DOLORES HUERTA

In 1962, when farmworkers in California earned minimal pay, had horrible working conditions, and were abused by the growers who employed them, Dolores Huerta left her job organizing for the Catholic Service Organization to join Cesar Chavez in cofounding the nation’s first successful farmworkers’ union. While working for the United Farm Workers (UFW), Huerta was physically attacked by growers and law enforcement officials and was denied justice by the legal system—a common occurrence for strikers—but through her hard work and persistence, she impelled the passage of many laws that protect farmworkers. She continues this fight today through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which supports community organizing in low-income communities.

Dolores and I have worked together advocating for farmworkers’ rights across the country. She joined me in Albany lobbying for rights to a day off per week, overtime, and worker’s comp. Dolores and I met for this interview in my apartment. My daughter, Mariah, who just completed her thesis on Cesar Chavez and Robert Kennedy, joined the conversation.

Dolores Huerta: The first time we met Senator Kennedy was when he arrived in Delano for the Senate hearing in March 1966. There were a lot of spectators in the stands, and people had set up a passageway with flags along it, and the senator was going to walk between the flags. What happened was that when he got there, nobody paid any attention to the flags; they all just crowded around him so enthusiastically that I thought, “Oh my god, we’re going to crush him.” The people just zoomed in and surrounded him. That walk of honor between the flags didn’t work out at all.

We were having a strike at that time, and the Kern County sheriff had arrested some of our peaceful pickets after scabs threatened them. During the hearing, your father asked the sheriff why he had arrested our people, and the sheriff said it was because the scabs had said, “If you don’t get them out of here, we’re going to cut their hearts out.” The sheriff said, “Rather than let them get cut, we removed the cause.” Senator Kennedy said, “How can you go arrest somebody if they haven’t violated the law?” The sheriff said, “They were ready to violate the law.” Senator Kennedy said, “Could I suggest that during the luncheon period the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?” That hearing became pretty famous, but the main thing was that Senator Kennedy was committed to our cause after that.

The morning after the hearing, Senator Kennedy was still in Delano—we were going to start a farmworkers’ march to Sacramento—and the police all got in front of the marchers, to try to keep them from marching. Your father called the chief of police and said something to him like, “Are you going to try to stop them from marching?” There’s film of this that shows police dressed in black and white; that was the Delano Police Department. You see them walking away, and that was because your father had told them they couldn’t stop the march: they had to get out of the way.

From that time on, your father did a lot to help us. There was no twenty-four-hour medical facility in Delano. They had maybe one or two doctors there, who were very much against the union. To give you an example, there was a farmworker who had hurt his arm, and he went to this doctor, and the doctor gave him some kind of a lotion to put on his arm. We took the worker to Bakersfield to get an Xray, and he had a broken arm. The lotion wasn’t going to help that. So we decided we had to start a clinic, a volunteer clinic, and we found doctors who would come on a certain schedule to a house we had rented where the clinic was in one room. I think it was the Garment Workers’ Union that was helping to fund this. Your father came to California and did a couple of fund-raisers for us to raise more money for the clinic.

Kerry Kennedy: I visited the headquarters a few months ago and I was touched to learn that the UFW named the plan after my father—RFK Health. Today it covers tens of thousands of farmworkers.

DH: Yes, exactly. But the funding is now under attack by the Republicans…. In the winter of 1968, January or February, we had all these farmworkers who rode on a school bus from Delano to New York City to picket at the Hunts Point Market. It was icy and cold, and some of the workers who were picketing slipped and fell on the ice, and then they were all arrested. So I called the senator’s office and I told him—there was a Latina woman who worked for him for many years, Angie Cabrera—and I said to her, “You know they arrested the farmworkers. Could you send somebody to help them?” They sent an attorney right down there to get the farmworkers out of jail.

It was because of all the things he had done for us that I went to the senator’s office to see if he could come out to Delano when Cesar ended his fast in 1968. Your father said he would, of course, and that’s when the whole thing happened with people cheering and saying they wanted him to run for president. He did announce he was running just a few days later.

When Cesar did that fast, it was kind of the first time that anyone had done something like that. Now people fast all the time. I remember I was here in New York when Cesar told us he was going to fast. He fasted for seven or eight days, and I remember how I felt sick for him that he wasn’t eating. We had a press conference in New York because we wanted people to know who Cesar was and what he was doing and why; we said, “Our union president, Cesar Chavez, is on a fast.” These New York labor guys got mad. “What kind of a president would do that? What kind of a kook is that?” It was something novel at that time.

Through everything, Robert Kennedy’s support was very important for us. He was sincere, and even though he didn’t speak Spanish, he just connected with people. He was genuine; he wasn’t uppity. You could tell that he cared.

His support was also important because it put us on an actual stage. When a senator from New York came to speak to farmworkers in Delano and support our union, it was a turning point for us. It definitely put the farmworkers on the map. Before that, people didn’t know who Cesar was; they didn’t know what we were doing; they didn’t know about the struggle.

Robert Kennedy related to working people; he related to poor people; and he was always about solutions. You can think about Bedford-Stuyvesant, too, the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, and the work he was doing there in that neighborhood where poor people and black people lived and still live. Think about when he went to Appalachia. He always connected with the poorest people. Think about the farmworkers. He was about solutions, and people admire him so much for that. He could make that connection with people and work to help them solve problems. This is my philosophy too. People are capable of solving all kinds of problems; sometimes they just need to be taught how. Your father didn’t really get a lot of mileage out of going to Bedford-Stuyvesant or going to the farmworkers; he didn’t get any great political gain. He just went to the places where people had the most need and where his presence and his support would not only put a spotlight on them but also give people some dignity. A lot of times poor people don’t have dignity. Working people don’t have dignity. Your father paid attention to their troubles, and he helped them where they needed help. He dignified them.

KK: Daddy wanted to be there when Cesar ended the fast. He spoke to thousands of farmworkers who had come to the mass, and he modeled his tribute to Cesar on a speech from one of Shakespeare’s Henry V: “When your children and grandchildren take their place in America—going to high school and college and taking good jobs at good pay—when you look at them you will say, ‘I did this. I was there at the point of difficulty and danger.’ And though you may be old and bent from years of labor, no man will stand taller than you when you say, ‘I marched with Cesar.’” And my father added, “You stand for justice, and I am proud to stand with you. Viva la Causa.”

DH: Yes, that was wonderful, but things are still not good for poor people and working people today. The inequality of wealth and income is extreme today compared with fifty years ago. Back in the sixties, what a CEO made was forty times more than what a worker made. Today it’s like five hundred times more than a worker. We have this huge income spread between working people and CEOs, and it affects most people very badly. The working people are struggling; people have to work two jobs, and mortgages are so high—people are getting gentrified out of their homes in San Francisco, Oakland, and plenty of other places. Ordinary people are just not respected.

Politicians today are not respected either, and this hurts our democracy because the politicians today are beholden to corporate interests and to special interests. It’s worse now than it was fifty years ago. Your father was someone who wasn’t afraid to take on the status quo and the people in power. He wasn’t afraid to challenge them. It would be better if our politicians weren’t afraid to stand up against the special interest system to defend the rights of disenfranchised people. Your father did that.

I guess courage is the big word there. I remember when John Kennedy was president, and the steelworkers went on strike, and he said to the steel companies, “I want to see your books because you’re saying you can’t give these steelworkers a raise,” and that ended the strike. It would be interesting to have a president who’s on the side of the workers instead of on the corporations’ side, especially right now.

When you think of Senator Kennedy, you know he was for justice. He was for fairness. He was for equality. People talk about this today: “The country is so divided.” Well, the country was divided then, too.

A lot of the establishment was for the war in Vietnam, but your father came out against the war, and some people thought it was a betrayal of the whole defense industry and the Cold War. In ’68 we met with Gene McCarthy, who was against the war, and we met with Humphrey too, and we asked them to support the boycott we were in at that time, and both of them refused to support the farmworkers.

Once Cesar was asked, “What’s going to happen to the union once you’re gone?” and his answer was, “If I would have thought that the union would not survive without me, I never would have started one in the first place.” When he died so suddenly and unexpectedly, I had to remember those words. Through both the foundation and the organization, we were able to get some important laws passed for farmworkers, especially the right to organize. That is in place now in California, but still not yet in New York.

In California, regardless of who becomes president of the union, we have the procedures and mechanisms so farmworkers can get a collective bargaining contract. It’s there, and knowing that made it less of a catastrophe for the organization when Cesar passed away. Cesar and I had a lot in common in our ways of thinking. When we first started the organization, one of the things we really wanted to do was follow Gandhi’s model. Maybe it was too idealistic, but we always have tried to stay at the level of the workers themselves. That’s why we didn’t have salaries in the union, which became a big issue later on when there was a lot of money coming in from dues, and our plan was to get as much money as we could so we could expand to other states. Our plan was to try to have a national organization, and we were so successful in those first years that we thought it was a possibility. We had contracts in Texas, in Colorado, in parts of New Mexico, because California’s agriculture businesses had workers in these other states, so the union was able to follow them. We had over three thousand workers under contract in Florida, too, with collective bargaining agreements, pensions, and medical plans. A lot of people who worked for the union saw that money coming in and didn’t want to continue on poverty wages; they wanted better lives for their families. So that changed after Cesar was gone, which you can justify, but it did take away from the movement feeling of the organization.

You need faith. When I first went to Delano, I was going through a divorce, and I already had seven children at that time. I wondered if getting involved with trying to create a new union would be the right thing or the wrong thing for my children. I remember taking a hot bath and sitting in the tub for about an hour, thinking about what I was going to do. I prayed. I asked for a sign. One of my daughters was making her confirmation, and I didn’t have the money to buy her shoes. She just had these little white tennis shoes and they had holes in them. When we went to the mass, I was dreading to see my daughter come down the aisle with these tennis shoes with holes in them. The parish was in the farmworker area, and just before my daughter got to me, there were little farm girls coming down the aisle wearing tennis shoes with holes in them. I said, “That’s my answer.” I knew from that sign that working with the union was the right thing to do.

Still, in all the work I’ve done as an organizer, one of the hardest things has been the knowledge that your struggle for your cause is going to affect your kids.

A lot of people criticized me at the beginning for leaving my teaching job to go to Delano. We were three bilingual teachers in the school district so we always had a lot of work and a comfortable salary. To leave that to become an organizer, not knowing where my salary would be coming from, got me a lot of criticism. My friends said, “Your children are going to become drug addicts; you’re crazy to be doing this.” People ostracized me when I went to Delano; they thought I was making a foolish decision. It wasn’t until the farmworkers got a lot of publicity after Robert Kennedy came that people decided it was wonderful what we were doing. Before that, the people Cesar grew up with in Delano admired him because he did such great stuff when he was with Community Service Organization, but when we started the union they all turned against him. That was because we were going against the growers, and people had friends who were growers. It was an agricultural community. Some people had relatives working with the growers. Also it was during the Vietnam War, and we were antiwar, so people in our community were not always in favor of all the things we supported.

Another thing was that when we were organizing, Cesar’s wife, Helen, was in the fields picking grapes. She had eight kids, and people made fun of her because her work was supporting the family while Cesar was organizing. The workers’ wages when we first started were like seventy to ninety cents an hour. Our food was basically what the farmworkers got. We had cornmeal and oatmeal and lard and beans and rice and flour. We were only paying ourselves, Cesar and me, like $30 a week, and sometimes not even that much; we had enough to pay the rent, but it was tough. When the strike broke out and we got donations, that kind of saved us.

KK: Dolores, your commitment to the farmworkers has never wavered. A few years ago you joined me in Albany trying to get legislation passed here [in New York], and there was so much fear about change among those state senators, but you kept reassuring them that their farms would be just fine and they didn’t need to depend on exploited labor. You were inspiring.

You’ve always been willing to take on an issue even when your family or friends or community didn’t agree with you, but it still must have been difficult to come out as pro-choice when you’ve worked for so long with Catholic farmworkers who are not pro-choice. You used to travel the country making pro-life speeches with Phillis Schlafly, who is credited with single-handedly stopping the Equal Rights Amendment. How did you come to change your ideas about abortion?

DH: You always have to accept that change is constant. You couldn’t really stop it if you wanted to. I’ve known Gloria Steinem for quite some time, and we’ve argued about a whole range of issues, including abortion. We used to have conversations about this all the time. I’m Catholic, I have a big family, and I always thought abortion was a mortal sin. In all our discussions, we evolved to talking about it in terms of “choice,” which I think is a good word, especially for women who are uncomfortable with the issue of abortion. Gloria would invite me to go with her on her speaking engagements, and I would go and speak about the boycott, and I would listen to what Gloria would say to women in her audiences. Later I met Eleanor Smeal, the founder of Feminist Majority, and I listened to her, and I came to understand that women can never be truly free unless they can decide about their own bodies. I see that clearly now. I had a transformation on the issue. The other important thing for me is that we really have to fight for early childhood education, for the sake of the children and also so that women can participate in civic life. That has to be seen as a right we all have, so that women don’t feel they have no choice except to be the homemaker and the sole caretaker for the children. We have to free women so we can save the world. I quote Coretta Scott King all the time; she said, “We will never have peace in the world until women take power.”

People criticized us for forming the union and for not caring for our children the right way. They will criticize me for my transformation. People are always going to criticize you no matter what, and you have to just keep on ignoring that.