Dolores Huerta

American labor leader

• Born: April 10, 1930
• Place of Birth: Dawson, New Mexico

Cofounder of the United Farm Workers Association with César Chávez, Huerta earned renown through contract negotiations with California growers during the Delano grape strike, the crowning achievement of one of the greatest victories in the history of American workers. Her role as a Chicana labor leader in the male-dominated culture of farmworkers made her a champion of the women’s movement as well.

Early Life

Dolores Huerta (WEHR-tah) was born Dolores Fernández in the mining community of Dawson, New Mexico. Her mother, Alicia Chávez, was a second-generation New Mexican, and her father, Juan Fernández, was of American Indian and Mexican heritage. Her father later became a union activist and served in the state legislature. Huerta’s parents were divorced while she was quite young, and she was reared by her mother and grandfather in Stockton, California. Her mother worked in a cannery and saved enough money to buy two small hotels and a restaurant while establishing her household in an integrated working-class community. (Her mother often housed farmworker families for free in the hotels.) Dolores, along with her two brothers, grew up assuming that women and men were equal, drawing on the example of her mother, who never favored her sons above her daughter and who became a business entrepreneur on her own.

Huerta grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood of farmworkers and other laborers of Chinese, Latino, Native American, Filipino, African American, Japanese, or Italian descent. As a result, she learned to appreciate the rich diversity of a range of ethnic cultures at a young age. This absence of cultural or sex discrimination, in combination with her egalitarian family background, contributed to Dolores’s leadership style in later life. Because she suffered no sense of inferiority at home and subsequently no acceptance of a secondary role in life or in her later career, Dolores came to maturity convinced that she was not required to accept the traditional feminine role of women as submissive domestic partners. Instead, she rebelled against conventional restraints on women and competed directly with her male colleagues.

Dolores was a dedicated Girl Scout in a multiethnic troop, participating in fund-raising campaigns to support the United Service Organizations (USO) and its entertainment programs for the armed forces during World War II; she was one of two winners in a national essay contest held by the Scouts. After graduating from an integrated high school in Stockton in 1947, Dolores married her high-school sweetheart, Ralph Head, in 1950. The marriage ended in divorce after the birth of their daughters Celeste and Lori. Dolores’s mother took care of the children while Dolores studied for a teaching degree at Stockton College. Although she eventually received a provisional teaching credential, she became dissatisfied with a career as a teacher. A dawning awareness of the pervasiveness of social injustice confronting the Mexican American community and other ethnic minorities led Dolores in a new direction in 1955.

In that year, Dolores met Fred Ross, an organizer for Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation who was trying to encourage the growing political consciousness of members of Mexican American communities throughout California. Ross started the Community Service Organization (CSO), a self-help association that led voter registration drives, pushed for more Chicanos on police forces, lobbied for Spanish-speaking staff at hospitals and government offices, and campaigned for sewers and community centers in the barrios. Because of her newfound civic activism and devotion to the work of the CSO, Dolores’s marriage to her second husband, Ventura Huerta, also ended in divorce.

Life’s Work

It was through her activities with the CSO that Dolores Huerta eventually became active as a labor organizer among migrant workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. She first came in contact with César Chávez when she was introduced to him by Ross in 1955 while both were working for the CSO. In 1960, she founded the Agricultural Workers Association. By that time, Huerta was a full-time lobbyist for the CSO in Sacramento and sometimes in Washington, DC, pressuring politicians to support disability insurance, unemployment insurance, and minimum wage bills for farmworkers. She was instrumental in securing the passage of bills that extended social insurance and welfare benefits to farmworkers and immigrant workers, such as a bill for a Spanish version of the California driver license test in 1960, the repeal of the Bracero program in 1962, and, in 1963, legislation to include California farmworkers in Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Nevertheless, she was convinced that these workers could never escape poverty through the CSO strategy of pressure-group politics. What they needed was a union.

At about the same time, Chávez was reaching the same conclusion. By 1962, Chávez had presented the CSO with a program outlining a strategy for the unionization of farmworkers. When this program was rejected, he left the organization. While his wife, Helen Chávez, worked in the fields to support their family of eight children, Chávez organized small meetings of workers sympathetic to the idea of a union of agricultural laborers. The Farm Workers Association (FWA), a precursor of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, was founded in Fresno, California, in September, 1962, at a convention attended by about three hundred delegates, practically the entire membership. It was organized primarily by Chávez, but the first person he called upon to work with him organizing the Mexican American farmworkers into a union was Huerta, who promptly left her post with the CSO to work with Chávez.

When Huerta began her labor organizing efforts, she was pregnant with the seventh of her eleven children (she had two by her first husband, five by her second, and four by her partner, Richard Chávez, the brother of César). Because of the demands of her work, Huerta was frequently absent from home, and her children spent much of their childhood in the care of her friends or family. Her union work was always her first priority, to the consternation and outrage of the more traditional adherents to Latino culture. Huerta clearly loved her children and was loved by them in return, but she refused to allow motherhood to deter her from her work. Even her colleague Chávez disapproved of her divorces, her decision to live with his brother, and her seemingly chaotic way of raising her children. Nevertheless, he understood that the union was the center of her life just as it was for him.

The foundation of the UFW union was laid during the bitter Delano grape strike of 1965–70 . The farmworkers of the 1960s often lived in mind-numbing poverty and toiled under inhumane conditions. The bulk of the workforce spoke little English, was often of undocumented residency status, could not vote, and was poorly educated. As a result, the workers were easily exploited by the powerful growers in the agribusiness industry of California. The growers often used deadly pesticides, primarily dicholoro-diphenyl-tricholoethane (DDT), in the fields, ignoring the devastating health effects these chemicals had on both the workers and their unborn children. Pickers were paid by the bushel or basket rather than the hour. A field overstaffed with pickers, therefore, could result in a day’s labor with little or no pay for the worker. There were no health and welfare benefits, no medical insurance, and no low-cost housing for the mainly transient workforce. Workers were forced to live in cars, shacks, and tents; many workers had no other place to sleep than the chemical-laden fields in which they had worked earlier in the day.

The grape-growing industry was perhaps the worst offender in terms of working conditions and pesticide use in all of California. Because of this, it became the logical site of the 1965 labor battle known as the Delano grape strike with Huerta and Chávez at the forefront. The strike began at dawn, when the workers moved out into the fields around Delano. The pickets met them carrying National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) banners with the union’s symbol of a black Aztec eagle on a red flag with the single Spanish word Huelga (strike). The pickets led the workers off the fields of Delano and the five-year battle began. In 1966, Huerta became the first person to negotiate a farmworkers’ contract when, as NFWA’s representative, she concluded a deal with the Schenley Wine Company. The strike continued on other fronts, and before it ended in 1970, Huerta had been arrested twenty-two times for strike-related efforts.

As quickly as the UFW pickets pulled work crews out, these laborers were replaced by scabs, or strikebreakers, trucked in from Mexico and Texas by the growers. The union’s pickets and organizers were harassed and arrested continually by local police, under the influence of the powerful growers. Support for the farmworkers was growing, both within the labor movement and on a national level. Senator Robert Kennedy embraced their cause and became their champion. Powerful unions, including the United Automobile Workers (UAW), Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the Packinghouse Workers rallied behind the striking grape pickers and provided relief in the form of fresh pickets, food, and money. It was against this backdrop of national labor and political support that Chávez and Huerta made the decision to escalate the strike to a nationwide struggle by declaring a universal consumer boycott. This boycott initially targeted individual growers and products, but eventually led to the boycott of all California-grown grapes. Hundreds of workers were delegated throughout the country to promote and organize the boycott, while Huerta organized in New York City. She was an eloquent and powerful public speaker, and her speeches expressed the deep desires and struggles of all poor and dispossessed peoples, not just those who worked the fields.

The UFW boycott was successful. Trade unionists across the country joined forces with the farmworkers, and a new consciousness of the Chicano in the United States was born as a result of the Huelga. On May 30, 1970, the first table grapes bearing a union label a black eagle on a red flag were shipped to market. The grapes came from seven growers who, unable to withstand the effects of the boycott, had signed contracts with the UFW. On July 29, twenty-six Delano growers filed into the UFW union hall to sign the contracts that ended the bitter five-year battle. As negotiated by Huerta, the workers received an hourly wage of $1.76, a guaranteed yearly increase of fifteen cents per hour, and a twenty-five-cent bonus per box picked. In addition, the growers were required to contribute to a health and welfare plan and to low-cost housing for their workers. Most importantly, the growers agreed not to use certain pesticides, and DDT was banned forever from California vineyards. Huerta’s efforts also fostered the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975.

While championing amnesty for undocumented immigrant farmworkers and fighting the federal guest worker programs of the 1980s, Huerta continued to serve in the UFW as negotiator and vice president into the 1990s. She became notorious in the union for her fervor and tenacity; stories are told of growers begging to face anyone at the negotiating table except Huerta. Huerta and Chávez continued their aggressive style of Chicano trade unionism through periodic use of the consumer boycott, most notably against Gallo Wine, the Dole Company, and California table grapes. They worked together to create the Robert Kennedy Medical Plan, Juan De La Cruz Farm Workers Pension Fund, Farm Workers Credit Union, and National Farm Workers Service Center. In the wake of Chávez’s death in 1993, Huerta, in her sixties, continued as an eloquent and frequent speaker and organizer on behalf of workers, Mexican Americans, and women. Her fervor elicited both praise and criticism. In 2006, for example, in a graduation address before Tucson High School in Arizona, she denounced programs against illegal immigration, leading to outrage among state and local officials.

In 2002, Huerta received $100,000 as part of the Puffin Foundation/National Institute Award for Creative Citizenship. With this money she founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, of which she is president. The nonprofit foundation offers aid in community organizing, research in private and public policies affecting workers and immigrants, and educational programs.

Huerta became a board member of People for the American Way and for the Feminist Majority Foundation, took an active role in supporting political candidates, and became secretary-treasurer emeritus of the UFW. In 2003 she held a short-term appointment as a regent for the University of California.

Huerta’s leadership in labor issues and humanitarian causes was widely honored. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She has won many awards, including the Outstanding Labor Leader Award from the California State senate, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Outstanding American Award, the Consumers’ Union Trumpeter’s Award, the Community of Christ International Peace Award, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, presented by President Bill Clinton in 1998. In 1993, Ms. magazine named her its Woman of the Year, and Ladies’ Home Journal placed her on its list of 100 Most Important Women of the Twentieth Century. She received honorary doctorates from several universities, including Princeton (2006), and has had several grade schools and one high school named for her. In 2012, she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. A phrase that she coined—Si, Se Puede ("Yes, We Can")—was used in translation as one of Obama’s 2008 campaign mottos. She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2017, Huerta was granted an honorary doctorate by Mount Holyoke College. That same year, the activist was awarded California State University, Los Angeles's Presidential Medallion. In 2021, Huerta was granted an honorary doctorate from Yale University.

Significance

Huerta’s dedicated and focused work with the Chicano trade union movement was based on four philosophical axioms: to establish a strong sense of identity, to develop a sense of pride, to maintain always the value of services to others, and to be effective and true to oneself. She was convinced of the need to lead through persuasion and personal example, rather than intimidation. She agrees with the vitality of ideas and the necessity of criticism, but for Huerta, action through responsible commitment and moral choice is the key to creating a just society.

More than a liberal, ethnic unionist, Huerta also is proud of her work as a feminist, a Chicano activist, and, above all, a humanist. Her cause transcends the narrow scope of unionism. As Huerta stated at an organizing rally at Santa Clara University in 1990,

"I would like to be remembered as a woman who cares for all fellow humans. We must use our lives to make the world a better and just place to live, not just a world to acquire things. That is what we are put on the earth for."

Also, Huerta’s skills as a negotiator are entirely self-taught. In fact, before the Delano grape strike she had never read a union contract. In addition to negotiating the UFW’s first contracts, she had organized for the strike in the fields, in boycott offices, and in union election halls as well as served as a picket herself. In retrospect, however, it is her skill, tenacity, combativeness, and cunning as a negotiator that truly separates Huerta from her peers in the labor movement. Her contract negotiations with the California growers marked the crowning achievement of one of the greatest victories ever in the history of American workers.

Bibliography

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