Dolores Huerta- Maria Sanchez



Dolores Huerta was born in 1930 on Dawson, New Mexico to a farmworker and miner father Juan Fernandez and an entrepreneur mother Alicia. Both parents were highly influential on Huerta’s eventual activist role as they themselves were union activists and community organizers. Dolores considers herself a Feminist and contributes it to her mother’s independence and self made determination that was continuously showcase even after her divorce with Huerta’s father.

Dolores became highly involved in her community joining school clubs and becoming a Girl Scout. She attended Stockton High School and graduated with a teaching credential from Pacific’s Delta College. Which will eventually lead her to seek social justice. Serving as a community organizer, Huerta met Cesar Chavez with whom she shared similar ideas and visions regarding farmworkers that would lead them to cofound the National Farm Workers Association. Such action was taken in order to fight for the rights of farmworkers who had been facing mistreatment. Issues such as the lack of access to clean water, low wages, humiliation and rape were day to day challenges agricultural workers had to confront. In California, thanks to her lobbying and negotiations se was able to secure Aid for Dependent Families and disability insurance for farm workers. She was also pivotal to the enactment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 which grant farmworkers the right to organize and demand better wages and working conditions.

As a woman, Huerta had to face many criticism and judgement specially due to her unorthodox personal life. Although she was traditionally married at a young age and became a mother as expected by social views, eventually Huerta was divorced twice and the mother of 11 children. Being the only woman in a leadership role in the NSFW she had to fight for her ideas to be heard and face backlash because of her nonconforming image of a woman in social standards. She was passionate and committed to the farmworkers movement such so that she was not overly present on her children’s life. However, her role has been diminish throughout time, so much so that she was taken out of Texas’s social studies curriculum and was incorrectly stated by Texan politicians as Chavez’s girlfriend. As stated in her film Dolores, people began seeing Cesar Chavez as the leader of the movement and Dolores as the housekeeper, undermining her contribution to the movement and her equal stand to Chavez. Barack Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes, we can!” was derived from the Spanish version “¡Si, se puede!” motto that represented Huerta and Chavez movement but was wrongly attributed to Chavez when Dolores was the creator of it. Thankfully, on 2012 Obama corrected his mistake and awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom which was added to Huerta’s award collection alongside the Puffin Foundation’s Award.

Today at 89 Dolores still fights for social justice and actively supports movements such as the labor movement, feminist movement, immigration movement and the LGBT movement. In addition, Huerta is consider one of the first women to create the pathway for other women to hold leadership and activist roles.

Work Cited

Bratt, P. (Director). (2017). Dolores [Film]. 5 Stick Films.