The Eternal Soldadera

In a nondescript Santa Rosa hotel conference room, another day of tortuous negotiations with the world’s largest winemaker has sputtered to a close.

Half a dozen farm workers slump around a long table as the sun sets. In their jeans, T-shirts and cowboy boots, the men listen glumly as their leader--a tiny, 69-year-old grandmother with a community college education--assures them that they are making progress against the bevy of lawyers and consultants from Gallo of Sonoma Vineyards.

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, is certain: “Something happened today. It’s another step forward.”

For the tired workers, it hardly seems that way. Gallo has fended off the farm workers and Huerta for a quarter century. This round of contract talks has dragged on for two years. And today the men have lowered their wage demand, again, only to receive no response.

The leather-skinned workers can only joke about their counterparts from Gallo, who huddle in a neighboring conference room in their crisp suits and white shirts. The winery’s top lawyer must have made another $1,000 today, the farmhands guess. Ruefully, they smile.

Then, incongruously, one of the men spreads his arms wide, throws back his head and laughs. It is the laugh, not of a vassal, but of a king.

“When we finally win, this is how I will laugh,” Carmelo Sales, a broad-faced father of three, tells Huerta and his fellow campesinos in Spanish. “Because all the foremen said we would never win. And he who laughs last, laughs best.”

For nearly four decades, thousands of field hands like Sales have put their lives and livelihoods in the hands of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers of America, the nation’s most mythologized and misunderstood union. They have thrown their bodies alongside Huerta’s to block loads of nonunion grapes, locked arms with her against the blows of 2-by-4-wielding thugs, and, raging to go on strike, stayed in the fields at the insistence of this mercurial little woman.

Fabled union founder Cesar Chavez has been dead more than six years. Current UFW President Arturo Rodriguez struggles with the daily task of winning new members for a rebuilding union. That leaves Huerta as the union’s emotional compass and its most potent symbol.

The longtime secretary-treasurer has pushed relentlessly toward the goal of building a national farm workers union--even as agribusinessmen have dug in their heels, even as new immigrants have continued to accept low wages, even as old liberals have forgotten the field hands and moved on to new causes.

Small victories sustain Huerta. For her followers, there is nostalgia and, especially, faith.

“With Cesar [Chavez] in heaven looking down and Dolores at the table negotiating for us,” Sales promises, “1999 is the year that the growers really have to worry.”

*

It has been this way since 1961, when Cesar Chavez called Huerta to his home in East Los Angeles and told her: “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will.”

What followed has become legend from the barrios of East L.A. to the liberal salons of SoHo and Santa Monica: the strikes, long marches and grape boycotts that blossomed in the fertile political soil of the 1960s. The contracts and substantial wage increases for transient farmhands, who some thought could never be organized. And the weeks-long fasts for nonviolence that landed shy, little Cesar Chavez on a saintly perch from which, for some, he has never descended.

Today, the Left heralds Huerta as a hero. Mexican Americans consider her a seminal figure in the Chicano power movement. Labor leaders and feminists have installed her in their Halls of Fame.

The faithful strum their guitars and sing new corridos for the “Madonna of the Fields.” At marches, brown-skinned parents push their small children forward to ask for autographs. Huerta, whose name, fittingly, means “Sorrowful Orchard,” scrawls boldly across vintage UFW flags, the blood-red field emblazoned with a defiant black Aztec eagle. “Si, se puede,” she writes. “Yes, it can be done.”

But the audience for such ethnic populism has its limits. Most Americans probably would be surprised to learn the farm workers union still lives; and that it still wants them to boycott grapes.

A quarter century after the plight of farm workers captured the national conscience, the UFW is battling to recapture its past glory. Membership has finally pushed back over 25,000, but it’s still less than one-third of its peak and not even 10% of California’s semi-permanent farm workers. An estimated three-quarters of all field workers earn less than California’s minimum wage, $5.75 an hour. Fewer than one-third receive health insurance. Ephemeral labor middlemen have proved too evasive for most union organizing drives. And when farm workers have gone to the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board for relief, they have seldom found it.

The UFW also has suffered at its own hand, stumbling through in-house purges and straying from the face-to-face organizing that was its strength. During the 1980s, Huerta and union leaders obsessed over internal conspiracies, while membership withered.

Ironically, it took Chavez’s death in 1993 to revive the union. Now it has entered a new era under the leadership of Chavez’s son-in-law, Arturo Rodriguez. During the past five years, the UFW has won 18 union elections and signed 23 new contracts. But the gains have been mostly in small crops such as mushrooms and roses. The union’s biggest push--to represent notoriously low-paid strawberry workers--has stalled, despite a three-year campaign and heavy financial support from the AFL-CIO.

Never mind that, says Huerta. “I feel that, as long as we keep fighting, we can’t lose.”

*

Like some presidential contender, Huerta whips across the landscape today, as if her next speech might be the one that finally enlightens a slumbering nation. During a typical five-day swing, she rushes from a meeting at a Florida ranch, where UFW workers would soon sign a contract; to a student rally in Georgia; to an appearance with California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles; then on to marches in East Los Angeles and Salinas; before speeding north to San Francisco, where rock legend Carlos Santana played a concert in her honor.

Her name still opens doors in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. This year, she helped push through federal and state relief for farm workers who lost their jobs in the citrus freeze, then got the state to raise the amount the distressed workers could earn and still receive unemployment benefits.

At an age when she might be doting on her 11 grown children, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, Huerta alights at her two-story stucco home in Bakersfield only long enough to repack and hit the road again.

At most of her stops, she listens as others paint her as an icon. Then Huerta takes center stage--often wearing a rakish red beret atop long hair, rinsed black--and tells a story about “Cesar.”

The final flourishes have become a mantra. Huerta calls out the names of the movement’s heroes--Chavez, the campesinos, the “martyrs” killed during the union’s heyday. The crowd responds to each with shouts of “Viva!” She then recites targets of union antipathy--pesticides, Proposition 187, the once-Republican-dominated state farm board. The crowd answers with “Abajo!” (“Down with.”) Then rhythmic clapping and chants of “Si, se puede! Si, se puede!”

To some, the routine might seem tired or anachronistic. But Huerta seems ever-inspired. She will not leave a room until she has talked to every well-wisher. Richard Chavez, Cesar’s younger brother and father of Huerta’s four youngest children, once joked that she seemed to suck energy out of the crowds like some powerful extraterrestrial.

Thirty years ago, Huerta remained sharp during all-night contract negotiations while others faded. Today, she stays up salsa dancing and partying until 3 a.m. with her youngest daughter, Camila, and her 20-something friends; then it’s up early to march through a rainy San Francisco morning, paying homage to Chavez.

In San Antonio this spring, she stayed at seven homes in seven nights. Someone from a network of union members and admirers--veterans of decades of labor conflict--always seems to turn up at the right time to offer a ride or a change of clothes.

Gone are the days when she and other UFW leaders paid themselves just $5 a week. But Huerta draws a salary of just $10,000 a year and still relies heavily on friends and union supporters.

In 40 years, this doyenne of American labor recalls only one true vacation--a week she spent in Puerto Vallarta with a son. Other respites came only when she was hospitalized for exhaustion.

“There is just so much work to be done, and someone has to do it,” Huerta says. “In organizing, you are not going to reach every person, but you just have to keep pushing for the next one.”

*

Throwing herself in front of brawling men, giving birth to four children out of wedlock, working rather than staying home to rear her children, Huerta shattered the mold for a Catholic Latina of her generation. Contemporaries sometimes clucked about her absentee parenting and vagabond lifestyle. Traditionalists found it distasteful that a woman was so outspoken, so radical.

But others found in the beautiful young provocateur the logical extension of a cultural tradition. During the Mexican Revolution, a handful of women followed Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and others into battle. The people called them soldaderas, women warriors. The most revered member of the fighting sorority was named Adelita.

When Huerta railed against greedy landowners at a rally in San Francisco, an old lettuce picker in the audience applauded. “Nuestra Adelita,” the man murmured, smiling. “Our Adelita.”

Like the soldaderas, Huerta, then union vice president, would be dispatched everywhere to do anything to keep the fledgling organization afloat. In 1963 in the UFW’s home base of Delano, the young mother would show up at all hours at pool halls and on front stoops, recruiting workers. When the great grape strike of 1965 began, it was Huerta who marched up and down the picket lines, rallying the men and keeping them out of the fields. When the growers formed a bloody, anti-UFW alliance with the Teamsters union, it was Huerta who flew to Miami Beach and camped for a week outside Jimmy Hoffa’s suite, pleading--futiley, as it turned out--with the Teamsters boss to back down.

Before the union’s first walkout--at the Mount Arbor Rose Co. in McFarland--she led a final unity meeting for nearly 100 workers. Huerta held out a cross and had the mostly Catholic workers place their hands on it. They had to swear they would stick together.

Not trusting providence alone, she was up before dawn the next day, patrolling in front of the workers’ homes. When one group of men appeared as if it might break ranks, Huerta rolled her car in front of their driveway. She hid the keys and would not move. (The strike eventually led to a pay raise, although not a permanent contract.)

When the first proud grape grower finally buckled in 1966, Huerta negotiated the contract--the first in the state’s history between a corporation and a union led by nonwhite workers. Then she went to San Francisco and learned from longshoremen how to run her union’s first hiring hall.

Huerta framed every fight as part of a larger class struggle. Some of the growers seemed as pained at being depicted as greedy oppressors as they did at granting wage increases. They called Huerta “the dragon lady.”

Three decades have not softened the view of one old foe, a Central Valley farmer, who said: “You don’t get anything from Dolores Huerta unless you fight for it and you earn it. . . . She is vindictive and carries a certain amount of resentment. I wouldn’t ever expect anything to be relented by her.”

The same persistence is viewed by the UFW stalwarts as the union’s greatest strength.

“She went about this stuff with an amazing confidence,” says Marshall Ganz, a former UFW executive and now an instructor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “She went in face to face with these lawyers or professional management people and she was just very impressive. She more than held her own.”

Huerta felt union leaders could only be limited by their own imagination and resolve. She once drove a 19-year-old grape picker to the Port of Los Angeles, handed him a picket sign and told him to stop longshoremen from loading nonunion grapes. Huerta then sped off to a meeting. Fourteen hours later, young Eliseo Medina was still sitting on the dock. He never saw a single grape that day. But if he had, “Dolores just thought I would figure it out and stop those grapes all by myself,” recalls Medina, later a UFW vice president and now the western chief of the Service Employees International Union, which has 1.3 million nurses, doctors, janitors, clerks and other members.

“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina says. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”

History also had a way of freezing Huerta in its bright strobe.

On the night in 1968 that Bobby Kennedy won the California presidential primary, among his last utterances was a thanks to Chavez, Huerta and the UFW, whose precinct walkers inspired a 90%-plus vote for Kennedy in some East Los Angeles neighborhoods. Moments later, Huerta followed Kennedy off the podium at the Ambassador Hotel, ready to direct him to a room where mariachis would serenade the presumptive Democratic nominee. Instead, Kennedy walked into the hotel’s kitchen, where Sirhan Sirhan shot him dead.

Two decades later, in 1988, Huerta suddenly found herself at the end of a San Francisco policeman’s nightstick as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George Bush. A television camera captured the assault, which ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.

The incident led to a rewriting of the San Francisco Police Department’s policies on crowd control and discipline. The city also awarded Huerta $825,000, a legal settlement that pays her $2,000 a month to this day.

Chavez once summed up his right hand quite simply: “Totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

*

Not long ago, Huerta’s daughter Juanita was writing for a San Francisco State University publication. Her elegant essay begins with a recollection of the day she waited in a junior high school parking lot for her mother to drive her home.

The minutes pass and Dolores fails to appear. The 12-year-old’s emotions vault from anger to sadness to despair. A train rushes past the lonely parking lot, and the girl begins to cry. The locomotive evokes in Juanita an image of her mother “. . . rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward. . . .”

Dolores Huerta did not make life easy for those around her, whether in her blood family or her union one. The fire and quixotic nature that moved the faithful often left those close to her scrambling for solid ground.

Chavez had his wife, Helen, to raise their eight children. But Huerta was often on her own, having split with her two husbands. The second, Ventura Huerta, had been alienated by Dolores’ refusal to stay home and be a traditional wife and mother.

So when Dolores drove up and down Route 99 to her latest meeting or negotiation, she would likely be nursing another new baby. (She once said she had so many children because they were lucky, like angels.) Her older children sometimes had to forage among friends and neighbors for dinner and a place to stay.

She would miss birthdays, communions and school open houses. The children could not help but feel jealous of their mother’s first love, the union. But they basked in a feeling that they were a part of history. “We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” says Emilio, now 42 and a lawyer for the National Farm Worker Service Center in Bakersfield. “She sort of belonged to the farm worker movement. And it was our job to support her.”

Her crusade only gave her pause, Huerta says, when it put her children in danger.

When Emilio was 9, he slipped fliers to workers on a giant produce ranch, sprinting to safety just ahead of a pickup truck driven by an angry ranch supervisor.

One night in Delano, two anti-union agitators came to the door at 4 a.m. and tried to force their way in. When they couldn’t, they smashed a picture window, sending shards of glass just past Emilio. Huerta and her children huddled in terror in a bathroom, shaking uncontrollably until the men went away.

“It was our families who sacrificed,” she conceded to friends and family at her 69th birthday last April. She then told a story about limping to school one day, with a carload of children, on a slashed tire. “That was kind of how we made it through life,” she said.

Now Huerta’s children seem largely to be flourishing. They devote at least some of their time to the movement. Fidel, 43, is a doctor at a public health clinic, 47-year-old Lori is acting director at the Cesar Chavez Foundation and Juanita, 28, teaches fifth-graders in Los Angeles. Among Huerta’s other children are a chef, a nurse, a film student, a public health outreach worker. Her greatest heartache has come from her eldest, 49-year-old Celeste, who has schizophrenia and has sometimes wandered the streets but now lives in an L.A. nursing home.

Her union family and allies also found Huerta to be an unpredictable partner.

Chavez appreciated that Huerta would speak her mind, but the two clashed so routinely that others tended to shrink from the room in anticipation of their encounters. Huerta quit or was fired by Chavez more times than anyone can remember. Within a day or two, she would be on the phone or back in the office, talking strategy as if nothing had happened.

Some of her co-workers were rankled by Huerta’s inability to follow a schedule. Others complained that, for all her negotiating and motivational skills, she could not execute an organizational plan. And she has a reputation for never forgiving a slight.

Art Torres, chairman of the state Democratic Party, suffered Huerta’s fury when he was a state assemblyman. Although he once worked as a UFW lobbyist, the union attacked him with a vengeance when he failed to support the UFW choice for Assembly speaker. The union gave generously to Torres’ opponent, and Huerta would not even speak to her old ally.

Torres won despite the union opposition, but he and Huerta “didn’t speak for years and years and years,” he recalls.

By some accounts, such stridency exacerbated the union’s long slide, which began in the mid-1970s when Chavez became preoccupied with “malignant forces” he insisted were trying to topple the union. Some core staff members were deemed too preoccupied with leftist politics and pressured to leave. Others were ostracized because--no longer content to work for little more than room and board--they asked for salaries.

When a group of dissident field representatives in Salinas attempted to elect their own candidates for the UFW’s executive board in 1981, Huerta was dispatched to fire the 10 leaders of the rebellion. She insists that they were not responding to worker grievances. To this day she claims the real culprit was Marshall Ganz, the former UFW executive who gave 15 years of his life to the union with virtually no pay.

Critics say that the dark side of Huerta’s zealotry came out during those low years for the union. “All through that period, Dolores played a negative role,” says Ganz. “I think she exacerbated Cesar’s difficulties and acted as an amplifier of the union’s paranoia.”

*

Those who knew her as a child could not have predicted what a force Dolores would become. She was skinny and prone to illness. She relished the middle-class life her mother built for her in Stockton. Dolores took violin lessons, joined the Girl Scouts, loved to tap dance. She even became a majorette.

But she also learned from her single mother, a hotel manager, the importance of community service. Alicia St. John Chavez made sure even her poorest tenants had something to eat. And Huerta’s father, Juan Fernandez, was a fiery union leader who had served in the New Mexico Legislature. According to family lore, he identified one fellow legislator as “a dirty scab” and punched him out on the floor of the House.

Dolores began to flower as an activist in the mid-1940s. As a high school student, she organized a teen center, where kids gathered to listen to a jukebox, dance and play games. She was popular and excelled in school.

But the sharpest memories of those years were of rewards denied, opportunities missed. She won a Girl Scout essay contest, but high school administrators would not let her miss two weeks of classes to accept the trip that was her prize. She sold the most war bonds, but the promised award was never presented. School officials would not accept a Mexican American as a winner, she says.

Then police ordered the teen center shut down, apparently because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican, black and Filipino kids. Huerta said those setbacks so alienated her that she cannot remember a single detail from her senior prom or graduation. “It was terrible,” she recalls. “I just blacked the whole thing out.”

In the years that followed, that sting would never leave her. After attending Stockton College, Huerta became a teacher. But she left about a year later because, as she once told an interviewer, “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 children.”

In 1955, at age 25, Huerta found the perfect outlet for her restless energies when she met Fred Ross Sr., a liberal activist who helped teach working-class people how to register voters, fight police brutality and demand government services. Huerta helped found the Stockton chapter of Ross’ Community Service Organization. A few years earlier, a former farm worker named Cesar Chavez had taken the same path in a San Jose barrio named Sal Si Puedes (literally, “Get out, if you can.”)

The CSO would help win many new rights for its poor, mostly Mexican American, constituents, including state pensions for immigrant noncitizens. As a CSO leader in Stockton, Huerta began to organize farm workers. Chavez was doing the same in Oxnard. They shared a frustration: After a few victories, they would turn over the workers to larger unions, who ignored the poor, Spanish-speaking migrants.

Even when Chavez rose to the CSO’s top job in California, the organization’s convention voted against organizing farm workers. A distraught Chavez bolted the group in 1962 and Huerta soon followed.

Chavez moved his family to Delano, a modest Central Valley town surrounded by rows of Emperor grapes and groves of fine almond trees. There he started his union with the help of his friend Dolores Huerta and, later, a child of the migrant camps, Gilbert Padilla.

“I thought, ‘Wow, we are finally going to do it!’ ” Huerta recalls. “We are finally going to make it happen.”

The old soldadera speaks much the same way about the union today. So closely does she relate to la causa that questions about her personal life inevitably turn back to the union. She seldom allows herself to express regret or loss. She answers questions about setbacks with reports on the latest union victories. Rarely by herself, she seems the fanatical embodiment of the old 1960s axiom--the personal is political.

Huerta is familiar with many people but gives the impression that she is intimate with very few. If this is sad to anyone else, it is not so to Huerta, who considers her life’s work totally energizing.

“You could just feel this power you could generate from people working together,” she says. “It was just very awesome. We were doing what we loved and so we didn’t really sacrifice anything.”

*

At a bucolic hideaway in the mountains above Bakersfield, Richard Chavez waits.

He has retired from most of his union responsibilities, except for an occasional march or a tribute to his late brother. Soon he plans to move out of Nuestra Senora de La Paz, Our Lady of Peace, the 200-acre retreat in the Tehachapi Mountains where many of the union’s leaders live and work.

Richard Chavez spends most of his days at the base of a boulder-strewn hill, about a half mile from La Paz, where Cesar Chavez is buried in a simple grave beside a gravel road.

He is toiling away on a retirement cottage. Here Richard will be close enough to his union family and friends, but distant enough to avoid being dragged into every union intrigue. He and Huerta have mostly lived apart in recent times, although she recently took him into her home when he was ill.

Chavez hopes the two will be reunited in the small hillside cottage, living out their days together. He concedes, though, that his sometime-partner has not shown much interest in this plan. “She wants to build this national union,” says Chavez, a kind and quiet man of 69. “And she feels she is running out of time.”

The old carpenter keeps at it--installing the dry wall in the cottage and raising rough wood beams. He adds a picture window and other touches he thinks Dolores will like. But he laughs a little at his efforts, realizing the woman warrior is not yet prepared to strip off her armor.

“I hope to spend a few hours with her before I fall over,” he says, still smiling. “I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. I guess I will just keep on waiting.”