Labor Leader Honored for Her Activism

Longtime labor leader Dolores Huerta was announced on Tuesday as the 2002 winner of the Puffin/Nation prize at a Beverly Hills ceremony commemorating her lifetime of work for social causes.

Huerta, a storied figure in the history of progressive politics, said she would use the $100,000 award to start an institute for recruiting and training community-based organizers.

The 72-year-old Huerta, who almost died two years ago after an aneurysm, said the future needs the kind of grass-roots groups that boosted her activist career.

“This is what I came out of, this is what Cesar [Chavez] came out of,” said Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America with Chavez. “There’s a lot of latent leadership out there, and the only thing they need is for us to help them surface.”

The award, given jointly by the Puffin Foundation and the Nation Institute, goes annually to an American who has challenged the status quo through courageous and imaginative work. The Nation Institute was founded in 1966 by the owners of the Nation magazine.

The ceremony at the offices of the Feminist Majority Foundation featured area politicians and fellow activists who, with a mixture of pride and nostalgia, recalled Huerta’s fiery leadership of protest marches, union strikes and boycotts.

Rep. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, thanked Huerta for helping her career in the early 1990s, at a time when Huerta was crisscrossing the state to boost female representation in politics.

“You’re my conscience, and you’re the conscience for many of us,” Solis told Huerta, who wore a skirt suit with the red and black colors of the farm workers union. A button on Huerta’s suit read “Viva la mujer” ( Long live the woman).

Though many of the accolades focused on Huerta’s place in history, some pointed out that she maintains her famously busy pace while spearheading the struggle for liberal causes. “She reminds that it’s not over,” said former state legislator Tom Hayden. “She will not go quietly. She won’t go on the shelf. She won’t become a statue. She won’t [yet] have a street named after her.”

Two years ago, Huerta saw her dreams slipping away. The mother of 11 children, 14 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, Huerta was told by doctors that she had little chance to live after suffering an aneurysm in her aorta.

Huerta said she was incapacitated for several months, and had to relearn how to walk, talk and eat, helped along by her family’s around-the-clock care. This summer, Huerta hit the streets again, marching from Bakersfield to Sacramento in support of landmark farm worker legislation. Fellow activists said Huerta marched 150 miles in 15 days, often in 100-degree weather. “For God’s sake, who could do that?” said Peg Yorkin, chairwoman of the Feminist Majority.

Huerta considers her life work far from complete. “Our task is to go out and find those leaders and help create a better democracy,” she said. Huerta will fly later this week to New York City, where she will receive the award on Sunday.