By Dick Meister
(Part four of a five part daily series on the Farmworkers)
“When I think of Dolores Huerta,” playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez once 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 80, is probably best known for her work with Cesar Chavez in the founding and operations of the United Farm Workers. But that’s just been a part of her lifelong and extraordinarily successful and courageous fight for economic and social justice.
Huerta, five-foot-two, 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’s traveled the country, speaking out and joining demonstrations in behalf of a wide variety of causes. She’s lobbied legislators to win gains for Latino immigrants and others. She was a key 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 union negotiating. She remains a leading Latina, feminist, labor and anti-war activist and a role model for women everywhere.
Huerta started out as an elementary school teacher in Stockton in 1955, but quickly tired of “seeing little children come to school hungry and without shoes.” That and her anger “at the injustices that happened to farm workers” in the area, led Huerta to quit teaching and join the Community Services Organization (CSO) which helped local Chicanos wage voter registration drives and take other actions to win a strong political and economic voice.
Chavez, who was general director of the 22-chapter CSO, stressed “grass roots organizing with vengeance” above all. Huerta agreed and generally agreed as well on tactics – including an unwavering commitment to non-violence. But where Chavez was shy, she was bold and outspoken. She had to be if she was to assume the leadership to which her commitment had drawn her. Mexican American men did not easily grant leadership to women, most certainly not to diminutive, attractive women like Huerta.
She was assigned to the State Capitol as the CSO’s full-time lobbyist. It was an unfamiliar task, but during two years in Sacramento, Huerta pushed through an impressive array of legislation, including bills that extended social insurance coverage to farm workers and immigrants and liberalized welfare benefits. I worked in the capitol as an Associated Press reporter and counted Huerta as one of the best – and certainly most principled – lobbyists in Sacramento.
Huerta soon realized, however, that legislation “could not solve the real problems” of the poor that she represented. What they needed was not government aid passed down from above to try to ease their poverty, but some way to escape the poverty. The way out, Huerta concluded, was farm labor organizing.
Chavez agreed, and in 1962, when the other CSO leaders and members rejected his plans for organizing farm workers, he quit to start organizing on his own, Huerta followed, helping create the organizations that eventually evolved into the UFW, with Chavez as president and Huerta as vice president and chief negotiator, later as secretary-treasurer. Like Chavez, she was paid but $5 a week plus essential expenses.
Huerta has paid a heavy physical price for her militancy. She nearly died in 1988 after being clubbed by a policeman while demonstrating with about 1,000 others outside a fund raiser in San Francisco for then Vice President George H.W, Bush, who had ridiculed the UFW and its grape boycott. Huerta’s spleen was ruptured and had to be removed, leading to a near-fatal loss of blood.
She was operated on for other serious problems in 2000. Huerta, long an active Democrat, stepped down as a UFW officer that year to join Democrat Al Gore’s presidential campaign, but remained active in Democratic Party affairs. She continued to lobby for immigrant rights, helping train a new generation of organizers and joining campaigns to improve the lot of janitors, nursing home employees and other highly exploited workers.
Dolores Huerta has shown us, beyond doubt, that injustice can be overcome if we confront it forcefully, if we heed the demand she has been known to shout in urging passers-by to join UFW picket lines:
“Don’t be a marshmallow! Stop being vegetables! Work for justice!”
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.