[Dolores Huerta is cofounder and first vice president of the United
Farm Workers union. She has dedicated much of her life to the struggle
for justice and dignity for migrant farm workers.
Dolores Fernández Huerta was born in a small mining town in
northern New Mexico in 1930. When Huerta
was a toddler, her parents divorced, and she
moved to California with her mother and two
brothers. By this point, the severe economic
slowdown known as the Great Depression
(1929–41) was fully underway, making it hard
for many Americans to earn a living. Her
mother worked at a cannery at night and as a
waitress during the day, while Huerta’s grandfather helped watch the children. By the 1940s,
the family’s financial situation improved.
Huerta’s mother, who had remarried, owned a
restaurant and hotel, and Huerta and her brothers helped run both businesses.
Inspired by father’s
accomplishments
Huerta was separated from her father, but the
two remained in contact. His work activities inspired her. He had become active in labor unions and eventually returned to school to earn a college degree. In 1938, he won election to the
New Mexico state legislature where he worked to enact better labor laws.
After high school, Huerta went to college and earned a teaching certificate, but she soon realized she wanted to do more than teach children.
She wanted to help those who came to school barefoot and hungry.
Turns to social activism
In the mid-1950s, Huerta began to work for the Community Service
Organization (CSO), a Mexican American self-help association founded
in Los Angeles. She registered people to vote, organized citizenship
classes for immigrants, and pressed local governments for improvements
in barrios (Spanish-speaking neighborhoods). As a result of her skills, the
CSO sent her to Sacramento, California, to work as a lobbyist (a person
who persuades legislators to vote for certain laws).
During the late 1950s, Huerta became concerned about the living
and working conditions of farm workers. Life for migrant farm workers
was incredibly harsh. They worked in the hot sun for hours, picking
crops. They often slept in run-down shacks or in their cars. Farm owners paid the workers poor wages and often tricked them out of the meager wages they had earned.
Chávez and the UFW
Huerta joined the Agricultural Workers Association, a community interest group in northern California. Through the AWA, she met César
Chávez (1927–1993), the director of the CSO in California and
Arizona. Chávez shared her deep interest in farm workers. Unhappy
with the CSO’s unwillingness to form a union for farm workers, Chávez
and Huerta left to found the National Farm Workers Association in
Delano, California, in 1962. After 1972, the union would be known
simply as the United Farm Workers (UFW).
As second-in-command to Chávez, Huerta helped shape and guide
the union. In 1965, when Delano grape workers went on strike, she devised the strategy for the strike and led the workers on the picket lines.
Afterward, she became the union’s first contract negotiator. In the late
1960s, she directed the grape boycott on the East Coast. Her work there
helped bring about a successful grape boycott across the nation.
Huerta’s style was forceful and uncompromising. However, she succeeded in bringing together feminists, community workers, religious
groups, Hispanic associations, student protesters, and peace groups to
fight for the rights of migrant farm workers. Victory finally came in
1975 when California governor Jerry Brown (1938–) signed the
Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first bill of rights for farm workers
ever enacted in America. It allowed them to form a union that would negotiate with farm owners for better wages and working conditions.
UFW activities
Over the years, Huerta has committed her energies to the UFW as a
leader, speaker, fund-raiser, negotiator, picket captain, and adviser to
government leaders. In the 1980s, she helped found the union’s radio
station in California. She testified before state and federal committees on
a range of issues, including the use of pesticides on crops and other
health matters facing migrant workers.
Many of Huerta’s activities on behalf of the UFW have placed her in
personal danger. She was arrested more than twenty times. In 1988, during a peaceful protest demonstration in San Francisco, Huerta was severely injured by baton-swinging police officers. She suffered two broken
ribs and a ruptured spleen, forcing her to undergo emergency surgery.
The incident outraged the public and caused the San Francisco police
department to change its rules regarding crowd control and discipline.
Legacy of the UFW
After recovering from her life-threatening injuries, Huerta resumed her
work on behalf of farm workers and in other political areas. In 2006,
Princeton University gave her an honorary degree. Huerta is the mother of eleven children.