Labor and civil rights leader Dolores Clara Huerta has always been a force.
She spoke of farm workers as essential workers decades before the term became part of the our daily vocabulary.
Her rallying cry, “¡Sí se puede!” (Yes, we can!) has inspired more than one movement — maybe even a presidential campaign.
Born in 1930 in Dawson, a mining town in northern New Mexico, Dolores Huerta’s father was a coal miner and farm worker; he was also active in labor organizing, giving Dolores an early introduction to what would become her life’s work.
Her parents divorced when she was three, and her mother moved Dolores and her two brothers to Stockton, Calif., the heart of the Central Valley. It’s where more than half of the lettuce, almonds, grapes, pistachios, broccoli, cabbage and other produce in the United States is grown, and all of it is harvested by seasonal farmworkers.
Dolores’s mother owned a 70-room hotel and restaurant, which she opened to farm workers at half the normal rate — and if they couldn’t pay, she gave them rooms for free. Her mother was active in the community and church, and Dolores was inspired by her example.
After earning an associate’s degree in education, Dolores taught elementary school briefly — but seeing children coming to school hungry or needing shoes convinced her that she needed to help on a larger scale.
The children at school typically lived in shacks with dirt floors and no running water. Their parents worked 14-hour days with no breaks, and often the kids ended up leaving school to pick vegetables so the family could earn more money. Wages were paltry, and most of the pay went back to the farm owners for lodging, meals and supplies. There was no such thing as healthcare, and job security was nonexistent. Women experienced high rates of domestic and sexual violence.
In 1955 Dolores started a local chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO) to improve economic conditions for Latino workers. Five years later she co-founded the Agricultural Workers Association, leading voter registration drives and lobbying local cities and counties for better living conditions.
In 1962 Dolores and César Chávez, whom she met working with the CSO, cofounded the National Farm Workers Association, now the United Farm Workers, to organize for basic rights for agricultural workers.
Dolores drove around the Valley, often with her young children, and met with Hispanic and Filipino workers, educating them about their rights and grassroots organizing.
In 1965 she helped to organize the Delano (California) Grape Strike, directing a national boycott of table grapes to pressure growers for better working conditions. It was the UFW’s first direct-to-consumer labor action, and the result was a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the California grape table industry.
And she did all this while raising 11 children.
Dolores worked with Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem, and Robert F. Kennedy, who the UFW supported in the 1968 presidential primary. She was standing on the podium when Senator Kennedy was shot; he had thanked her, Chavez and the UFW in his speech just moments before.
In 1998 she was severely beaten by a San Francisco police officer in Union Square, during a nonviolent, peaceful protest. After her recovery, she shifted to women’s rights, working to recruit Latina candidates for local, state and national office.
The Dolores Huerta Foundation was formed in 2002 to promote grassroots organizing, leadership development and policy advocacy in the areas of health and environment; education and youth development; and economic development.
Just this week, the foundation is making available COVID testing for agricultural communities in the Central Valley, and distributing food in areas where farmworkers have lost jobs or income due to the pandemic.
In other words, Dolores’s work is ongoing.
In 2018, at the age of 88, Dolores gave the keynote address at the Berkeley Law graduation ceremony. The year before, she was named an honorary chair of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.
She even has an asteroid named after her — 6849 Doloreshuerta, discovered in 1979 by American astronomers.
Dolores recently spoke to Time magazine after being named to this year’s Time 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The interview took place in June, during protests around the country against the killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter.
Dolores, now 90, was at home due to the pandemic — and not happily. But she was encouraged that her grandchildren wanted to participate in the protests.
“I mean, this is like a punishment for me not to be out there,” she told Time. “I just wanna bless and thank all of the protesters.”