I remember a year or so ago, in a
sermon about Cesar Chavez, I mentioned Dolores Huerta once, as co-founder of
the United Farmworkers of America. I
feel terrible about that now, because it was actually Huerta who first
became interested in the plight of Mexican-American farm workers and risked her
life to speak out and fight for justice for them. But I wasn’t alone in my ignorance and
arrogance. Huerta is barely even mentioned in history books, yet, she is one of
the hardest-working, most devoted activists in America. Growing up in the 40s
and 50s, she was expected to fit into the box of wife
and mother. And although she was a wife and a mother of 11 children, she had a
need and a calling to do and be more.
In 1959, she became a community
organizer and lobbyist, the only woman in this male environment. That’s where
she met Cesar Chavez, who at first ignored her because she was a woman, but
after witnessing her commitment, her knowledge, and her ability to get people
to listen to her, joined with her to try to form the farmworkers in California
into unions, so that they could bargain with the rich, powerful, and racist
growers. Huerta said, “It’s ironic that none of us can live without food, yet
farmworkers are the lowest paid workers on the planet.”
Her dream was for them to be able to
share in the wealth they helped produce. In 1962, she and Chavez divided up the
San-Joaquin valley, and with an army of volunteers, set up the first credit
unions and cooperative stores for the workers. She joined a strike by Filipino farmworkers,
and her presence there sent the message that it was acceptable and necessary for women to be on the picket line. In
1966, Huerta organized a march from Delano to Sacramento, where the marchers
faced angry and sometimes violent crowds who accused them of agitating the local
farmworkers who were “loyal to the growers and did not have any complaints
about their treatment.” Shortly after reaching the capital city, she negotiated
the first contract in history between growers and workers, getting drinking
water and toilets in the fields.
When Robert Kennedy was running for
President, he came to California and stood in solidarity with the protesters. In a meeting with one of many anti-union
sheriffs, Kennedy asked, “How can you arrest someone if they haven’t violated
the law?” When the sheriff answered, “They are about to violate the law, that’s
why,” Kennedy told him that he should read the constitution. Huerta was on the
speakers’ podium with Kennedy moments before he was shot, which strengthened her commitment to
non-violence in the movement.
Their greatest success came when they
decided to call for a boycott of California table grapes which, Huerta said, “were
produced in poverty and poison—DDT pesticide— for farmworkers.” She lobbied for the boycott as far
away as New York, where she reached out to African-American and Puerto Rican
store owners, asking for support, and they took grapes out of their stores.
Gloria Steinem became interested in the movement and urged her supporters to
boycott the large grocery retailer A & P. At the height of the boycott,
around 17 million people stopped eating grapes.And in 1970, after almost 5
years of boycotts, marches, and nonviolent resistance, the
California Grape Growers association signed a collective bargaining agreement
with the United Farmworkers union that affected over 10,000 workers. Asked to comment on the victory,
Huerta said, “You have to have a total commitment. It’s not something you can
just come in and leave. You have to stay and keep working in order to make a
difference.” When she was 58 years old, Huerta was hit so hard with a police
baton during a protest rally in San Francisco that she had to have her spleen
removed. She was out of commission for a while, and when her children, who were
taking care of her, asked what they could do for her, she said, “Boycott
Safeway.”
After Chavez died in 1993, Huerta was
pushed out of the union by its male leaders. But at age 89, she continues grass
roots community organizing through the Dolores Huerta Foundation. The United Farmworkers’ slogan is ,“Si, se
Pueda,”, “Yes, it can be done” or “Yes we Can.” Cesar Chavez is usually given credit for it, but
when fellow community organizer President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 2012, he acknowledged that Huerta was the one who came up with the slogan
and that he had appropriated it for his campaign.
Learning about the work of this
brilliant, courageous woman and the justice she helped bring about for
farmworkers reminded me of what Jennett said last week, that all movements for
positive change overlap because they have the same basic values, the primary
one being that we care so much about our people that we want true justice and
full equality for all of them.
As we heard in the reading, Huerta
considered her movement and its lack of respect to be similar to the Civil Rights
movement. The march from Delano to Sacramento echoed the march from Selma to
Montgomery the year before. And when she
needed help in getting people to boycott grapes in New York, it was the African
American and Puerto Rican small grocers who supported her, because they knew what she was going through. Even
though she refused to be put into the box of wife and mother, when she knew she
could do and be more, Huerta didn’t consider herself a feminist until she
became friends with Gloria Steinem, who helped her see that the American
system of patriarchy creates false divisions among women to keep them
oppressed. Women of color rarely joined the feminist movement, because it was considered
a white organization. Steinem taught her about feminism, and she taught Steinem
about racism. I think the message here is that humans need other humans to
support and participate in our respective fights for justice and equality. And
by intentionally reaching across the aisle, we can learn from and help each other.
As we said in our gathering prayer, Let us hear the plight of all who yearn for
justice. Let us be in solidarity with them and join in their cause.
Amen.
Our reading
is by Dolores Huerta, community organizer and activist for the rights of Farm
Workers, from the documentary, Delores.
I remember
when I first read the Constitution of the United States in grammar school. I always felt so proud of being an American. I thought, We have all these rights. In a
democracy, you make your demands, and then somebody will listen to you, and
justice will prevail.
But I found
out that when you do this in an economic situation, it doesn’t quite work like
that. Once we started making these kinds
of demands, we had the same response that the black movement has had. Our people
were killed. The system doesn’t really
want brown or black people to have an organization or to have any power. I
found out that no matter what I did, that never changed.
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