Dolores Huerta’s Story: Community Organizing, the Chicano Movement and Challenging Gender Norms

Living Self-Portrait: Dolores Huerta - National Portrait Gallery

Hosts: Jewell Robinson, Eduardo Diaz

Interviewer: Taína Carago

Interviewee: Dolores Huerta

Interview Date: October 5, 2015

Interview Length: 1 hour, 38 minutes

 

Visual:

Black and white image of Dolores Huerta in the 1960s holding a sign that reads, “Huelga,” which is the Spanish word for “strike.”

 

Jewell Robinson:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

 

Visual:

Jewell Robinson is on a stage with a sign language translator

 

I’m Jewell Robinson, I’m Public Program Manager for adult programs here at the Portrait Gallery, and producer of Living Self Portrait: Dolores Huerta.

We are so delighted to have her here. And we’re almost as delighted to have you here. This is such a wonderful crowd. We were worried, you know, what with Him Eminence being here that you might not venture out. It’s wonderful to see all of you. This portrait – Living Self-Portrait – is being done in collaboration with the Smithsonian Latino Center because of our ongoing relationship with the Center, which is directed by Eduardo Diaz, and for the sake of brevity, I am going to turn over the microphone to Eduardo, so that he can greet you from the Smithsonian Latino Center and we can get on with the show.

 

Visual:

Eduardo Diaz walks onstage and Jewell Robinson leaves the stage

 

Eduardo Diaz:

OK, now I got to be brief, no? In the interest of brevity, no? Thank you, e buenos noches a todos ustedes, buenos noches Thank you all for being here, we really appreciate it. First of all, I want to thank you, Jewell, for that kind introduction and thank you to all the staff here at the National Portrait Gallery, we really appreciate the hospitality. Wonderful to work with. Let me first begin by introducing to you and thanking Paula Morales, who is our American Sign Language interpreter. Paula?

We have some folks here from Gallaudet University who are always so great about supporting the programs of the Latino Center. We did an interesting program, it has been several months now, on the deaf Latino community, and it was, I have to say, one of the most endearing, enriching programs, I think that I’ve been a part of here at the Smithsonian in the seven years that I’ve been here. And so, we want to thank the folks from Gallaudet as well as folks like Paula?, who make it possible for our programs to be truly accessible.

It’s a real honor to be here in the presence of Dolores Huerta of course, who you will have the chance to hear from in a few minutes. The Portrait Gallery tells the stories of important Americans, important people who have forged this country, and I think it’s very fitting that today we are able to welcome Dolores Huerta, one of the most important historical figures in this country to be here with us and to have this kind of exchange.

This evening, you are going to have an opportunity to hear firsthand from her about her work in the ‘60s and the ‘70s as she forged one of the most important labor unions in this country. In 1962, of course, she co-founded with Cesar Chavez the National Farm Workers Association that merged later with the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in 1966 to form the United Farm Workers.

For sixty years, Dolores has devoted her life to organizing communities and helping them empower themselves to fight oppression so they can live in dignity. And I should say that extends beyond farm workers. It extends to immigrants, women, all Latinos, or members of the LGBT community. She has worked and spoken on behalf of all these communities, and she continues to train community leaders through her foundation and, of course, provide inspiration to all of us in the fight for social justice.

We’re very happy. It’s an extraordinary – I keep on going how happy I am and how extraordinary it is because it is. I mean It’s kind of nerve racking, but we’re very happy here. This One Life exhibition, Dolores Huerta, this is the first time I think we have a Latina that’s featured as part of this One Life exhibition. It will be continued until May of next year.

How many of you have seen the show already? Great, that’s a pretty good turnout. Those of you who didn’t raise your hand, I encourage you. You’ve got until May of next year. It’s just down the corridor here, not too far from where we are all at this evening. The show was curated by Taína Caragol , our wonderful Curator of Latino History & Art here at the Portrait Gallery and she’s going to be having this conversation with Dolores .

The show of course, some of you may know coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Delano Grape Strike, exactly this month fifty years ago. Some of those of us who were active at the time, me included, I won’t bore you with all the details, but I spent a lot of time, I was in law school, I probably should have spent more time in the books, but we were out with the secondary boycotts and the lettuce and grape strikes in front of Safeway. I don’t shop at Safeway anymore, but that’s OK. Don’t drink Gallo wine even if the strike is over. But many of us were out there. I know John Huerta who is here, the former General Counsel of the Smithsonian is here, and a former professor at UC Davis Law School, where I also happened to be educated. We spent a lot of time in those days out supporting the activities of the Union.

Dolores was picket captain. She served as lobbyist at the federal and state level on behalf of the Union, was the first woman to sit across the table to negotiate contracts with the agricultural corporation. Which was not an easy task, but she did it all, and thanks to her efforts, to her tenacity, the life of farm workers today has improved. I know Brad Goldstein is here from Farmworker Justice and can attest to that. We’ve got a long way to go, right Bruce? We’ve got a long way to go still, la lucha continua como dicen? We’ve got some more work to do, and you can bet that Dolores will be there all the way through. This exhibition and this program was supported through the Friends of the National Museum of the American Latino as well as through the Latino Initiatives Pool which we manage at the Latino Center.

Before I start, I know all of you have one of these cell phones. So I want you to take a moment now and make sure that it is off or in the vibrate position or whatever it needs to be in so we don’t hear it out of courtesy to the folks that I am about to bring out on stage. And without further ado let me bring out Taína Caragol , our Curator of Latino History & Art at the National Portrait Gallery, and the wonderful Dolores Huerta. Thank you so much.

 

Visual:

Taína Caragol and Dolores Huerta walk onstage and are seated, as Eduardo Diaz leaves the stage.

 

Taína:

Sí se puede What a wonderful crowd! Thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you Eduardo and Jewell. My name is Taína Caragol , and I’ve had the privilege and the pleasure of curating the exhibition, One Life: Dolores Huerta. And I have the great honor to interview Dolores tonight.

This exhibition, as Eduardo mentioned, is part of our One Life series and it is the first time that we devote one of these shows to a Latino figure, so we are absolutely thrilled about that. It is the second time we devote it to a living figure, so that gives us the possibility of hearing directly from Dolores about her experiences as an activist, as a community organizer, as a feminist, and just her very, very rich life. So, we want to thank you, Dolores, for accepting our invitation and for being here tonight.

Dolores Huerta:

Thank you.

 

Taína:

We will proceed with a conversation of about one hour and then you will all have the opportunity to ask questions, so let me just start with a very current question, are we fine on sound? OK. Good. Just a question about today. Dolores , you did not only travel from Bakersfield to Washington DC for this program.

 

Dolores:

Right.

 

Taína: You were also here to see the Pope, like many other people. So, I want to ask you whether he asked you for a selfie with you.

 

Dolores:

I wish.

 

Taína:

No, really, did you get to meet him? What is it about this Pope that is so appealing?

 

Dolores:

Well, I didn’t get to meet him in person, like many of the people I saw him from a distance. It was a wonderful experience to be in the presence of Pope Francis.

What I liked so much about all of his messages that he had, number one, and it’s kind of the messages that we use when we organize people, one of the messages is of course, that’s what he said to the Congress, was, you’ve got to work together, right? Let’s hope they do.

His other message was that you’ve got to take responsibility. He kind of emphasized that repeatedly. And I thought that was very good too because when we organize, and I do want to mention that the person that taught us how to organize was this gentleman named Fred Ross Sr., who is in the angle that you see in the Portrait Gallery. He’s the one that helped both Cesar Chavez and myself how to organize. The message that he taught us that we in turn teach other people when we organize them: you’ve got to take responsibility. You’ve got to do this. If you don’t do it, nobody is going to do it for you.

That’s a very strong message. And that they have to understand that unless they commit themselves to make the changes in their lives and in their community, nobody is going to change it for them. That they have to do it. And that was the message that the Pope was giving, over and over again, in the different messages.

And then the other message that he had, which I am going to tell all of my folks when I get back to California, is that you have to go out there and evangelize, right? That we have to go out there, literally have to go out there and organize. That’s the way I interpreted this message. We have to go out there and organize and just like the way the apostles did it. I think that is the message that he made at the mass that you have to go out there. And so, the knowledge that we have and the skills that we have, we can’t keep them to ourselves. We’ve got to share this, and this is the way that we make our community stronger because if we just live our little comfortable lives, and we don’t go out there and say, what’s a little chillier than where we are at, and we’ve got to go out there and that’s the way that we can really involve with other people.

And by involving them of course, I think the other thing that he’s talked about, about joy, and he talked about – at least my interpretation – of the Pope’s messages is that we have alegría, he said we have joy in our hearts, and when we go out there and we help other people. And I think that’s probably what I have found in my life too, that I think, oh my, what if I would have been like as a suburban housewife, you know what I mean?

And not been able to get out there, and by going out there and making, and I’m going to call these sacrifices, you know? And maybe taking the risks, then I wouldn’t be there today. I would have been a suburban housewife, you know?

 

Taína:

So talking about what led you to who you are today and being here today, can you tell us a bit about your childhood? Where were you born, how was your upbringing, your childhood?

 

Dolores: Well, I was born in New Mexico. Any manitos in the house? Alright, in Northern New Mexico in a coal mining town. My parents were both born in Dawson, New Mexico, which is right by the Colorado border. And my parents divorced, and my mother then brought us to California, and so I ended up growing up in California. My grandparents were also born in the state of New Mexico, on my mother’s side of the family, and I love to say this when they talk about, “Go back to Mexico,” you know? Anyway, and my great grandfather on my mother’s side was actually born in New York! In Rochester of New York, you know? So, you know, we’ve been here for a long time. Actually my great grandfather was actually in the Civil War on the Union side. Yeah. So when they think, you know, they say that we’re the newcomers, we’ve been here for a long time. A long, long time.

 

Taína:

So I have read that very often you give credit to your parents for very specific things they taught you that really – that shaped your personality and your life path.

 

Dolores:

Well, my mother especially, because she’s the one that raised us. And again, I kind of give this a credit, I think, to la cultura, our culture that we have, because that’s the way I think many of us in the Latino community are raised, you know, we are raised to share, and we are also raised to help other people. And it’s interesting because, again, talking about the Pope that he changed his name to Francis, in New Mexico, there was a lot of devotion to St. Francis Xavier, who also copied, you know, St. Francis of Assisi, the idea about helping the poor, and also you don’t have to ask for it. When you see somebody that needs assistance, or they’re in some kind of trouble, you shouldn’t wait for them ask for help. If you see somebody that needs help, it’s your obligation to help them. And the other thing is, never, never expect gratitude, you know, or any recompensation. When we do to help others we do if for that reason. If we do it for self-interest, then we’re taking away the grace of that act of helping someone. And I think that’s pretty much the way my mother raised us. I think when I say that I think it’s pretty much a part of our Latino culture, is that, you know, we see people in need and go out there to help them.

 

Taína:

And your father was a farm worker, a miner. He also worked in public office, right? Could you tell us a bit about that?

 

Dolores:

Yeah, my dad was a very, very smart man, a very handsome man. Moreno con ojos verdes. He was very dark, but he had green eyes, very charismatic, very intelligent. And he was an organizer. He loved to organize, he was a volunteer organizer for the mine workers union and then became elected as a state assembly man. But he also had a very hot temper, which sometimes I inherit, I have to admit, okay? What he did actually, he was expelled from the state assembly of New Mexico because he punched out, and anybody from New Mexico here might know José Montoya, who became a congressman leader, because he was working against the union, and he, my Dad, punched him out on the floor of the assembly, and then he was expelled. He was expelled.

But my Dad, he was very active in a lot of strikes. He was always a union man. He was always very strong. Anywhere that my Dad went to work, he organized a union. He was in some farm worker strikes in California, and he went to work for the Army base. He was a veteran also, he was in both the Korean War and World War II, and when he went to work at the Navy base he organized the union at the Navy base. And then he was also very supportive of our work in the Farm Workers Union. He was not a wealthy man, but he would send a check every single month.

 

Taína:

So you knew about union work, you knew about farm work from very early on, and of course you lived in Stockton, California which is an agricultural town as well.

 

Dolores:

Yeah, well, one thing about both my parents, and I think that, in our Latino community now, because you know we are, what, fifty five-plus million people in the United States of America, and one of our challenges that we have is getting our people to vote. Well, again because of being raised in New Mexico, we were always very civically engaged, you know, not only because my Dad was an assemblyman but the talk was always about who is going to run for office, and dicen que los Muertos votan en New Mexico, you know. Even the dead vote in New Mexico. That whole idea about voting was just something that was expected of someone, and people didn’t even think about not voting. My goodness that would have been just a terrible thing. And so I really think that helped me out too, later on, you know, as we do a lot of civic engagement work both in the Community Service Organization and United Farm Workers, and then of course with my own foundation, the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

 

Taína:

But initially, before becoming an organizer, you were a teacher, right?

 

Dolores:

Yeah.

 

Taína:

You studied to become a teacher. What led you to that career choice?

 

Dolores:

I was very fortunate that I met this Fred Ross Sr., that I mentioned before, and I met him in a house meeting, which we is a way we still organize in the Dolores Huerta Foundation. In the house meeting he showed us pictures of people in East Los Angeles that had come together, and you’d see a picture of a hundred people in a meeting, and I thought, “Wow, I’ve never saw that many Latinos in a meeting in my life!” And then he talked about how they brought in, you know, streetlights into East Los Angeles, they brought in sidewalks and gutters, health clinics. And then they got the first Latino elected to the City Council in Los Angeles, Ed Roybal, who was by the way his daughter is in the Congress right now, Lucille Roybal. And there had never been a Latino in the City Council of LA, with all the Latinos that are there.

 

But the one that really hooked me, he showed a picture of … a newspaper clipping how they had sent the police to prison for beating up Mexican Americans. They sent fourteen police to prison, and I thought, “Wow, I want to belong that group!” Because, you know, as youngsters, like Chicano and Latino kids, and African American kids, they would always be racially profiled, were always being harassed by the police. So when I saw that picture, I thought, “I want to be sure that I can organize people,” to kind of confront the police harassment that we all faced.

 

Taína:

So Fred came to Stockton to establish a chapter there, and to volunteer.

 

Dolores:

Yes.

 

Taína:

And immediately you left your job as a teacher, or…?

 

Dolores:

No, I stayed at teaching for a while, it was a few years later, because I was just a full-time volunteer for the Community Service Organization, that organization established, and by the way that organization, people don’t know this, but we passed a lot of laws that were quite historic. We passed laws that you could register for your Driver’s License in Spanish, that you could register voters door-to-door, that you could get your ballots in the Spanish language, which was a first. We got disability insurance for farm workers, and one very historic law that we passed that today makes millions of people that you did not have to be a citizen of the United States to get public assistance. That if you were a resident and you had your Green Card, then you could get public assistance. So today we have millions of people that are covered by Obamacare because of that law we’ve passed way back then in 1961. Who knew, right? Who knew?

 

Taína:

And you were quite instrumental to all those efforts because you started as a volunteer but you were so talented that you were given a job as a lobbyist, right?

 

Dolores:

Well, it was a non-profit organization and never had very much money, I think Cesar Chavez was the first person that was hired, and another person and eventually they asked me to also be the Executive Secretary of the organization, so I moved to Los Angeles, and worked in Los Angeles for a few years.

 

But it was actually when working in Los Angeles that Cesar and I, when we talked about starting the union, we actually had the meeting to start the Farm Workers Union in East Los Angeles, you know, because that’s when we had both worked in trying to organize farm workers, and Cesar organized a large group in Oxnard, and he turned them over to the Packing House Workers Union. I organized two groups of farm workers, one of them we turned that group over to the Butchers Union, the meat cutters, and then it kind of dissolved. Then I formed another group called AWA, Agricultural Workers Association, and we brought in the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations], and then they funded it, but then it wasn’t working. And I hired Larry Itliong, the Filipino organizer, with a black, and an OP, and a Mexican organizer, but then I left that because they started working with labor contractors. So at that point is when we both Cesar and I were working for CSO [Community Service Organization] at the time. And that’s when Cesar said, “Well, you know what, if we don’t start the union for farm workers, they will never have one.” And I thought he was joking when he said that. He said, “Yeah” he said, “if we don’t start a” – the way he put it was, “if you and I do not do it.” And I started laughing. And he said, “No, really, I’m serious.” And then he said in the next breath, “But we will never see a national union for farm workers in our lifetime.” And I said, “Why, Cesar?” He said, “Because the growers are too rich, they’re too powerful, and they’re too racist.” And that was true. And it’s true today.

 

Taína:

So you left. You left CSO in 1962, you founded the union together, the National Farm Workers Association. What was it like to work with Cesar Chavez ? How did you distribute responsibilities?

 

Dolores:

Well, we had worked together a lot in the Community Service Organization when we were passing all these laws as I spoke about, I was a lobbyist in Sacramento, and Cesar was the director of CSO, so we were working in tandem. We worked very well together. When we started the union – and as a feminist I have to say this, that Cesar said, we had this conversation, and Cesar said, “Well” he said, “you know, one of us has to be the spokesperson for the union,” and he said, “I think I should be the spokesperson.” And I said, “Of course Cesar you should be.” Turn back the clock as a feminist and I would said, “You know what, Cesar, let’s do it half and half. You be the spokesperson half the time, I’ll be the spokesperson half the time.

You know, the Civil Rights Movement at that time in the ‘60s that, and I say this before a lot of women, I know that a lot has been written on this by Gloria Anzaldúa and many other Latino writers that, and African American writers, that we were just worried. We were so focused on helping our gente, our people, that we were not thinking of ourselves as women or as feminists, you know. We just wanted to make sure to end this discrimination, and the oppression, and so we weren’t thinking about, “Hey, what about women? Right?” And I really didn’t come to that realization until later, even though my mother was a feminist.

 

Taína Caragol:

So, you started organizing, and how receptive were farm workers initially? Were they ready for that immediately?

 

Dolores:

Well, I think the people are never ready. I think one of the things when people are oppressed, is that they start accepting their condition and they often kind of blame themselves. Or growing up in the ‘50s, in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, you know, there was a lot of racial discrimination, and it was just the way that it was. I remember one of my girlfriends, she was told in high school – and she wanted to be a nurse – and they said, “Oh no, you can’t be a nurse, you got to take domestic work, because the only kind of work you’ll ever be able to do is to be housekeeper or a house maid.” Of course, she didn’t pay attention to them, went ahead, and became a nurse. But I think a lot of us, you know, and I’m sure the stories of a lot of Latinos, we were put into the business school, boys were also put into shop you know, because the expectation was never that we should go to college or anything like that. I did go to college unlike many of my friends that either dropped out or didn’t go to college. Unfortunately, though they were very, very smart. So that’s kind of the way that it was. And I think with the farm workers too, it’s kind of… That’s the way it was, and they didn’t think that they could make a difference. So our job was to convince them again that they could make a difference, and that they had the power to do it. And that’s why I was talking about that they had to take that responsibility to make that happen. And that’s what we would do in the house meetings.

 

Taína:

That must have been amazing. You must have seen a transformation, right? I mean from that, perhaps resistance at the beginning to real momentum in 1965, when you joined the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee of the Filipino Union in the strike.

 

Dolores:

Like I said before, actually we started this group AWA that became AWOC later. You know, so I kind of organized that group and that transformed in the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. But I started talking about how I was organized. See, I was organized in a house meeting. So exactly the way that Fred Ross organized me, this is the same way that we organized the workers, little by little, to make them understand, look at this, these are the conditions that exist, but you don’t have to accept these conditions. We have the power to change them. And it’s the same type of format that I used in my own organization, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, the people, the same thing. This is what’s happening, this is what made these conditions exist, but we can change them. How can we? We don’t have the kind of power to do it. Like we just said to the farm workers. They don’t have money, they’re not citizens, they don’t speak English, but they have the power to change it. So the only thing that they needed is their own person, this is all that you need. And you know, when we think about the farm workers’ movement, and we can talk about the strike later on, but what they did, it was the farm workers themselves that did it. They are the ones that went out there and got people to support the strike.

 

Taína:

Can you talk about the multi-cultural aspect of the union?

 

Dolores:

Well, the union from the beginning was primarily mostly Latino. We did have a lot of Puerto Rican farm workers, by the way. They were brought in from Puerto Rico to work in the fields, and it pretty much started as a Latino union. In fact, our first strike that we had, before the big Delano grape strike, was a strike by the Puerto Rican workers and one of the big companies. But at that point, we didn’t get any contracts because unfortunately, the farm workers from Michoacán, they built a strike of the Puerto Rican farm workers. So we had everyone go back to work together, because we don’t want them any fighting between the two groups.

 

Taína:

Right. Well, how was the interaction between the different groups of Filipinos and Puerto Ricans? I read also that there were many workers, Anglo workers, Mexican and Mexican-American. What were… where there…?

 

Dolores:

At the beginning, I would say that there was,when the growers would do this purposely, they would pit the Filipino crew against the Mexican crew, against the Puerto Rican crew, against the Anglo crews. And there were some African-Americans also. “Oh you were not working as hard as the Puerto Rican crew that were working better. Or the Filipino crew, they were working better.” And they would pit people against each other. So that one thing the Delano grape strike did was it brought everybody together. Because we were all together in the strike.

 

Taína:

Can you tell us a little bit about how was it to be a woman at the forefront of the movement? You know, in a leading position. What was the reaction from the membership of the Union, and also from other people who were in leadership positions, you know, and from the growers themselves?

 

Dolores:

Well, we started organizing because I had been one of the initial organizers of the Union, again doing these house meetings, most of the farm workers already knew me. And the thing we have to remember, and I should mention this, that when the Delano grape strike started, when the Mexican and Puerto Rican farm workers and the African-American farm workers came out on strike, we had been organizing those workers for three years. Because we started the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, and our plan was to organize all the workers throughout the whole Central Valley of California. And so we had one big huge general strike all the way from Bakersfield, California, which is right north of Los Angeles, all the way to Stockton, California. The whole Central Valley. And because we wanted all the growers to negotiate together, so we had been doing these house meetings up and down the Central Valley. We had committees everywhere up and down Central Valley, because we were going to organize for five years and do a big general strike. But what happened is that when the Filipino workers were out on strike, then we had to support them. And that was kind of what changed our whole plan that we had before. But on September the 16th, when the Mexican and the Puerto Rican farm workers came out on strike, people think, “Wow. All these thousands of workers came out on strike”. But we had been organizing them for three years before the strike. So it didn’t just happen like that. In the Chavez movie it looks like Cesar walked through the fields and came out on strike. No, no.

[Laughter] It didn’t happen like that.

 

Taína :

[Laughter] It takes longer than that.

 

Dolores:

It took three years of organizing them in their casas, in their houses, and again telling them, “You can change this. You got the power to change it.” And the other things that we did before the strike started was we started a newspaper called The Macriado. And we had that in Spanish, and so we would give the farm workers information about what was going on, how the growers were stealing water from the government, one of the issues that we had. And we had Don Sotaco, he was kind of a cartoon character, who always went around with a short handled hoe, then he used a long handled hoe, bet he didn’t know any better. And you know, kind of making fun of some of the practices that the growers made the farm workers do. And we also started the first Farm Worker Credit Union in 1966. That was the first Farm Worker Credit Union in the whole United States of America. And it was wonderful, because we let the workers borrow a $100, right? And Richard Chavez, Cesar’s brother, who later became my husband, he mortgaged his house so we could start the credit union, that’s how we started the credit union. But it was really funny because, you know, you had seen all the workers lining up for a $100 to get a loan for a $100. But at that time, the workers were only making about 50 cents an hour, 60 cents an hour.

 

Taína :

So that was like an early version of the micro loan.

 

Dolores:

Yes, exactly.

 

Taína:

That’s so interesting. You were saying before that, when we were talking about your, how you divided all responsibilities with Cesar, that you were not necessarily thinking about your role as a woman. But you did have a very big impact, and you were very inspiring to many women, farm workers, who joined the movement in a perhaps even more public way because of you. And so I, the other day I was giving a tour of the exhibition to a Chicana poet, Diana Garcia, and it was incredibly beautiful and inspiring. And because she was herself part of the movement as a student, she studied in Fresno State College. And she was telling me how meaningful it was for her to see someone like you at the forefront of the movement. How inspiring she found that. And especially because you were the age of her mother, and you had children of your own, and yet your way of being a woman was so different from the traditional way that she was taught at home. So that was very powerful for her. And I wonder what, you know we always have people we look up to and who, I guess, you already said that your mother inspired you to be that way. Was it her example that led you to be so unconventional?

 

Dolores:

I think so, because my mother, well, first of all my mother was a business woman, and she was a very, very savvy business woman, and she was always out in the community. In fact, in the Community Service Organization, she always won all of the prizes, and she registered the most voters, and she sold the most, whatever contest we had, my mother had to be the winner. [Laughter] But she was a very gentle person, and great, different personality for myself, muy quieta, but you know, very, very strong. Very, very quiet, very powerful woman. She started the first Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce in our town. She was always the leader in the community, always helping people. I was a girl scout for ten years of my life, I did that from the time I was eight until I was eighteen, and my mother volunteered to become one of our scout leaders. So she was very, very active in the community. In fact, looking back on my early life, my mother was always pushing, I was actually very quiet and very shy. And she was always pushing me. And again as a middle class youngster, I took the dancing lessons, and the music lessons. I played the violin, I played the piano. You know, I danced in public, and she was always pushing me. My mother was a fantastic cook, you know, and looking back, I never got that skill. [Laughter]

 

Taína :

You got others, though.

 

Dolores:

So she was kind of responsible for my always being out there.

 

Taína :

A few moments ago, you were talking about the newspaper of the Union, and there was a whole cultural movement that emerged around the farm workers movement and the Chicano movement. Can you talk about that multi-disciplinary aspect, you know, the theater, El Teatro Campesino, the music around the movement? Can you talk about that? How important was that?

 

Dolores:

Well yes, the Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez, his contribution was just wonderful. And remember that, in the farm workers Union, once a strike broke out, oh by the way, I have to go back to when we had that decision, because I want to include Helen Chavez in my conversation, Cesar’s wife. By the way, Helen is a very strong woman. Her father had been in the revolution in Mexico. Her maiden name is Helen Favela. And she and her sister, very, very strong women. When we first went to Delano… of course by the way I have to mention that I was going through divorce, I had seven children at that time, and I had to leave a couple of my kids back in Stockton, took my other ones with me. I left my youngest daughter, two daughters, with some cousins in Stockton, took the rest of them with me. And we all moved into Cesar’s house, you know. Cesar, had eight children, and then I had my five kids, and we, you know, we’re all in Helen’s house all there together. And Helen’s sisters, Petra and Theresa, they would actually help us. They would go down to the food bank and they would bring in the food that we had to eat, because we were doing this without any money. That’s one of the scary things we you think about it. People thought in Stockton I was crazy. I’m going to leave a teaching job, I’m in the middle of a divorce, taking my kids down to Delano, it’s like running away with a circus, right? You know? [Laughter] Literally, and people thought that I had just gotten completely nuts, right? And many people, they said “Oh”, one of my compadres, “Your children are all going to grow up to become drug addicts. What are you doing, leaving?” There were only three of us Latino teachers at the time in our school district that were bilingual, only three of us in the whole district. So I had a lot of criticism from family and friends. For years, until huelga became famous, now they all like me, right? [Laughter] So it was difficult, you know, it was difficult because, and then we were pretty much living like the farm workers, you know, because we had to get our food from the service commodity. So we had the oatmeal, and the cornmeal, and the rice, and the beans, and, you know, eating like the farm workers we were eating. It was a very good lesson for me, coming from this wonderful, middle class background that I had growing up. And it was good, it was very good. But then, so the day we had the strike meeting after the Filipinos went out on strike, and so we’re having this meeting, and everybody was worried about what’s Helen going to say. Helen wasn’t part of our executive board, but she was Cesar’s, wife, everybody was worried is she going to support this crazy thing that we were going to do, go on strike with no money. And it was wonderful, because when they came to Helen, and she said, and this line by the way is in the movie, which I asked the people to put that in the movie, when they came to Helen, they said “So are we going to go on strike?” And she says “We are a union, aren’t we? Of course we are going to go on strike. Of course we are going to go on strike.” And in the strike, the women were always on the picket lines with the children. This is not in Cesar Chavez movie, but actually, when Helen was arrested, she was arrested with a lot of the other farm worker women and the children. They took them all to jail. That was like the Salt of the Earth movie. So that was a very good thing that we had all of the women involve

 

Taína :

Going back to the role of these other cultural expressions in the movement, can you tell us more about that? About the music, about the theater… about the… yeah.

 

Dolores:

Well, the strike went on for years. It started in 1965. It didn’t end until 1970. And during about half of that time, of course Luis Valdez was with us, he came to do work again with no money, you know. And when he talked to Cesar, he said, and you know, in fact I’m the one that had Luis Valdez came down to Delano, and we did a little teatro, and we brought Cesar to come and see the teatro, and he liked it. And he said “I would like to help you guys with the teatro” And then Cesar told me, “But you realize you’re not going to get paid anything.” So it was totally a volunteer operation. So every Friday night, we had the new teatro plays, we had the music, the songs that Luis would compose. And his actors came right out of the farm workers themselves, out of the strikers. And they were very, very good actors. So every Friday we had the Friday night meeting with the songs and the theater, and people looked forward to that. After you know, being out all during week in the hot sun, we get out there like early in the morning, before they were bringing the strike breakers in to break in the strike up, and we’d be out there before the sun came up. And then at night, we were there sol a sol, and then from sunup to sundown. And then in the evening, we had to go follow the strike breakers, wherever they had them housed, in a labor camp or in motels, to ask them to support the strike. And so we had to organize them at night. It was very hard, you know, we just didn’t have time to rest. Because again, from sunup to sundown, and then we’ll be out till maybe 10 o’clock at night, and then have to get up at 3 o’clock the next morning. It was very hard.

Taína :

Can you talk about he permanent gains of the movement?

 

Dolores:

Well, the gains that we finally made out of that first huelga, and then we have to add the boycott, I guess, because we couldn’t win just with a strike. And the reason we couldn’t win is because the growers they went to courts, and they got these court orders, these injunctions, to limit the pickets. So, here you have these huge fields. By the way, you know, California is agribusiness. So a small family farmer in California would have several hundred workers. So the fields were huge, and when they got these court orders, you could only have, like, five pickets maybe to a big field. And so when we would break those injunctions, and have more than five people and they would haul us off to jail, you know. And so we got arrested many, many times, so we were not winning. We were winning, but we weren’t, because we was so close to the Mexican Border, that they could go down to the Mexican Border and bring more workers in. Or from Texas, and bring people in from Texas to break the strike. And so, luckily, we had this one volunteer attorney, named Stuart Weinberg, and he said to us, “Why don’t you guys try a boycott?” And we thought “Oh, that’s a good idea.” Ok? So we had people, our volunteers, by the way we had a lot of young volunteers also during the Vietnam War. A lot of young people came, and they volunteered to work with us, again, with no pay. So many of these young volunteers went out into the cities, they hitchhiked all the way to New York, and to St Louis. We started the first boycott, Shelly Boycott. It was a growing company. And I want to tell you an interesting story you probably won’t hear anywhere else: when the President of Mexico came, Calderón, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the dinner at the White House. There was a gentleman sitting next to me, and I wanted to talk to Calderón in Spanish, right, but this fella next to me kept kind of wanting to talk to me. So I finally have it up and started talking to him. [Laughter] And he said to me, “Do you remember me?” And I said “No, I really don’t.” And he said, “If I say the word Shelly,” this is where we had the first contract, right? He said… I said “I negotiated that first contract with the farm workers.”

 

Taína :

In 1966.

 

Dolores:

And he said “Well I was an attorney for Shelly at that time. And I went down to Delano to see what the fuzz and the strike was all about. The corporation asked me to go down there. He said, “And I looked at the records. And they had the names of these workers, and next to the name of each worker they had 25 cents that they were deducting from their paychecks.” And so he asked them, “What are these deductions for?” And they said, “That’s for the water they’re drinking.” And he said, “I don’t think the corporation will be very happy about this.” He said, “You better stop charging them that money.” And that may have been why they had decided to, in addition to that boycott, to settle and sign the contract. I’m going to tell you who that person was, you would never guess in a million years. It was Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. And that was him. That’s something. [Laughter]

 

Taína :

So you were telling me, Dolores, about the permanent gains of the movement.

 

Dolores:

Well, when you ask farm workers that question, they’re always going to say, “The toilets.” The toilets in the fields, because they did not have toilets. Especially for the women workers. You know, the embarrassment of them having to try to find somewhere, because these fields, they are not close to town, they’re not close to gas stations or anything. They’re way, way isolated out there. So the toilets, the cold drinking water, because workers would have to drink out of one tub. You’d have like one maybe a soda can, or beer can with a little open. All the crew, maybe 40, 50 people had to drink out of that one can. And if they had water, it was usually hot, if they had it at all. Very often, they wouldn’t have any water at all for workers. So relief periods, and eventually we got an employment insurance for farm workers, because, you know, Ronald Reagan, the Governor then of California, even though the legislation passed for employment insurance for farm workers, so that they can get a check, you know, between periods when they were not working, he refused to sign that law, he vetoed it three times in a row. Anyway, so we got unemployment insurance for the workers, and many, many other things later on. And of course, the ultimate gain was the right to organize. The right to have a contract. The right to sit down and negotiate with the employers over their working conditions. And then of course with the contracts later on, we were able to get health plans for the farm workers. First time in the history of the United States, that farm workers had health plans that covered the entire family, not just the worker. And by the way it was single payer, ok? It was single payer. And it was interesting. The attorneys said, “Oh, we have to go to Blue Shield or Blue Cross. And we said “Why?” You know Cesar never went to high school, right? He never went to high school. So he thought, “We don’t need those insurance companies. They send us some money, and then we pay the doctors.” This single payer. So were able to get really, really good health plans for farm workers, and death benefits for the farm workers if the farm worker died. And then later on a pension plan for the farm workers. So these are all, you know, things that the farm workers had never had before. And with the bill, they had the right to organize, which means that when they tried to organize themselves into a union, and if the employer requires a worker or pressures a worker, retaliates against them, they get fined. They get a fine. And now, in later years, one of the bad things that’s happened with the Farm Workers Union is that even though we were able to, you know, get these laws passed, often the laws were not enforced. And so more recently, Governor Jerry Brown supported a law that if the growers refused to sit down and negotiate the contract, that the Union can take them to court. As a result of that, in most recent years, the United Farm Workers has been able to take many of the growers to court. They have signed contracts on companies, that I actually organized back in 1991, ‘92, and we are just barely getting those contracts right now. So it’s like Cesar said: “The growers were too powerful, too rich and too racist.” And they resist to this day, giving farm workers the kind of working conditions and safety conditions that they need.

 

Taína :

How much has changed or remained the same in respect to farm workers now?

 

Dolores:

Well, I think that the Union, although it doesn’t have all of the contracts that we had back in the ‘70s. When the Union has a contract in one area, then all of the growers, the surrounding companies, they will match those wages, and they will have higher wages, higher than the minimum wage that workers usually get. And also match the working conditions that the workers have. So it’s a big help.

 

Taína :

I think very much about your motto of Si se puede that you coined in 1972, and about the role of optimism in any struggle. Can you tell us about that?

 

Dolores:

Well, you want to know how that came about? Shall I tell that story?

 

Taína :

Yeah.

 

Dolores:

Well, actually Cesar had three fasts, water-only fasts, the first one that he did in Delano, because he was afraid the workers would turn to violence. And that’s kind of a funny story, too, because I was in New York on the boycott, and Cesar called me and he said “I’m afraid the workers are going to turn to violence.” And I said, “Oh what are they doing Cesar?” He said, “They’re throwing cow pies at the strike breakers.” You know what the cow pies are, right? … “Really, Cesar, really?” … But he was so worried about people turning to violence because the strike had gone on for so long that he did the first twenty-five day water-only fast, and then the second fast he did in Arizona because they had passed a law that if anybody said huelga, strike, or boycott, you could go to prison for six months, you know. And so we were trying to stop that law, and they finally passed it. So Cesar went to Arizona and he did a second water-only fast for twenty-five days. While he was fasting, and we were trying to get some of our Chicano leaders, you know our professional Latinos, to come and join us and to support us. And they said to me in a meeting I’m having with them, because every night we had a mass and we had a rally. And they said to me “Oh Dolores, you can do all of that stuff in California, no se suede in Arizona no se puede.” In Arizona you can’t do it. And I said to them, Si se puede! Si se puede! in Arizona! Si se puede! in Arizona!” So when I went back that night to report this to our meeting that we were having there. And I told them, “Si se puede!” And everybody jumped up, and everybody shouted, started shouting: “Si se puede! Si se puede!” So that became our rallying cry, you know. So it came out of the universe, and now it is out there in the universe. Si se puede!

 

Taína :

It’s the kind of motto that we all need and that helps us, you know, just go on every day and embrace causes and do important work. Can you talk – speaking about important work, can you talk about what your Foundation does, please?

 

Dolores:

Well, I left the Farm Workers Union in 2002, and Cesar passed away in 1993, and I felt that we needed younger leadership. I didn’t know I was going to live this long, but I’m glad I’m still around. Anyway, so we decided we had Arturo Rodriguez become the President of the Union. Arty had been a very good organizer, very good administrator, and he’s still now, of course, now President of the United Farm Workers. When Cesar and I got started, I guess about the time when we got all the contracts, we didn’t realize that we were going to lose those contracts later on in 1973. That’s another big story about the Teamsters Union, and President Nixon and Allan Grant of the American Farm Bureau Federation. The President of the Teamsters, Frank Fitzsimmons, Allan Grant, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and President Nixon, they really conspired to get rid of the Farm Workers Union. And I think, looking back, that one of the reasons was not even so much about that we organized the workers, because God knows the growers were so wealthy and so rich, it was because of our political activity, because of the work we had done to get Robert Kennedy elected. You know, we worked with Robert Kennedy, of course we lost him, and we were doing a lot of electoral work. We always did that, the electoral work, and I think that they could see we were getting a lot of progressives elected from California. And I think that’s why they decided they had to get rid of the union. And the chiefs just came in in 1973. And there’s a movie about that, called – that you can get from United Farm Workers called “Fighting for Our Lives”. And I recommend that people get that movie and see that. It’s a long story. But anyway, so we had to kind of rebuild it. Cesar and I had always thought that, because we had about 100,000 people under contract at one time, and we thought, “Oh boy, in another five years we will be able to have a national union, and then we want to go back to organizing the communities,” again because of our electoral work. Because no matter what we did, we had to go back to the cities to make sure we got the people elected to office, and that was kind of our dream. So that’s exactly what I did, I received a gift from the Puffin Foundation of $100,000. So I put that money into an escrow account, and decided to go back to organizing, doing grassroots organizing to the house meetings. So that’s what my organization is doing now. We are doing a lot of work on civic engagement, we work a lot with Latino immigrants, the first generation, recent immigrants. And the work that we’ve done in making sure people get organized to vote, we have just done a study, and where we have been working, our people are voting 15% higher than the areas in our county. And not only that. But eleven of the people that had come out of our organization, have gotten themselves elected to office. Okay? [Applause] They’re taken over city council, the school boards, the [inaudible]… And they’re doing a lot of work on education because of the huge suspension, and expulsion of Latinos and African American students. We currently have a lawsuit that we’ve filed against the current high school board, because of the, the suspensions and expulsions, and not giving our kids a quality education. So we’re doing that work there, we’re doing a lot of health work, doing a lot of door to door work on the Obamacare to get people signed up. We’re doing work on nutrition, taking all of the sodas out of the schools. So we got four school districts that no longer have sodas. Not even chocolate milk. Take out the chocolate milk too, which is kind of hard. [Laughter and applause]. Doing what’s on nutrition and physical activity. We have our youth group, and we take them camping to the Sequoias. And also they do a lot of artwork to cover up the graffiti in the neighborhoods. It’s civic engagement, it’s health. Teen pregnancy prevention. You know, getting the Latinos to be able to say, eso esa cosa“No.” They call it, “That thing.” No. It’s sexo, okay? [Laughter] Everybody, let’s say the word, 1-2-3 sexo!, And they all go, “Oh!” They hide, they giggle.

So you know it’s all grassroots work that we’re doing. And developing that local leadership, they’ve gotten – we have one little town, they got about eighteen streets now, that they have curbs, sidewalks and gutters. We have two neighborhood parks in two different communities. One of our committees actually petitioned, did the registration, and got a bond issue, passed to build a gymnasium at their school. A huge, beautiful gymnasium. So it’s like this infrastructure work with streetlights and sewers, getting homes connected to sewers, very basic things. At the bottom of it – and when I talk about all these things that people have done, they are the ones that do it. We organize them, and then they have to volunteer to do the work. And in doing the volunteering, that’s how we build a leadership. It’s really beautiful when you see like one of our abuelitas said, “I can’t watch my grandchildren anymore. I’m too busy.” [Laughter] “I’m out there getting petitions and getting signatures, you know. Don’t bring the grandkids here, I no han tiempo” [Laughter] Too busy, you know? And that’s basically our goal. We’re trying to also build a permanent voter structure to get people really engaged in voting.

 

Taína :

Your energy is contagious.

So we put on our Facebook page, we announced that we were going to have this event. And we gave people the opportunity to ask, to send their questions, you know. Those who were not able to come here tonight. And so we got two questions from there that I selected, that I would love to ask you. One is, “What was the role of visual arts in the movement, and particularly how important was the Royal Chicano Air Force, which produced a lot of art in support of the Union for the movement.”

 

Dolores:

Art and music I think have always been a part of the movement from the beginning, and José Montoya, who was an artist, and his brother, Malaquias Montoya, and all of those people in Sacramento, the Royal Chicano Air Force. Very, very important because, you know, we were in Delano, we would have all these marches. I didn’t mention the march to Sacramento.

And so we would call the RCAF, Royal Chicano Air Force, and we’d say, “Ok, we need a thousand flags, we need posters, and we need [inaudible] for the people.” And they would make sure that they would have them by the time the workers got in. They were sometimes up all night working on the flags and everything. They were like our support. Most of them were college students at that point in time. And again, when you combine art and music and civic engagement, I think Sacramento, California, is a good example of what they did there. Because they were eventually able to get one of their own members to become the Mayor of Sacramento, Joe Serna, and he transformed that city. He literally transformed that city when he was the Mayor of Sacramento. He made it into a vibrant community. This was a farm worker kid from [inaudible] California, you know, who went to college, was an activist in the RCAF, and then became the Mayor of Sacramento. But it shows that’s a powerful combination when we have all of that together, the Teatro, the music, and the civic engagement, we can make some incredible changes.

 

Taína :

Great.

Then the final question that came from one of our web visitors, is. “What advice do you give young activists?”

 

Dolores:

The main thing is not to get discouraged, because as you go doing activist work, you have some times that you just don’t win. You know, you have set backs, like we had back in 1973, when the Teamsters came in – and I didn’t mention this, but we had people that were killed during that time. You know, that’s really, when you think about it because of your activist work that you’re doing, that somebody actually gets killed. That’s very disheartening. And it takes a lot of heart to be able to go forward and continue the work. So not to get discouraged. Just look at the victories, you know, and kind of step back a little bit so that you don’t get overwhelmed, so you don’t get too tired and realize that you can keep going. The other thing I want to say… like myself, I came from a middle class background, and I remember when I first went to Delano, I thought, “Maybe the best thing that I can contribute is that I can type,” right? And I told Cesar, “I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t feel like I am really going to be able to help organize the workers” And he said, “Look” he said, “Remember this: If they didn’t need you to help them, they would have already did it by themselves.” Right? Sometimes I think we have a tendency – and we always say this – one thing that we never want to do when we try to help people, is feel sorry for them. Because when we feel sorry for people, actually we take away their dignity. I have to mention Manuel Chavez, who was Cesar’s cousin, was an incredible organizer, and Manuel was one of those kind of people, he put it on the workers immediately. You got to do this. You know, this is your work. This is your life. You’re the ones that have to take the responsibility. And again, like what the Pope was saying today. And I think sometimes it’s hard to do that, because we know people are oppressed or they are poor, or whatever, and we want to feel sorry for them. And when we do that, it’s like a poison, because we don’t want people to be victims. We want them to have their dignity. They may be poor, but they still have dignity, you know, regardless of what kind of life situation they’re in. And I think that’s one thing that young activists have to understand that. Don’t feel sorry for people. Just remind them that they have power. And the power is where? In their person, right?

 

Taína :

We are going to open it up to questions from the floor.

 

Visual:

Audience members speak from the darkened theater and Dolores responds from the stage.

 

Audience Member #1:

Were you ever scared? For your life? Were you ever scared for your life?

 

Other Audience Members in Unison:

Did you fear for your life? Were you ever scared?

 

Dolores:

Oh, yes. I had some scary, very scary situations during the strike. The growers would try to run us down with their cars, we had rifles pointed at us. I had one horrible moment when somebody came to my house. It was I guess about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. I had actually been working in New York City on the boycott, so nobody even knew that I was in town. Except we had had a meeting with the growers in Los Angeles, and so the growers knew that I was in town. I been to New York, went to LA, went to Delano, and I was at my house, and about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, someone knocked on my door. And I said, “Who is it?” And they said, “Helen sent me” That’s Cesar’s wife. So I thought something was wrong with Cesar. And when I opened the door, there was a latch on my door, because my son Emilio, who is here in the audience somewhere, he insisted that I put that latch on the door, okay, before I went to sleep. And he insisted that I put the porch light on. He’s now an attorney, I don’t know if that has any connection [laughter]. But when I went to open the door, they tried to push the door open, and then I realized that they weren’t coming from Helen Chavez. So luckily, I was able to slam the door shut. Then they went and they broke – Emilio, he was asleep on the sofa, under a picture window in our house – and they smashed the window. And all of the glass – luckily he jumped quickly and was not, you know, hurt by the glass – so I grabbed him and my other son was with me at the time, who was his younger brother, and we just locked ourselves in the bathroom. And I thought, what am I going to do? I have nothing to protect myself with. I had a jar of cold cream… [Laughter] But I was so scared, that I was just shaking like this, I mean literally, because my kids were there. And they kept going around the house, around the house, and we had a little dog, they were kicking the dog and barking. And they finally went away, but it was the scariest moment of my life. I put Emilio through the window in the bathroom, so that he could see if we could find some help from somebody, because we were being terrorized. I didn’t know what these men were going to do, and he saw that there were two men, he saw their cars. And then we found out later that it was a foreman from one of the growers who had been in that the meeting in Los Angeles. They terrorized me in the same way they terrorized another woman, one of the workers who actually lived in Texas, and they did the same thing to her in her house. So we had some very scary moments during the strike, because you never knew what was going to happen.

 

Audience Member #2:

We have another question over here.

 

Audience Member #3:

Hola, Señora Huerta, un placer tenerla acá entre nosotros. Voy a hacer la pregunta en español y espero que alguien pueda traducirla.

 

Translator:

Welcome Ms. Huerta for your presence, and I’m going to ask the question in Spanish.

 

Audience Member #3:

Vi la exposición y los videos.

 

Translator:

I saw the exhibition in the videos.

En uno de los videos, en la conversación o la charla que ustéd hace

 

Translator:

The conversation or the talk that you give in the video

 

Audience Member #3:

La noté una mujer joven, simple, con un poco de recelo ante el papel que le estaba tocando asumir en ese momento.

 

Translator:

Yea, I noticed that you were, you know, as you said in the conversation before, a shy woman who was a little bit, you know, distrained at that time, and go ahead.

 

Audience Member #3:

Me pregunto si ahora, después de tanto tiempo, cuando usted recuerda ese momento de decidir involucrarse en la unión.

 

Translator:

And I wonder if you could recall the time when you finally decided that you were going to get yourself directly involved with the Union?

 

Audience Member #3:

Después de tanto tiempo….

 

Translator:

After all this time…

 

Audience Member #3:

Díganos, ¿qué piensa? A veces pensará: “Estaba loca.”

 

Translator:

Now after all this time, did you think now, “Wow. I was really crazy,” or what?

 

Dolores:

No.

 

Audience Member #3

Gracias:

 

Translator:

Thank you.

 

Dolores:

Actually, I prayed a lot about the decision, because I knew it was a big decision that I was going to make, especially since I was in the middle of a divorce. And I had all these children, and I knew that it was a big risk that I was taking. [Speaking in Spanish] Y en see momento estaba pasando por este divorcio, pensé cómo estaba voy a hacer esto, sin dinero.

 

Translator:

And at that time I was going through this divorce, I thought how I was going to do this, without money.

 

Dolores:

And no child support, by the way.

 

Translator:

I didn’t… Child support, obviously.

 

Dolores:

But I had I guess this is what they call a calling. Pero es como muchos dicen que tienen una llamada, algo que sentía tan fuerte.

 

Translator:

As they say when you have a calling, that you feel so strongly.

 

Dolores:

Sabía que me habían enseñado cómo organizar a la gente.

 

Translator:

You know, someone taught me how – my parents in this case – taught me how to organize people.

 

Dolores:

Well mostly Fred Ross, that’s the one that taught us, but anyway.

 

Translator:

Okay… sorry.

 

Dolores:

I thought that maybe, and I knew how to organize people, we had been doing that in the Community Service Organization. And this was the one way that farm workers could finally change their lives. [Speaking Spanish] Nos damos cuenta de que si no organizamos a los trabajadores agrícolas en este momento, tenía que hacerlo, era la única vez que podíamos mejorar sus condiciones de vida y sus vidas.

 

Translator:

We realize that if we did not organize the farm workers at this time – we had to do it, it was the only time that we could improve their living conditions and their lives.

 

Dolores:

Y yo sentía que tenía que hacerlo.

 

Translator:

And I had to do it. I felt I had to do it. Question over here.

 

Audience Member #4:

Hi Dolores, it’s Laura. You’ve talked a little bit. You mentioned that there was sacrifice involved and told a little bit right now about the, you know, the terrorizing. And you’ve spoken in the past about the impact on your children, you know, of you being so active. But one thing I don’t hear you talk about very much is the physical abuse you took in the hands of the police, landing you in the hospital. Can you tell that story?

 

Dolores:

There’s one of the photos in the exhibit which shows me in the hospital bed, and Cesar is sitting there sitting next to me. And Cesar had been doing this third fast, which is thirty-six days water-only fast, which he did in Delano. And after that fast, we all went off in different ways to start another boycott of grapes, and this time we looked at the pesticides. Cesar did that fast to call attention to all the poisons that are on our food, and to let the public be aware of that. I was in San Francisco, again telling people they have to boycott grapes again, because of the increase of use of the pesticides on the grapes. So I was beaten up by a policeman in San Francisco. And by the way, we actually had a rally against the first Bush, George Bush, the one, the first, because he had a press conference, saying there was nothing wrong with the pesticides, that the government takes care of us, so we don’t have to worry about it. We had this big rally, and the rally was a fun rally. Everybody was chanting, they had these big signs, “George Bush, Noriega that’s the ticket”… that’s with the president of Panama, who by the way was working for the CIA. “Bush Noriega, that’s a ticket.” Our LGBT friends, the gay community, they had wonderful signs, many of them were dressed in dresses, you know, with red skirts, blue and white tops, you know, like the flag. And they had these signs saying, “Bush is a Drag” [laughter]. So I mean, it was like a really fun rally, you know, there was nothing really ominous about it, but then the police moved in it and started beating people up. And I was one of the people that got beat up by the police. They broke my ribs, they hit me so hard in the back that my spleen splattered, I mean they never found it, it just burst. But they say in Spanish: [Speaking Spanish]. Because of that beating I got from the San Francisco Police, they actually have to give me $2,000 a month till I die [laughter and applause]. So with that $2,000 a month plus my minimal social security – I get $600 a month social security, because in the Union, we never got wages. So we just got food from food stamps, and we got a very low subsistence money. So because of that, I am able to continue to work with the Dolores Huerta Foundation that we started. Because all of the money that I raise goes to the foundation. We are going to have about twenty staff people, by the end of the year. We are working with seven different communities, where we’re organizing the people, and I don’t have to worry about my food, okay? [Laughter] We’re a nonprofit organization, and the reason that I don’t take money from the foundation is because I’m very political, and I go around with a lot of the candidates, right, campaigning with a lot of candidates. I don’t want to jeopardize our tax exempt status – so thanks to that policeman that beat me up.

 

Audience Member #5:

Senora Huerta, tengo un comentario, I have a comment to make. In the early ‘80s, I finished my high school in Mexico. And then my uncle invited me to go to California to pick on the grapes. And I went with them. So we got there, and you know, I was three years in school, and no work. And we got there, and then he said, “Ok get ready because tomorrow we’re going to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to be there on the field.” So I said, “Ok good. Ok.” I was all asleep. Every morning, we will be there at 4 o’clock in the morning to pick the grapes. And by the way, in the name of my uncle, thank you for your work because – thanks to you – they benefit from your work. In those days, they were given a house, in the field. Old house, but it has all the commodities. So we were given a house there to work, to stay there around the fields. And then like I said, wake up at 4 in the morning, start picking the grapes at 4 o’clock in the morning, and then get all wet – 100% from top to bottom, all the shoes and everything – and 7 o’clock in the morning you started drying all up again. So it was really hard. When we got back to the house that evening, you know, ok, so everybody just get out, running, you know, we home. So they cook, I stay in the car, and they say, “Okay hey, Hernando, come over here, it’s time to eat.” And I was in the car asleep, and they say, “You want to eat?” and I said, “I want to stay here. I’m so tired, it’s terrible. In this hard working job, it is incredible.” So I work for a year there, but thank you for your work. It’s better now.

 

Audience Member #5:

Thank you for your commentary. One more question.

 

Dolores:

And I like what you said about being out of the field by 10 o’clock, because you know we have a lot of farmers that die from heat stroke. But when we had the contracts, and I negotiated those contracts, I made sure that the workers were out of the field before it got hot, you know. So they would only work early in the morning, then out by 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock they were out of the field. And that way they wouldn’t be jeopardized to die from heat stroke. Now a lot of farm workers are dying from heat stroke, unfortunately, because, you know, we have climate change, global warming. It got a lot hotter for the workers, so those are things that we sometimes have to think about. And I loved what you said about how hard it is, and to remind those people like Donald Trump that the food that he’s eating was picked by some undocumented farm worker out there. Just remind him of that.

Audience Member #6:

Dolores if you could turn back the clock, what would you change in your life? Do you have any regrets?

 

Dolores:

I think I would have made more demands for my children. We did have an established child care for the kids, but that was Farm Worker daycare center actually, when we did the march to Sacramento, because the women had to run the strike while men were marching. But I think, and I think it’s still an issue today, I mean that was, like, fifty years ago, but I think for women that remains that we have to really demand, is that we have not only childcare but early childhood development for our children so that women need to be out there in civic life. We need the voices of women and the intelligence of women, the intuition of women, and women shouldn’t have to sacrifice that they have to stay at home to raise their children and at the same time we need them to get out there and do the work that we need to be doing in the world. So I think that’s one of the things. I would have fought more for my kids. My kids survived. My son Emilio is here with me today, and we have it set up at the end so that people will know him. I mentioned that he’s an attorney. My oldest son, Miguel, is a doctor, and my daughter Angela a nurse and I could go on. My daughter Juanita was a teacher, she is now working at my foundation, my daughter Camila graduated from [inaudible] in Early Childhood Development and so on. So I think it is important that as women and men to fight for, you know, so all of our kids can have a good education. And eventually I think we all need to buy. Luckily my kids got to go to college, when we had affirmative action in California, but we have to fight to make sure that all of our kids have free education in the United States of America. Okay?

Because I had a wonderful upbringing, you know, with my mother who gave me, you know, the dancing lessons, the music lessons, and my kids didn’t have any of that. Of course, I always felt very guilty about that.

 

Audience Member #7:

Miss Huerta, thank you for sharing your stories. Through the exhibition, I learned how, I was very moved by your bravery for how valiente you are. And I want to understand what inspired you to be so brave, so valiante. You said that you heard a calling, but there must be something in your life, a person, an event, or were you born so brave? Thank you.

 

Dolores:

Actually, I was seeing the needs of the people when I did my first voter registration drive after Mr. Fred Ross organized us in the Community Service Organization, and going to the homes, going door-to-door, getting people to register to vote. And I went to the home of a farm worker. And there was just a dirt floor. They had cardboard furniture and orange crates for furniture. And seeing the children kind of so threadbare and malnutritioned. And I knew how hard the farm workers worked. And it made me kind of angry. Then again when I was in school, teaching in school and seeing again, trying to get them a free milk or free lunch or a shoe voucher, and having to fight with the principals too. I remember one principal said to me, “Oh, all they do is drink up all their money, they’re a bunch of winos.” And that’s what they used to say about the farm workers. And the growers in Sacramento, they would stand up and they would testify: “We do the public a favor by all these degenerates, you know, by giving them a job. They’re a bunch of winos. They’re a bunch of alcoholics.” And once I got to Sacramento, and I remember hearing one of the growers say that, and I went up to him and I told him “If I ever hear you say anything like that about farm workers, I’m going to tell people about what you do to farm workers, the way that you enslave them, the way how hard you work them.” So with seeing the need of the people, and I think that still keeps me organizing today. When we see that we have so many needs that need to be met, and that our people can actually, once they learn how to organize, they know how they can overcome that, that’s the formula. What we need is more resources, more monies, so we can train more organizers, right? Because that’s what we do in my foundation, we hire them, we train them, and we pay them to go into communities and show the people how to organize and how they can improve their conditions, that they have it within themselves to do it. So, this is what keeps me going. I know it kept me going then.

 

Audience Member #8:

OK, so thank you for being here. My question, you sort of touched on already, but it’s about the toxic political discourse there is right now around Latinos and immigrant issues. And I wanted to know what your thoughts are on that, if you sort of dealt with anything similarly in your experience as being an activist.

 

Dolores:

Well, I think that it’s the racism has always been there, you know. I think now we are better equipped to be able to challenge the racism. I mean, when we were, like I mentioned that I got involved, because they had elected one Latino to the City Council in LA, Ed Roybal, and of course now in California we have a large number of Latinos in the State Legislature. In California, I think we have the largest number of Latinos in the Congress. And it all comes from that basis of organizing. So I think that the challenges are still there. Someone once said we’ll always have an immigration problem from Mexico, or Central America, because we’re so close to those borders. I think the one thing that we have to look at that’s different, excuse me [coughs], is that we have to challenge when they pass laws like NAFTA that allow American companies to go into Mexico and Central America, and set up their corporations there, or take over the economies, because as I like to say and use this as an example: bananas, okay? How many bananas do we eat in the United States every single day? Does that money go to the people in Guatemala? Or Honduras? No, it goes to Dole. It goes to Chiquita Banana. So that the profits come back to the United States, and those countries are today, they have more poverty in Mexico and in Central America than they did before NAFTA was passed. And I call it, “Economic Colonization.” So I think those are different things that we have to look at. The other thing I talk about when I lecture is about natural resources. That we in the United States, we do not own our natural resources. You know, in Norway, for instance, which is a very small country, a few years ago they had a $400 billion surplus. Where did they get all that money? They own their oil! They own their oil. We in the United States, we do not own our natural resources. We have British Petroleum. We have Shell, which is Dutch. We have all these other people that own our natural resources, and yet we have so much poverty in our own country. And so I think the income inequality is of course much greater now than when we starting organizing. The farm workers were so poor, and those are the things, the challenges that we have. So it’s not just about Latinos per se, it’s about challenging these systems. By the way, like the Pope is doing, right? [Inaudible] in the systems that we live and work under, and change them. And again, we know the way that we change those systems is through what I like to call an “Electoral Revolution.” An “Electoral Revolution” by voting, and by getting good people elected to office, doing campaign reforms so that we can get the money for elections come from the public. And so people out here in this audience are the ones that can run for office even though they’re not millionaires. And these are all things within our power and we can make it happen. But we’ve got to really get engaged and take the leadership that we have and develop leadership in our community to do it. Is se puede.

 

Audience Member #8:

One more question.

Dolores Huerta, thank you very much for your time. Precisely, my question is about voting and how Latinos engage the electoral system at this time. I worked as a field organizer for the Obama Campaign in Miami in 2012, and in Miami, the experience with local politics is frustrating at best, very pretty much to the point apathetic at worst, right? And you mentioned a lot of work that you did was, you know, a lot of civic engagement, but on the local and state level. But then we have this problem among the Latino community that we believe that the President does everything or the President can achieve everything. And then of course, we come out every four years to vote, but then we forget city council, we forget mayors, we forget state legislators. So from your experiences, what advice can you give folks – I mean not just Latinos, but just everyone in general – you know, how to educate people that it’s not just about Presidente, you know, I got to pick the president. No, it’s really everybody else that if anything has more power than the President himself or herself, eventually. Thank you.

 

Dolores:

That’s true. That’s exactly what we do, and that’s why we now have an organization that I mentioned in the beginning. We have eleven of our residents of the people that we have organized that have now gotten themselves elected to office. Once they learn how to do the work and how to register the voters and get the voters out. And we have to do it at the local level, and that – I want to say this – it sounds kind of silly, but sometimes I think that our people, we have to be invited to vote, you know, the Latinos. Because I think a lot of times, as we’re growing up, we were told [Inaudible], right? You know, don’t be a buttinski,’ don’t go where you’re not wanted. And as I think a fear, a lot of people don’t vote because, again, they don’t want to do the wrong thing. They get this long ballot, and they see all of these names on it, they don’t know who they are, and they get intimidated. And one of the things we teach them is you don’t have to vote for everything, just vote for the things that you know. We also have candidates forums, where we invite people to come, and we make the candidates come, and then we ask them the questions. And we don’t let them make speeches, they can make like a three-minute or two-minute introduction of who they are. And then we ask them, “Well, how do you feel about driver’s license?” We give them a green card, and a red card. The red card is for no, the green card is for yes. And then we give them a yellow card, undecided. So they just have to hold up the card. We don’t make any speeches. And then what we do is, we get their answers, then we print them up and pass them in the community so people can know where the candidates stand. So we engage them so they understand why voting is important. And I know what I’m saying is that it takes a lot of work to do that. The way that we organize is that each organizer really develops a corps of volunteers. And then the volunteers are those that do the work. But it can happen. It’s just a matter of just going out there and doing the work to make it happen. It takes a lot of man powers, a lot of volunteers. And not even too much money. We have unfortunately during elections, they throw a lot of money at the last two or three weeks of an election. But if we could get that money ahead of time to engage people early on, and train them how to vote, then people will vote. They’re just not conditioned to vote. If we get them to vote the first time, they’re going to keep on voting. It just takes work, that’s all it takes. The grassroots organizers make it happen.

 

Audience Member #8:

Thank you.

 

Taína:

 

We have five questions left. Please edit your questions.

 

Eduardo Diaz:

We’ve got to take this one in because this young lady has to go to school tomorrow and get to bed. So there you go.

 

Audience Member #9:

Hola, me llavo Kavita y voy a la escuela bilingüe Oyster Adams. Hi my name is Kavita, I go to Oyster Adams Bilingual School. ¿Recuerdas dónde fue tomada esa foto y cómo te sentiste cuando estabas ahí?

 

Dolores:

Esa foto fue durante la primera semana de la huelga.

 

Translator:

This was the first week of the strike.

 

Dolores:

Estaba yo arriba de un automóvil pidiéndole a la gente que saliera en huelga. Así que me miro (sic) muy apurada.

 

Translator:

I look very rushed.

 

Dolores:

Por que quería que la gente se saliera en huelga.

 

Translator:

I really wanted the folks to come out on strike, I was really trying to get them out.

 

Dolores:

La huelga ya había durado como unos siete u ocho días.

 

Translator:

It’s about seven or eight years… sorry days old at that point.

 

Dolores:

Ya se me había acabado la ropa limpia.

 

Translator:

My clean clothes had been exhausted by then.

 

Dolores:

Y esa “suera” que tenía puesta está completamente arrugada.

 

Translator:

The sweater I had, as you can see, was completely wrinkled.

 

Dolores:

It was clean but wrinkled, no? Y el fotógrafo me quería. And I was trying to get away from him.

 

Translator:

I was trying. yep.

 

Dolores:

So anyway, El automóvil donde estaba parada era de uno de nuestros líderes de la compañía Schenley el primer contrato que ganamo.

The first contract that we got.

 

Audience Member #10:

The exhibit says that was fifty years ago today.

 

Dolores:

Yea, just about. Exactly. Right. About that time.

 

Audience Member #10:

I think today, a lot of people know of organizing because of Obama and Obama for America. And obviously that is very focused on just the political scene, right, on getting a single candidate elected. But you mentioned your foundation does a lot of civic organizing, you know, getting sidewalks, getting gutters. The questioner before me at this microphone before me mentioned a lot of apathy, and I’m wondering if it’s easier to get people more engaged in political organizing when you start with civic organizing. Or, you know, if you just combine them all, and sort of what they add to each other. And then, if you’re familiar at all with the Obama’s model, the Neighborhood Teen Model, if there are any differences or similarities with your organizing?

 

Dolores:

That’s a very good point. And also, I guess in addition to the other question that was asked. For instance in our area, there was the City Council of Bakersfield. They had an ordinance that they wanted to have passed, to stop all public services to people who didn’t have papers. All public services stopped for undocumented people. And of course that was crazy. And English only for the whole city. And so what we did is we just got all of our volunteers to get a bunch of postcards. And so every time the City Council met, we took a big stack of postcards, we had a press conference, we had people from their districts go up to them and talk to them about this. So we put a lot of pressure on them. And what happened, ultimately they got scared, right, and the final ordinance that they passed was to support immigration reform, instead people signing postcards. Also our Congressperson didn’t want to support Obamacare, and so again we did the same thing. We just got a bunch of postcards, and people went to their neighborhoods, got a couple of thousand postcards, and we took them to the Congressman. And we picketed his office, we picketed his fundraisers, right? We did sit-ins in his office that he had, and he still wasn’t going to vote for Obamacare, by the way he was a Democrat, also. But then what we did was we fasted, we started fasting, we had some of our local people start fasting, and he finally [inaudible].

Then the other Congressman up north, we called, “We are going to go get you next.” So right away he said, “No. I’m going to vote. I’m going to vote for Obamacare.” And remember that the Affordable Care Act, I think it only passed with four votes, four or five votes. So at least we were responsible for two of those votes. But that’s a good point. Get people involved in some of the local issues that are going on, there’s a lot of different things that are going on that we can get people involved to. So our people are always involved in working on some thing or the other, not just working on elections. And that’s the way you get them engaged.

 

Audience Member #11:

Thank you, Dolores. It’s Laura O’Connor, I know it’s hard to see in the light there. But actually, when you turned eighty, you started using that which was several years ago, you started using that term, “Weaving Movements.” And it actually speaks a little bit... And today when you went to be with the Pope, right before that, you wrote the environmental movement, talking about the connection between food and climate change. So you seem to be able to go from feminism to LGBT, to all these different movements that you work in. How do you do that? How do you get people to connect dots between the different work? Which really speaks to what you just said, but you have a really magic way of doing that. How do you do that?

 

Dolores:

Well, I think I’m kind of blessed. I am on several boards, I’m on the Board of Equality California, which advocates for people in the LGBTQ community. I’m on the board of the Feminist Majority, which advocates for women’s rights. I’m on the board of People of the American Way, which is about engaging people in civil engagement, and fighting the right wing. So just bringing all these folks together so that they will know each other also. Because a lot of times, and even the environmental movement, I think one of the things that we saw in the big demonstration that we had today, there were a few people, there were a few Latinos and people of color, but overwhelmingly most of the people that were there were Anglos. And we know that because, again, of our huge number of people in our population, that we have to do a lot more work on the environment, to get our people engaged in the environmental issues. You might say cross fertilization of the different organizations to make sure that they all work together. I know that the LGBTQ community, the gay community, was very, very involved, and has been, in helping us with immigration reform. So we can help each other because, like I like to say, we are the majority, right? When we think of women, we think of people of color, and as I say, white men of conscience, then we are the majority, and so we are the ones to really decide the political landscape of our country by working together.

 

Audience Member #12:

Hola Dolores, me llamo Thomas Earlier you mentioned that you felt, when Cesar wanted to speak and you really regretted, and you were like, “Oh I wish it would have been 50/50.” At what point did you become conscious of your oppression? What made you pursue, as a woman of course, what made you pursue college and to follow your dreams?

 

Dolores:

Well in my family, I mean we just expected that we would graduate from high school and go to college. In the movement itself, like I said before, there were a lot of women on the picket lines, lot of women that went to jail, you know, during the strikes. It was about, I guess, I started realizing that we didn’t have enough women on our Executive Board. Some of our people had really macho tendencies. And so I told Cesar, “You know, we can’t have it like this. We have got to change this culture of Machismo in the organization.” And I made it a point that when I negotiated the contracts, we had women also in all of our committees, so that they could get that leadership experience. So we started working to make sure we had more women on the Executive Board, to the point where we were almost 50/50 on the executive board for the United Farm Workers. But I guess it was, like I said before, realizing that unless we, as women, challenged the situation, the system, that it just continues. And men are just more aggressive than women are, and even when we try to get some of the women that I would get them on the Executive Board, and then they would quit, oh don’t quit, you know. Well one of them, well her father got sick. Well take a leave of absence, don’t quit, don’t leave the job. But you know we have a lot of work to make sure that our women are, you know, are more, not only assertive, but realize that they have the capabilities that men do. I always like to say that men, they learn on the job, and women think, “Oh we have to be prepared ahead of time.” But we can learn on the job just like the guys do.

 

Eduardo Diaz:

Last question. Last question.

 

Audience Member #13:

I remember the Delano grape strike very well because when it ended, literally half of my life, there were no grapes in my family’s house because of the strike. My cousins and I used to joke that it had been so long since we had eaten our last grape that we had forgotten what it tasted like. And I look back at that and I realize the commitment and wherewithal in our community and beyond the Latino community to the greater community. And I don’t see that anymore. And it saddens me. And I wonder if there’s any words of hope and direction that you can give us about how to capture that kind of commitment and energy again to be willing to go half your life without something in order to make the lives of your brothers and sisters that much better.

 

Dolores:

I actually think that we do have that going on right now. Back in 1966 when the Congress passed the [inaudible] bill, that would actually put people in jail for helping people who were undocumented, we had the largest march ever in the United States of America. When people all over the United States started marching against the [inaudible]. Do you all remember that that happened? And today we see what the dreamers have done. You know, the dreamers, when they got the President of the United States to sign a law that said that these young people that who were undocumented had the right to go to college, right, and to get work permits. We see the immigrant rights movement, we just saw that now that the Pope was here, when Sofia Cruz, this little girl – that was organized, okay, that was not spontaneous. There was a hundred women that marched a hundred miles, you know, to come here to Washington, to make sure to be here when the Pope was here. And they are the ones that got that little girl to go out there, and give the Pope that picture and that petition. So what’s happening right now, I think, the immigrant rights movement I think has really brought a lot of us together. We just have to translate that into voting, okay? We have to translate that into voting. [Applause] But it is happening, it is happening right here. And you can look back, look back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, where we didn’t have organizations of Latino engineers, Latino doctors, Latino attorneys, you know. And so we have come a long way, but we know we still have a long way to go. I wouldn’t despair like Joe Hill said, don’t cry, just organize, organize, organize, right?

 

Jewell Robinson:

Thank you all for coming, and thank you to Ms. Huerta.

 

Dolores:

Before we close up, I just want to say to all of you, I’ve been doing this in all of my speeches recently, and I say to the audience, and I remind them, and I say: Who’s got the power?

 

Audience:

We got the power.

 

Dolores:

Okay, so we say we’ve got the power. And we say: “What kind of power?” And we all say “People Power”, okay? So I want to shout it out there and we are going to do it twice, okay. Who got the power?

 

Audience:

We got the power.

 

Dolores:

What kind of power?

 

Audience:

People Power.

 

Dolores:

I’m going to say it one more time. But this time I want you to say “Voting Power” Okay? Voting Power. Who’s got the power?

 

The Audience:

We got the power.

 

Dolores:

What kind of power?

 

The Audience:

Voting Power.

 

Dolores:

Alright. Se puede?

Can we go out there? Can we do this? Can we organize our community to make sure that we have the impact that we should have, and make sure that people are educated? And they know how to vote?

 

The Audience:

Se puede?

 

Dolores:

Let’s do it altogether.

 

The Audience:

Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede, Si se puede!

Dolores:

Thank you all for coming tonight, alright, and remember the Delano grape strike and the courage of the farm workers and all of the peoples throughout the cities that supported the farm workers during the grape boycott. Seventeen million Americans stopped eating grapes. I think that gives us the inspiration to keep on going and keep on organizing. Right?

 

Jewell:

Thank you very much, Dolores. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you and good night.

 

Dolores:

And one more thing. Come back, OK? I want people to visit this place, this is a treasure. This place is priceless. So bring your friends to see the exhibit, and keep them coming back so they can see the different programs that are being done here.

 

Visual:

Jewell Robinson returns to the stage.

 

Jewell:

If you haven’t seen the exhibit, please come back and see it. It’s open until May. Thank you.