Dolores Huerta deserves our gratitude and veneration
"When I think of Dolores Huerta," playwright-filmmaker Luis Valdez said, "I think of Earth. Powerful, beautiful, fecund, challenging, conscious, yet so incredibly delicate."
She's been all of that in a remarkable career that has spanned more than a half-century. Huerta, now 77, is probably best known for her work with Cesar Chavez in the founding and operations of the United Farm Workers. But that's been just a part of her lifelong, successful fight for economic and social justice.
Huerta, 5-foot-2, 110 pounds, hardly looks the part. What's more, she's had 11 children to raise along the way, much of the time as a single mother. She has traveled the country, speaking out and joining demonstrations in behalf of a wide variety of causes. She's lobbied legislators to win important gains for Latino immigrants and others. She was a leader in the worldwide grape boycott that forced growers to agree in 1970 to some of the country's very first farm union contracts, which she negotiated despite her utter lack of experience in negotiating. She remains a leading Latina, feminist, labor and anti-war activist and, of course, a key role model for women everywhere.
Chavez, general director of the 22-chapter CSO, stressed grass-roots organizing. Huerta agreed. They generally agreed on tactics including an unwavering commitment to nonviolence. But where Chavez was shy, she was bold and outspoken. She had to be. Mexican-American men did not easily grant leadership to women.
She was assigned as the CSO's full-time lobbyist. It was an unfamiliar task, but during two years at the state Capitol in Sacramento, Huerta pushed through an impressive array of legislation, including bills that extended social-insurance coverage to farmworkers and immigrants and liberalized welfare benefits.
In 1962, when other CSO leaders rejected Chavez's plans for organizing farmworkers, he quit to start on his own. Huerta followed, helping create the organizations that evolved into the UFW, with Chavez as president and Huerta as vice president and chief negotiator, later as secretary-treasurer. Both were paid but $5 a week, plus essential expenses.
They quarreled frequently. That was inevitable, given Huerta's excitable temperament and the harsh discipline Chavez imposed on himself and his close associates. But they were always headed in the same direction. He described Huerta as "physically, spiritually and psychologically fearless, absolutely."
She was a regular on their picket lines outside struck fields, defying growers, sheriff's deputies and other sometimes-violent opponents. "Dolores was our example of something different. We could see one of our leaders was a woman, and she was always out in front, and she would talk back," a fellow protester said.
Huerta nearly died in 1988 after being clubbed by a policeman while demonstrating with 1,000 others outside a fundraiser for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had ridiculed the UFW. Huerta's spleen was ruptured and had to be removed, leading to a near-fatal loss of blood.
She had surgery for other serious problems in 2000. She stepped down as a UFW officer that year to join Democrat Al Gore's presidential campaign but has remained active in UFW and Democratic Party affairs, most recently lobbying for immigrant rights, helping train a new generation of organizers and joining campaigns to improve the lot of janitors, nursing-home employees and others.
Huerta has demonstrated, beyond doubt, that injustice can be overcome if confronted forcefully, if others heed the demand she has shouted, urging passers-by to join UFW picket lines: "Don't be a marshmallow! Stop being vegetables! Work for justice!"
Dick Meister is a San Francisco writer and co-author of "A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America's Farm Workers." Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service
Recent comments
The major tragedy for farmworkers has been the lack of union management...
Pajaro Valley Pete | March 24, 2008 at 2:07 a.m.
