant internal injuries, resulting in broken ribs and a damaged spleen that had to be removed in an emergency surgery. A film of the brutal beating was broadcast widely. Dolores later won a large financial settlement against San Francisco and its police department, which she used to benefit farmworkers and to structure a modest monthly payment that she relies on still for income. She also helped spur changes in police policies governing crowd control and officer discipline.

After a lengthy recovery from the beating, Dolores took a leave from the UFW to focus on women’s rights and to encourage Latinas to run for office. She became an ally of Gloria Steinem, advocating together for the cause of women’s rights. Dolores called herself “a born-again feminist” because of the sexism she witnessed in the labor movement. “When my epiphany came is when I started seeing that within the movement, once everything kind of got settled down, and all the women who had been on the front lines and on strike—all of a sudden you look around, and where are the women?” she said. Gloria Steinem has said that Dolores shaped her thinking and actions and helped bring the voices of women of color and farmworkers to the feminist movement.

“I think that’s a problem with us as women—we don’t think we need to be in the power structure, that we need to be on those boards where decisions are being made. Sometimes we think, Well, I’m not really prepared to take that position or that role. But I say [to women out there]: Just do it like the guys do it—pretend that you know. And then you learn on the job.”

—DOLORES HUERTA

Today, at eighty-nine years old, Dolores is as passionate, energetic, and determined as ever. Running into my friend Dolores on the campaign trail in 2016 always gave me (and everyone else around her) a boost of energy. She was always at the center of the crowd, chanting into a bullhorn and dancing at the same time, or sharing stories with a group of rapt young people.

In recent years, she has knocked on doors for candidates in every corner of the country, joined teachers in Los Angeles who were striking for better public schools, and spoken out to protect access to safe and legal abortion in New Mexico. “When it came to the abortion issue, I had to struggle with that, given my Catholicism, my traditional beliefs,” she said. “And I’m glad I went through that, because I think it helps me to be able to talk to Latina women, to be able to say why this is an important issue.”

Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, she trains leaders and community organizers. She raised her eleven children (yes, that’s right, eleven!) while building a movement, and even if they didn’t always understand why their mother was gone for long periods of time when they were children, many of them are now part of that movement as lawyers and civil rights activists themselves. “When we think of the kind of inheritance that we want to leave to our children or our grandchildren, think of leaving them a legacy of justice,” she has said, and that’s just what she has done throughout her life. Her famous call to action—“Sí, se puede”—is a reminder that each of us has a voice and that we are more powerful than we realize.