UFW Co-Founder Urges Support for Workers’ Rights

Dolores Huerta, la mujer behind the United Farm Workers, implored a group of Ventura College students Wednesday to carry on the legacy of Cesar Chavez and strive to end racism.

Wearing all red and black, including a red beret over shoulder-length black hair, the fiery 69-year-old civil rights leader--who led the grape boycott with Chavez while raising her 11 children--said it was up to young people to keep his fighting spirit alive.

“I call upon you to join in the legacy of Cesar,” she told about 75 students who came to hear the UFW legend and peace activist, who was at Robert Kennedy’s side the day he was shot.

As part of Ventura College’s Cesar E. Chavez Commemorative Week, Huerta spoke at the campus quad. The events began Monday, six years and three days after Chavez’s death.

“The civil rights movement was built with people like you,” she said. “It is you who will have to change the society to bring justice to everybody--for farm workers, to end racism and to end sexism.”

Born in a small mining town in New Mexico, Huerta grew up in the San Joaquin Valley community of Stockton. After her parents divorced when she was 5, Huerta and her siblings were raised by her mother, who owned a hotel and often took in farm worker families for free.

Huerta’s father also instilled in her a desire to help the downtrodden. He was a miner, a field worker, a union activist and later became a state assemblyman.

A passionate young woman, Huerta was a grammar school teacher with seven children when she gave up her profession in 1962 to join Chavez in forming the UFW.

On Wednesday, Huerta reflected on her years working with Chavez and some of the UFW’s accomplishments. Currently, there are 27,000 unionized farm workers in California, she said. They earn wages that begin at $10.45 per hour. When they retire, they receive a healthy pension.

“This is what Cesar was fighting for,” Huerta said. “But what we have been able to get for the farm workers has come at a great cost.”

She named five UFW “martyrs” who were killed by police or anti-union growers while they defended farm workers’ rights. The youngest was a 19-year-old student from Boston who was killed during a sugar cane worker strike in Florida, she said.

Huerta said she was jailed 22 times during protests. In the early 1990s, she said, she was beaten by San Francisco police while participating in a demonstration and left in critical condition.

“What is so wrong with farm workers wanting to form a union?” she asked. “Cesar always said we’ll never see a national farm worker union in our lifetime, because . . . of racism. I truly believe what Cesar said.

“When I was your age, in school, I thought someday racism would end,” she said. “I thought all the racists would get old and die off . . . how sad it is when you see that instead we have new racists.”

Huerta attributed the recent school massacre in Littleton, Colo., in large part to society’s failure to embrace different cultures.

“When you see these young 17-year-old kids who decided they wanted to wipe everybody out and, of course, they were looking for people of color first, killing the Latino and the black kid,” she said.

Additional lessons about the accomplishments of people of color beginning in grade school would help encourage tolerance, she said. It would also instill a sense of pride in minorities, she said.

“We open our school books and we don’t see anything that tells us what the people of color have contributed in this country,” she said. “If we as people of color do not read about what we have done . . . , then it gives our children this whole self-esteem problem. . . . And what about the white kids? They go through life thinking that white is superior.”

Although Huerta lives in Bakersfield, she often travels to Ventura County in an effort to unionize the county’s 5,000 strawberry field workers. In July, she helped to organize a new Ventura County chapter of the National Strawberry Commission for Workers’ Rights, made up of local leaders who support better conditions for farm workers.

During Wednesday’s talk, she pleaded fervently for basic rights for field hands, including improved sanitary conditions.

“We in the farm workers union don’t want to work against growers, we want to work with them,” she said.

At the end of her speech, Huerta again emphasized the need for nationwide racial healing.

“Our species of human came from Africa,” she said. “Then as we spread all over the world, we got whiter and whiter, we started fading. But we all have one root, we all came from Africa. We’re all one race--the human race.

After leading the audience in chants of “Si se puede” (“It can be done”) and “wozani,” (Zulu for “the people are coming”) Huerta was swarmed by students and teachers. They gave her hugs, took photographs with her and asked her to sign UFW posters, books, stickers and even a T-shirt.

“Some people strive to meet movie stars,” said former Ventura College student Jeri Nava-Maynez, 31, who had her Cesar Chavez T-shirt autographed by Huerta. “I strive to meet people like her.”

While a mariachi band played, Huerta mingled with the students for about an hour.

“It’s a humbling experience,” Huerta said. “It also shows that the young people really have a thirst.”