La Voz del Pueblo

Dolores Huerta

November/December, 1972

My family goes way back to the 1600s in New Mexico. My father was a migrant worker who used to travel from New Mexico to Wyoming, following the work, living in little shacks. My mother was a very ambitious woman. She got a little lunch counter together, then she got a bigger restaurant, and when the war came she got a hotel. That’s how I was able to go to school and how I got a more affluent background than the other kids.

When my dad and my mom divorced, he stayed in New Mexico and she came to California. I would beg my mother to let me go to the fields when I was little, but she would not let me. My brothers used to go pick tomatoes in Stockton, but my mother wasn’t going to let her daughter go work in any field. So when I was fourteen, I went to work in the packing sheds instead, which were just as bad.

I was a little bit luckier than most Chicanos because I was raised in an integrated neighborhood. All the Chicanos who went to school where I did are all making it. We grew up in Stockton but we weren’t in a ghetto. In our school, there was the Mexican, black, white, Indian, Italian; we were all thrown in together. We had all of the oldguard teachers who treated everybody very mean. But they didn’t discriminate against one or the other. They treated us all equally mean. So we all hated the teachers, but we didn’t hate each other. We didn’t have a whole bunch of hang-ups, like hating Anglos, or hating blacks.

When I got into high school, then it was really segregated. There was the real rich and the real poor. We were poor too, and I got hit with a lot of racial discrimination. My four years in high school hit me very hard and it took me a long time to get over it.

When I was in high school I got straight A’s in all of my compositions. I can’t write any more, but I used to be able to write really nice, poetry and everything. But the teacher told me at the end of the year that she couldn’t give me an A because she knew that somebody was writing my papers for me. That really discouraged me, because I used to stay up all night and think, and try to make every paper different, and try to put words in there that I thought were nice. Well, it just kind of crushed me.

I couldn’t be active in college though, because it was just too early. I was the only Chicano at Stockton Junior College. At that time, there was just a handful of us that you might call liberals.

I was frustrated. I had a fantastic complex because I seemed to be out of step with everybody and everything. You’re trying to go to school and yet you see all of these injustices. It was just such a complex!

Then my mother took me to Mexico City when I was about seventeen. She had never been there either. It was our first trip. But that opened my eyes to the fact that there was nothing wrong with Chicanos. I felt inside that [in the United States] everybody was wrong and I was right. They were wrong in beating the people up in the streets and all of the things they did to people. I felt I had all of these frustrations inside of me, so I started joining different Chicano organizations-E1 Comité Honorífico, Women’s Club, all of these organizations that didn’t do anything but give dances and celebrate the Fiestas Patrias.

By the time I was twenty-five years old, I had been married and gotten a divorce. I was still living in Stockton when Fred Ross came into town and he started telling us about forming this organization, the Community Service Organization. And he told us about how in Los Angeles they had sent these policemen to San Quentin and Fred had organized it.

When Fred started telling us that if we got together we could register voters, elect Spanish-speaking representatives, and turn everything around, I just didn’t believe it. He showed us how they had gotten these clinics in San Jose and he told us about César Cha´vez. He showed me all these pictures of big meetings with one hundred to two hundred people together. Well, I thought he was telling me a fairy tale.

I thought he was a Communist, so I went to the FBI and had him checked out. I really did that. I used to work for the Sheriff’s Department. See how middle-class I was. In fact, I was a registered Republican at the time. I don’t think I was ever a real cop-out, though, because I had always been real close to a lot of the people. My mother even used to tell me all the time that all my friends were either ex-cons or pachucos [zoot-suiters].

But I always thank the day that I met Fred. I always hated injustice and I always wanted to do something to change things. Fred opened a door for me. He changed my whole life. If it weren’t for Fred, I’d probably just be in some stupid suburb somewhere.

Anyway, I started my first job getting people to register to vote. Eventually, some of the people started paying attention to us. So then we started fighting the Police Department and we got them to stop searching and harassing people arbitrarily. Then we had a big fight with the County Hospital and we turned that around. But it was just like magic. You start registering people to vote and all of these things start happening.

I was actually in the organization for two years before I got to talk to César [Cha´vez]. I met him once, but he was very shy. He wouldn’t talk to anybody except the people he was organizing. But I heard him speak one time at a board meeting and I was really impressed. Well, after a big voter registration drive in 1960 where we registered one hundred and fifty thousand people, César got this bright idea to send me to Sacramento.

So I went to Sacramento and we got all these bills passed. I headed up the legislative program in 1961 when we fought for the old-age pension for the noncitizens, for los viejitos [the little old people]. I lobbied the welfare bill through so that the parents could stay in the home. César and I and the rest of us worked to get the right to register voters door to door, and the right for people to take their driver’s license exams in Spanish, and disability insurance for farm workers, and the right for people to get surplus commodities. And, of course, we were the ones who ended the bracero program. I have a lot of experience in legislation, and I guess I’ve become sort of a troubleshooter in the union.

I guess because I’m articulate, I came to the forefront. A lot of people who do a lot of hard work in the union are not mentioned anywhere. “Son los soldados razos del movimiento” [We are the common soldiers of the movement]. And that’s what I consider myself-just a person working at what I’m supposed to be doing. The fact that I get publicity is sort of a by-product of the union. But there’s an awful lot of people who have worked continuously since the union started, a lot of women, for example, who nobody even knows.

There’s been no reaction from the farm workers to my role as a woman within the union. They will appreciate anybody who will come in to help them. In terms of the leadership itself I get very little friction from anybody, really. Anyone who can do the job is welcome to come in and share the suffering.

There are a lot of other women in the union besides me and they share some of my problems. But I think it’s mostly a personal conflict and it depends how much you let it hang you up in terms of what you’re doing. If you let it bug you when people say that you’re not being a good mother because you’re not with your kids twenty-four hours a day, well then of course it will deter you from what you’re doing. In the union, you know, everybody cooperates to take care of your kids.

The idea of the communal family is not new and progressive. It’s really kind of old-fashioned. Remember when you were little you always had your uncles, your aunts, your grandmother, and your comrades around. As a child in the Mexican culture you identified with a lot of people, not just your mother and father like they do in the middle-class homes. When people are poor their main interest is family relationships. A baptism or a wedding is a big thing. In middle-class homes you start getting away from that and people become more materialistic. When you have relatives come to visit it’s a nuisance instead of a great big occasion.

While I was in jail some of my kids came down to Delano to see me, but my little girl, Angela, didn’t come. She wrote me a little note which said, “Dear Mom. I love you very much, but I can’t come because the people need me. I’ve got to go door knocking this weekend and I can’t leave my job.” I think that’s really great because she puts her priorities on the work she has to do instead of coming down to see me.

The time I spend with my kids is very limited. This year I was in Washington, D.C., for almost two months, then I was in Arizona for another six weeks, then I was in Los Angeles working on the McGovern campaign for another two weeks. So this year I’ve spent very little time with my children. Since August twenty-seventh I’ve seen them twice for visits for about an hour.

Sure, it’s a hardship for me, but I know that my kids are all working in the union itself. They have to grow up with the responsibility of their work, but they have fun too. Probably the problems they have is like the kind of schools that they go to which are very reactionary. I think it’s important for the children to be fed and clothed, which they are. When I first started working with César I had this problem worrying about whether my kids were going to eat or not, because at the time I started working for the union I was making pretty good money, and I knew I was going to start working without any money, and I wondered how I could do it. But the kids have never gone hungry. We’ve had some rough times, particularly in Delano during the strike, because my kids went without fresh milk for two years. They just had powdered milk we got through donations. It’s made them understand what hardship is, and this is good because you can’t really relate to suffering unless you’ve had a little bit of it yourself. But the main thing is that they have their dignity and identity.

My family used to criticize me a lot. They thought that I was a traitor to my Raza, to my family and to everybody else. But I think they finally realized that what I’m doing is important and they’re starting to appreciate it now. They thought that I was just neglecting my children and that what I was doing was just for selfish reasons.

The criticism came mostly from my dad and other relatives, but my brothers are very understanding. My mother was a very active woman, and I just followed her. She’s dead now, but she always got the prizes for registering the most voters, and she raised us without any hang-ups about things like that.

You could expect that I would get a lot of criticisms from the farm workers themselves, but it mostly comes from middle-class people. They’re more hung-up about these things than the poor people are, because the poor people have to haul their kids around from school to school, and the women have to go out and work and they’ve got to either leave their kids or take them out to the fields with them. So they sympathize a lot more with my problem in terms of my children. Sometimes I think it’s bad for people to shelter their kids too much. Giving kids clothes and food is one thing, you know, but it’s much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use it in the service of other people. So my kids know that the way that we live is poor, materially speaking, but it’s rich in a lot of other ways. They get to meet a lot of people and their experiences are varied.

I know people who work like fools just to give their kids more material goods. They’re depriving their family of themselves, for what? At least my kids know why I’m not home. They know that I’m doing this for something in which we’re all working-it makes a whole different thing. My children don’t have a lot of material things but they work hard for what they do get, just like everybody else, and that makes them really self-sufficient. They make their own arrangements when they go places. They all have a lot of friends and they don’t get all hung-up about having a lot of goodies. I think my kids are very healthy both mentally and physically. All the women in the union have similar problems. They don’t have to leave their families for as long as I do. But everybody shares everything, we share the work.

The way we do the work is we do whatever is needed regardless of what we’d really like to do. You have a problem when you develop into a kind of personality like César because that really takes you away from the work that has to be done with the farm workers in education and development of leadership. That’s what I’d really like to do. I’d just like to keep working down there with the ranch committees and the farm workers themselves because they have to take over the union. I can put my experience there. César would much rather be organizing than anything. He loves to organize because it’s really creative. But he can’t do it because right now he has to go around speaking, as I am doing also. I’d rather be working on the strike.

It’s hard when you learn how to do something but you have to do something else. But they’ve kept us on the run. We had been successful in organizing farm workers so in order to try to stop the union they introduced this bill, AB-964. This bill was just exactly like Proposition 22 and they thought they could get it through the legislature. Well, we mobilized and were able to stop it. Thousands of farm workers’ supporters went to Sacramento to stop it. That was 1971. They tried it again in 1972 but the bill didn’t really go very far. We had been involved with the lettuce negotiation all of last year, after we stopped the boycott. Then they got the bright idea in the Nixon administration to try to take the boycott away from us in the federal courts. What they were using as an argument was that we were covered by the National Labor Relations Law (NLRB) so that we couldn’t boycott. They took us to federal court in Fresno saying we were part of the NLRB. Well, this is ridiculous because we’ve never been part of it. So what this means is that it’s strictly a political issue and logic and justice, none of these factors, have anything to do with it.

We went to Washington and started putting heat on the Republican party all over the country. We picketed people like Bañuelos [U.S. Treasurer Romana Bañuelos] and Senators Tower, Percy, and Hatfield. I was in Washington talking to the Republicans and the Democrats trying to stop this thing, kind of coordinating it.

In a way they might win by keeping us on the run but in a way they lose. Arizona is a good example, I was there for about two months before César went out there. They passed a proposition in the legislature similar to Proposition 22 here. So I called César up to ask him to come to a rally. I said “The governor’s going to sign the bill but maybe if you come we can at least make a good protest.” So we called the governor’s office to tell him that César was going to be coming, and would he please give us the courtesy of meeting with us before he signed it. We thought we still might have a chance to stop it. Well, the governor knew that we were having this noon-time rally so he signed the bill at nine o’clock in the morning without even meeting with us. So what’s happening now is we’re getting everybody registered to vote, we’re going to recall the governor and turn the state upside down. We organized the whole state just because the governor signed the stupid bill. So you might say that they win because they make us come out to the cities, but maybe while we’re here, we’re organizing too. Every time they try to do something against the union it works in our favor. The main thing they keep us from doing is working with the farm workers. We’d be going after other growers and going to other states but we can’t do that right now. But maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. It’s like this letter that this farm worker wrote me. “Dice que parece que estamos siguiendo un mandamiento de Dios” [They say that it seems that we are following a command from God]. We see these things as bad things that are happening to us right now but maybe they’re good things and we can’t see them that way because God wants us to do them. Every time we had some problem that kept us from ending the grape strike, I’d always tell César it’s because God wants us to organize something else before the grape strike is over.

We’ve been working more and more with the Democratic party, because it’s been the more liberal of the two parties. We depended on the Democrats to pass all those bills I told you about. You hardly ever get Republicans to vote for you. We live in a practical world, in a world of survival. And when the Democrats do us dirt, “también los atacamos a ellos” [we’ll attack them also], although on an individual basis. So we maintain a certain amount of independence because our first responsibility is to the farm workers.

It’s not true that both parties are just as bad for Chicanos, because the few benefits that we have gotten have come through the Democratic party. The only thing I have to say to people who attack the Democrats is that they should attack the Republicans. They should be going after Nixon, after Secretary of Agriculture Butz, after Reagan and all of these Republicans in the valley who vote against us every single time.

That’s who they should be going after, not after the guys who are trying to help us. On the other hand, if anybody needs straightening up in the Democratic party, we straighten them up. We went after certain guys, like Alex García who’s a Mexican, and we almost got him defeated. He won by two hundred votes, and if it wouldn’t have been for the fast in Arizona and our work on the McGovern campaign, we would have beaten Alex García, and Alex knows it.

I think that if people are dissatisfied with the Democratic party they should get involved and take it over. I’ve told Assemblyman Moretti that he can make a decision either for or against the poor people, and that if he’s against us we’re going to fight him. But you can’t go saying this to Reagan. He won’t even meet with us.

There were some problems at the Democratic Convention. It was really unfortunate because there was a little clique that was trying to put down McGovern. The rumor was going around that McGovern wouldn’t talk to Chicanos. Well, this was ridiculous because in East Los Angeles McGovern would go to every little place Chicanos wanted him to go, and speak to them. But there were people who were spreading this rumor around. I think they were part of the Nixon sabotage squad!...

I know that the farm worker issue is not the only Chicano issue. But in terms of the visibility of the Chicano issues, I think first of all there wasn’t an agreement among the Chicanos themselves on what the issues were. Some people talked about bilingual education, other people talked about something else. I don’t know, there just wasn’t that much of a consensus on what we wanted to make public. So, I talked to Senator McGovern’s staff, Frank Mankiewicz and some other people, and I told them that Chicanos wanted more visibility there. Naturally, they turned to me and said they wanted me to make a seconding speech for Eagleton or somebody. And I told them that I didn’t want to be in the limelight, that other Chicanos wanted the focus. So that’s when they had Mondragó make the speech he made.

I would say the Chicanos were disorganized. They had a platform with a lot of Chicano issues which they wanted to submit. But it was put together kind of fast, I think. You didn’t have a kind of cohesiveness. But that’s not unusual, you see, because in the black caucus you had the same kind of divisions.

Understanding that Chicanos have to come from all walks of life, from different experiences and different communities, you’re not always going to get everybody to think the same. I think the Chicano caucus they had in San Jose is a good idea, where you can get Chicanos to decide the two or three priorities we want for California and get everybody to push together on them. But again, you got too many factions going. Everybody wants their own thing.

We’re just now reaching a level where we can get mature political participation. We’re going to get it as people get more interested in politics and make it a life-long thing, like Art Flores who ran against Alex García in East Los Angeles. Art really likes politics and he wants to do the right thing and he’s not afraid to tell a guy he’s an s.o.b. Then there’s Peter Chacó, who’s an assemblyman, “pero es muy cobarde” [but he is very cowardly]. When people are doing something against Chicanos he’s afraid to tell them so, because he says he has to rely on a lot of white votes. So he lets them tell him what to do. But if we would have had fifteen Chicanos in California who were really involved in politics, “pero que no fueran miedosos” [but who were not afraid], the whole McGovern campaign would have been run by Chicanos. But we didn’t have enough guys who had the political savvy.

But that’s all going to change. If you ever get a chance, go down to Parlier. Chicanos turned around the whole city council there. So when the farm workers set up a picket line in Parlier, the cops wouldn’t even come near us. There’s a whole change in the picture because those people exercised their political power, they participated in democracy.

The worst thing that I see is guys who say, “Man, they don’t have no Chicanos up there and they’re not doing this or that for Chicanos.” But the “vatos” are just criticizing and they’re not in there working to make sure that it happens. We criticize and separate ourselves from the process. We’ve got to jump right in there with both feet.

Most of the people doing the work for us are gabachillos [nice Anglos]. When we get Chicano volunteers it’s really great. But the Chicanos who come down to work with the farm workers have some hang-ups, especially the guys that come out of college. “En primer lugar, le tienen miedo a la gente” [in the first place, they are afraid of the people]. Unless they come out of the farm worker communities themselves, they get down there and they’re afraid of the people. I don’t know why it happens, but they’re afraid to deal with them. But you have to deal with them like people, not like they were saints. The Chicano guys who come down here have a very tough time adjusting. They don’t want to relate to the poor farm workers anymore. They tried so hard to get away from that scene and they don’t want to go back to it.

We have a lot of wonderful people working with us. But we need a lot more because we have a whole country to organize. If the people can learn to organize within the union, they can go back to their own communities and organize. We have to organize La Raza in East Los Angeles. We have to do it. We have one thousand farm workers in there right now organizing for the boycott. In the future, we would very much like to organize around an issue that isn’t a farm worker issue. But we just can’t because we just don’t have the time.

Maybe some day we can finish organizing the farm workers, but it’s going so slow because of all the fights we have to get into. We’ll have a better idea of where we’re at once the lettuce boycott is won. See, there’s about two hundred to three hundred growers involved in the lettuce boycott. The same growers who grow lettuce grow vegetables like artichokes and broccoli. So if we get that out of the way we’ll have about one third of the state of California organized. That’s a big chunk. From there, hopefully, we can move on to the citrus and get that out of the way. We have to move into other states, like we did into Arizona.

It would seem that with the Republicans in for another four years, though, we’ll have a lot of obstacles. Their strategy was to get Chicanos into the Republican party. But we refuse to meet with, for example, Henry Ramírez [chairman of the President’s Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for the Spanish-Speaking]. He went around and said a lot of terrible things about us at the campuses back east. He thought that we didn’t have any friends back there. But we do, and they wrote us back and told us that he was saying that the farm workers didn’t want the union, that César was a Communist, and just a lot of stupid things. This is supposed to be a responsible man.

Then there is Philip Sánchez [National director of the Office of Economic Opportunity]. I went to his home in Fresno once when a labor contractor shot this farm worker. I was trying to get the D.A.’s office to file a complaint against the labor contractor. So I went to see Philip Sánchez to see if he could help me. But the guy wouldn’t help me. Later when the growers got this group of labor contractors together to form a company union against us, Sánchez went and spoke to their meeting. It came out in the paper that he was supporting their organization. As far as I’m concerned, Philip Sánchez has already come out against the farm workers.

It’s really funny. Some of the Puerto Riqueños who are in the President’s Committee for the Spanish-speaking, man, they tell the administration what the Puerto Ricans need. “Se pelean con ellos” [They fight with them]. But the Chicanos don’t. They’re caught. They just become captives.

I spoke to a lot of the guys in Washington who were in these different poverty programs. Some of the Chicanos had been dropped in their positions of leadership. They put [other] guys over [the Chicanos]...they put watchdogs on them to make sure that they don’t do anything that really helps the farm workers. The guys are really afraid because there’s just a few jobs and they can be easily replaced. They’re worse off than the farm workers, you see. The farm workers at least have the will to fight. They’re not afraid to go out on strike and lose their jobs. But the guy who has a nice fat job and is afraid to go out and fight, well, they’ve made him a worse slave than the farm worker.

An ex-priest told me one time that César should really be afraid somebody might write a book to expose him. I said, “Don’t even kid yourself that César is afraid of anybody because he’s not. The only ones who might scare him are God and his wife, Helen. But besides them he’s not afraid of anyone.”

He’s got so much damn courage, “y así come es él” [and he is as he is]. That’s the way the farm workers are. They have this incredible strength. I feel like a big phony because I’m over here talking and they’re out there in the streets right now, walking around in the rain getting people to vote. “Son tan dispuestos a sufrir” [They are so ready to suffer], and they take whatever they have to take because they have no escape hatch.

Being poor and not having anything just gives an incredible strength to people. The farm workers seem to be able to see around the corner, and César has that quality because he comes out of that environment. César’s family were migrant workers. It was kind of the reverse of mine because they started with a farm in Yuma but lost it during the depression. They had to migrate all over the state to earn a living, and they had some really horrible times, worse than anything we ever suffered. So there was a lot more hardship in his background. But his family had a lot of luck. His mom and dad were really together all the time.

César always teases me. He says I’m a liberal. When he wants to get me mad he says, “You’re not a Mexican,” because he says I have a lot of liberal hang-ups in my head. And I know it’s true. I am a logical person. I went to school and you learn that you have to weigh both sides and look at things objectively. But the farm workers know that wrong is wrong. They know that there’s evil in the world and that you have to fight evil. They call it like it is.

When I first went to work in the fields after I had met Fred Ross, the first thing that happened was that I was propositioned by a farmer. People who work in the fields have to take this every day of their lives, but I didn’t know how to handle it. So I wondered if I should be there at all, because I had gone to college. I had gone to college to get out of hard labor. Then all of a sudden there I was doing it again. I feel glad now that I was able to do it. It’s good my kids have done field work now, too, because they understand what it all means. I feel very humble with the farm workers. I think I’ve learned more from them than they would ever learn from me.

Source: La Voz del Pueblo (November-December 1972). Reprinted by permission.

* * * * *

In 1991, law professor Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on being sexually harassed by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The televised testimony resonated with women across the nation and moved them to action. Thomas was confirmed and sits on the Court, but the new awareness of the scourge of sexual harassment resulted in thousands of women reporting the harassment they had previously suffered silently. This article by Anita Hill describes her ordeal.