Although she is best known for her leadership in the United Farm Workers, Huerta was engaged in social and political activism throughout her life, supporting voting rights, immigrant rights, environmental justice, LGBTQ equality and other issues. She has been arrested more than 25 times for participating in nonviolent civil disobedience activities. In 2019, at age 89, she was arrested while participating in a union protest for better pay for home health workers. She has also campaigned for numerous Democratic candidates.
In 1993, Huerta was the first Latina inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
In receiving this prestigious award, Huerta emphasized: “The great social justice changes in our country occurred when people came together, organized and took direct action. It is this right that supports and nourishes our democracy today.”
In a shocking coda to her life story, Huerta revealed earlier this year that Chávez sexually assaulted her while she was a union leader. The revelation is part of an explosive investigation by The New York Times alleging that Chávez groomed and abused girls and women. Huerta was unaware of the girls and young women’s allegations, she said. In a statement about her revelations, she said: “I kept this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing the rights of farm workers was my life’s work. »
Of Mexican-American descent, Huerta was born in 1930 in New Mexico to Juan Fernández and Alicia Saint John Chavez and raised in Stockton, California. Civic engagement was part of his family tradition. “My father was a congressman; I had a cousin who was a judge. When we were kids, we listened to FDR’s fireside chats,” she said, referring to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “When I turned 21, part of my birthday ritual was to go and register to vote.”
After college, Huerta worked as a teacher. But she was shocked to see farm workers’ children coming to school barefoot and hungry and living in houses with dirt floors. Determined to make a bigger difference in people’s lives, she decided to become a community organizer.
In his mid-20s, Huerta joined a California Latino civil rights group as a lobbyist, working in Sacramento on behalf of noncitizen pensions and disability insurance for farmworkers.
Then came a turning point in her life, when she met Chavez, a fellow organizer, at a fundraising dinner in 1955. They shared an interest in the welfare of farm workers, and seven years later they formed the National Farm Workers Association, a precursor to the UFW.
Although Chávez was the face of the movement, Huerta’s organizing was essential to its success in winning farm workers the right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions. She was the one who coined the slogan “Sí se puede” (Yes, we can!), which became the rallying cry of the agricultural workers movement.
Through protests, strikes and grassroots campaigns, the UFW helped improve the lives of some of the country’s poorest and most marginalized workers. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, millions of Americans participated in the grape and lettuce boycott. It was a heady time, Huerta recalled in the 2017 documentary about her life, “Dolores.”
“We had this vibe all around you that you could really change the world,” she said in the documentary.
It was around this time, Huerta said this year, that she experienced two unwanted sexual encounters with Chavez. The first time, Huerta told the Times, was in 1960, when Chavez pressured her to have sex. The second time was in 1966, a situation Huerta described as rape. These traumatic experiences became a dark secret that she kept for nearly 60 years, even as she became a much-admired feminist and labor icon.
“Dolores has been by Cesar Chavez’s side throughout the entire process,” Garcia said. “They took what was a largely rural movement and transformed it into a cause that captured the national imagination. » Huerta, he pointed out, took the UFW’s message to places like Los Angeles and New York. “She was also a tenacious and strong negotiator of contracts on behalf of farmworkers. »
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