UFW Co-Founder Comes Out of Shadow : Labor: Cesar Chavez’s stature long eclipsed Dolores Huerta’s work. She’s emerged as a leader and advocate for women.

In history, women’s accomplishments are often forgotten or tucked behind those of their male colleagues.

*

That’s how it has been for Dolores Huerta, co-founder with the late Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers of America.

Chavez, the union’s charismatic president until his death in 1993, has been credited with organizing the union and its nationwide grape boycotts to win better pay and conditions for farm workers. But her admirers believe the credit should be shared with Huerta, the union’s first vice president since its founding in 1962.

A small Mexican American woman with soft eyes but steely determination, Huerta at 65 still spends much of her time traveling, organizing migrant workers, negotiating contracts with growers and giving speeches. She averages about four hours of sleep a night and is often away from her Bakersfield home.

In her spare time, she has raised 11 children.

Before he died in 1993, Chavez described Huerta, the grandmother of 15, as “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

One example of that courage: In 1988 Huerta was in San Francisco, handing out news releases on the UFW’s longstanding grape boycott outside a hotel where President Bush was speaking. She was beaten by police and suffered a ruptured spleen and three broken ribs. The run-in with police and injuries didn’t stop Huerta from fighting for her cause.

Eleanor Smeal, president of the advocacy group The Feminist Majority Foundation and a longtime admirer of Huerta, described her as a “dedicated, inspired leader.”

“She is the hardest working, most determined yet optimistic crusader for people I have met,” Smeal said. “She thinks nothing of taking a red-eye flight from California to New York or elsewhere and then a red-eye on to somewhere else. She is tireless.”

Said Karen Nussbaum, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau: “She was the most important woman labor leader in the 1970s. She led the picket lines, stared down the bosses, negotiated the contracts, sustained the beatings and carried on.”

Former California Gov. Jerry Brown described her as “a fighter, dynamic, creative.”

But he also described her as “embodying the spirit of Cesar Chavez,” and there lies the rub.

“That’s the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn’t,” Huerta said in a recent interview. “I feel that has to change and women are going to have to change it.”

So Huerta in recent years has added to her union work an advocacy for women, with a focus on getting women elected to public office in California.

“At some point in my career in the union I realized that women were not being valued for what they were doing,” Huerta said.

“Women have the ideas and men take the credit for them. It happens all the time.”

*

Huerta was born in 1930 in Dawson, N.M., a small mining town. Her father was a miner and union activist. He was, she said, charismatic, intelligent, handsome and a chauvinist. Her mother was a cannery worker and cook, quiet, genteel and a hard worker.

When Huerta was 6 her parents divorced and her mother moved the children to Stockton, Calif., where she raised them alone, eventually saving enough money to buy a simple 70-room hotel.

Huerta and her siblings did much of the work. At the same time, however, her mother believed strongly in culture, buying the children symphony tickets and encouraging them to play musical instruments.

As a teen-ager, Huerta took dance lessons offered free under the Works Progress Administration--tap, ballet, flamenco and regional Mexican dances. She believed for a long time she would dance professionally.

But reality set in, and at 20 she married Ralph Head, a manual laborer, had two children and held an array of clerical jobs. The marriage ended about the time she started work on a teaching degree, taking night courses at what was then Stockton College.

She then married Ventura Huerta, with whom she had five children and whose name she took for her own. In Spanish, Dolores means “sorrow” and Huerta “orchard”--appropriate names for a union organizer, she and Chavez later thought.

After completing her degree, Huerta took a job at a local grammar school, but said she soon realized teaching was not for her.

“I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” Huerta said. “I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Partly, that realization came after meeting a community organizer, Fred Ross, who taught Huerta what he knew about union organizing.

She was deeply moved by the living conditions of the farm workers, who she said were treated almost as indentured servants by some growers.

“We would see their dirt floors, the wooden boxes for furniture,” Huerta said. “They had no money for food and worked so hard.”

Ross introduced Chavez to Huerta and after several attempts to organize the mostly Mexican farm workers for other unions, the two formed their own, the United Farm Workers.

Huerta and Chavez used community and public support to pressure growers to negotiate. Strikes and three nationwide grape boycotts eventually forced growers to sign contracts with the United Farm Workers.

In her division of labor with Chavez, Huerta did much of the negotiating, the legislative work, and organized the 1970 and 1975 grape boycotts. Chavez spent more time in the fields with workers.

Huerta successfully lobbied for state bills that removed citizenship requirements for public assistance and legislation that created disability and unemployment insurance for farm workers and aid for dependent children. Republican administrations in the 1980s, however, eroded some of the gains made the previous decade, she said.

Also in the 1980s, the union began fighting the increasing use of pesticides, after finding high rates of cancer and birth defects in migrant workers.

Meanwhile, Huerta raised her children, including four more with her current companion, Richard Chavez, Cesar’s brother.

Between organizing meetings, Huerta changed diapers and nursed babies. The older children sometimes stayed with friends and supporters; they often ate donated food and coped with frequent moves.

“Although we weren’t a traditional farm worker family whose livelihood depended on harvesting crops, we felt that way,” said Emilio Huerta, 37, an attorney for the union. “As a labor organizer, my mother had to follow workers in their seasonal patterns, and we traveled around with her. . . . Sometimes we attended as many as three or four different schools in a year.”

Emilio Huerta said that on the last day of fourth grade his mother picked him up from school and they moved to another town for the summer without taking anything, depending on donations of clothing once there.

“At certain times it was hard having a mom who always worked and wasn’t your typical mother,” said Maria Elena Chavez, a daughter and a performance artist who also works with the union. “As I get older it becomes easier to understand why those sacrifices were made.”

The way the children were raised made them resourceful, and at the same time exposed them to a life most people won’t experience, Chavez said.

“We have always known that we can overcome any obstacles with a lot of determination, time and sacrifice,” she said.

And why did Huerta choose to bear 11 children?

“She wants to pass on life, have her children carry out what she stands for,” Chavez said. “She’s always reminding us what she stands for.”