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From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues

Huerta, Dolores Clara Fernandez (b. 1930)

Dolores Huerta has sought economic and employment justice for Hispanic American agricultural workers since the early 1960s, when she and Cesar Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). A folk hero in the Mexican American community for her work as a contract negotiator, strike organizer, lobbyist, and boycott coordinator, Huerta has been arrested more than two dozen times and has experienced harassment and violence.

Huerta entered the migrant labor movement in part out of frustration at teaching migrants’ children because, she later explained: “I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry kids.” In 1955, she met a representative of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Mexican American self-help association that sought to empower Latinos through political action. A founding member of the Stockton, California CSO, Huerta served as the group’s lobbyist to the California legislature in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She helped pass more than a dozen bills, including measures requiring businesses to provide pensions to legal immigrants and allowing farm workers to receive public assistance, retirement benefits, and disability and unemployment insurance regardless of their status as U.S. citizens.

Photo Credit: Jay Godwin

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Through the CSO, Huerta worked with Chavez, who proposed creating a union for farm workers. In 1962, they formed the NFWA, went into fields, and explained the anticipated benefits of organizing to farmworkers. Chavez and Huerta endured threats from landowners and law enforcement officers. When the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) initiated a strike against California grape growers, the NFWA joined the effort in 1965. The AFL-CIO group and the NFWA merged into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) in 1966. For her involvement in the strike as an organizer, Huerta was repeatedly arrested and placed under surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Huerta was named chief negotiator for UFWOC, even though she was not a lawyer, had no experience as a labor negotiator, and had never read a union contract. By 1967, she had negotiated contracts that gave workers an hourly raise, health care benefits, job security, and protection from pesticide poisoning. Despite the success with some growers, the majority resisted the UFWOC, and the organization called for a national boycott of table grapes in 1968. As director of the boycott, Huerta moved to New York and mobilized unions, political activists, Hispanic associations, community organizations, and others in support of the boycott, one of the most successful boycotts in the United States. In 1970, Huerta negotiated collective bargaining agreements with more than two dozen growers and obtained many new benefits for grape workers. The success attracted new members to UFWOC, and membership reached 80,000. In 1972, the UFWOC became an independent affiliate of the AFL-CIO and was renamed the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW).

More boycotts followed in the 1970s, with Huerta managing the lettuce, grape, and Gallo wine boycotts. One of the successes of the boycotts was the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the first law that recognized collective bargaining rights of California farmworkers.

Huerta described the achievements of the organizing efforts: “I think we brought to the world, the United States, anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change. I think we have laid a pattern of how farm workers are eventually going to get out of their bondage. It may not happen right now in our foreseeable future, but the pattern is there and farm workers are going to make it.”

From 1991 to 1993, she took a leave of absence from the UFW to work on the Feminist Majority’s Feminization of Power campaign, a project that encourages Latinas to run for public office. She then returned to the UFW and began organizing the 20,000 workers in California’s strawberry industry.

Born in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta earned her associate’s degree from Stockton College.

See also: The Feminist Majority

References: Felner, “Dolores Huerta” (1998);”Dolores Huerta,” https://doloreshuerta.org (accessed April 2, 2019); Garcia, Dolores Huerta: Woman, Organizer, and Symbol (1993)

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Huerta, Dolores Clara Fernandez (b. 1930)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, edited by Suzanne O’Dea, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0471.
APA 7th
Huerta, Dolores Clara Fernandez (b. 1930). From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, In S. O’Dea (Ed.), Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0471.
CMOS 17th
"Huerta, Dolores Clara Fernandez (b. 1930)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, Edited by Suzanne O’Dea. Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0471.