Dolores Huerta , a civil rights legend, continues the fight

At age 92, civil rights icon Dolores Huerta maintains a busy schedule supporting the causes she has worked for her whole life.

She speaks regularly all over the state, recently participated in a re-creation of the famed 1966 farm workers march from Delano to Sacramento, and is campaigning for Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke.

Diana Victa, director of the San Jose State University Student Union, said she had to book the farm workers advocate for her coming October speech at the school a year in advance. “The fact that she is still touring and speaking at 92 is amazing,” Victa said.

“One of the things my mother always told us when we were young is that if you see somebody that needs help, it’s your obligation to help them.” –Dolores Huerta

Huerta, a mother of 11 children, co-founded what became the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez, in 1962 and helped win the approval of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975.  In 2012, the President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Interestingly, Huerta never worked in the fields herself. Her mother was a successful businesswoman who owned a hotel and gave Huerta and her siblings a comfortable middle-class life in Stockton. Huerta graduated from San Joaquin Delta College and initially worked as a teacher. But she soon felt she couldn’t help her students who came to school hungry and barefoot. She knew she had to help their parents.

Huerta gives her story in recorded interviews featured in the app for the traveling Smithsonian exhibition “Dolores Huerta: Revolution in the Fields.” The exhibition has been presented around the country since 2019 and will be at the Gilroy Library Nov. 5-Jan. 23.

“One of the things my mother always told us when we were young is that if you see somebody that needs help, it’s your obligation to help them,” Huerta said in the recording. “Don’t expect to wait for them to ask for help. The other thing is don’t expect any kind of reimbursement or recognition when you help somebody because if you expect something in return, the you are taking away the grace of the act of helping somebody.”

Huerta’s work meant she and her children lived in poverty — she received a union salary of $5 a week as well as donations of food and clothes.

Huerta’s road to union activism began in 1955 when she met Fred Ross of the Community Service Organization.

“Mr. Ross showed us how to organize through house meetings, which means that you ask someone in the neighborhood you are organizing to invite some of their friends over – six to eight people — and then you explain to them the project that you’re working on,” Huerta said in the Smithsonian recording. “And from that meeting you get another meeting. And you have that host or that person invite their friends and they make the same presentation. You do a whole series of those meetings until you’re able to form a base of people.”

Ross introduced her to Chavez, who eventually asked her to come to Delano to help him create a farm workers union. Huerta then had seven children and was going through a second divorce, but she knew she had to do it. “It was a calling,” said Huerta in the 2017 documentary “Dolores” shown on PBS. “I felt it so strongly.”

It was a decision that was hard on her children. “The kids raised themselves because they were alone a lot and other people took care of them,” Huerta said in the 2009 documentary “A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood and Activism.”

Huerta’s work meant she and her children lived in poverty — she received a union salary of $5 a week as well as donations of food and clothes.

“I used to pray all the time that what I was doing was the right thing to do,” said Huerta, who grew up Catholic, in the program. “I would ask God to give me signs. I remember when I made the decision to come to Delano, the next day, someone left a box of groceries on my front porch. I didn’t have a winter coat and before I left Stockton to come to Delano, four different people gave me brand new coats. To me, those were signs.”

In 1988, when she was 58, the 5-foot-2-inch grandmother was hospitalized from fractured ribs and a ruptured spleen that resulted from a confrontation with police in San Francisco.

Inspired by Gandhi’s teachings on nonviolence, Huerta and Chavez built up a union that eventually organized strikes. They faced harassment from growers and police. But in the end, they were able to get a contract giving farm workers rest periods, toilets and potable drinking water on the fields. Eventually, they secured farm workers a credit union, life insurance and other benefits.

Along the way, Huerta had four more children with Chavez’s brother Richard Chavez. The couple never married but their relationship lasted four decades.

Her high-profile life brought her in touch with leading figures of the day, including Robert F. Kennedy. She worked on his campaign for president and was on stage with in 1968 in Los Angeles the day he was assassinated. It was a devastating blow for Huerta and the farm workers, who had seen him as a valued ally.

But it didn’t stop Huerta, who went on to lead boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the 1970s to call attention to mistreatment of farm workers.

Throughout the ensuing years, she continued her path of bold activism, even when it put her in danger. In 1988, when she was 58, the 5-foot-2-inch grandmother was hospitalized from fractured ribs and a ruptured spleen that resulted from a confrontation with police in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time that she had been distributing grape boycott literature in the crowd outside a Union Square hotel, where then Vice-President George Bush was making a speech at a fund-raiser. The incident scared her family and left her incapacitated for some time.

Maria del Carmen Cossu, project director for Latino Initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, said she is impressed with how brave Huerta is and how she was able to lead a union at time especially at a time when society expected Mexican-American women to have a traditional role in a family.

“Sometimes, if I’m tired or discouraged, I think of her and I think what she will do,” Cossu said. “She has more energy than any young person. It’s amazing – her stamina, her knowledge and her intelligence.”