Dolores Huerta’s legacy is the generations of labor activists she inspired from the frontlines

The only time I have been arrested was with Dolores Huerta in 2004.

I was 21 and an intern with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, or HERE, which was leading a campaign to unionize workers in the Agua Caliente Casino and Resort in Palm Springs.

The workers’ demands spoke of everyday concerns and needs, and of the marginal conditions in their absence: livable wages, for instance, for a decent home; healthcare and retirement benefits; protection from sexual harassment and assault, whether from bosses or costumers; grievance procedures to curtail abusive supervisors; employer guarantees to respect employee choices.

Facing typical hostility, HERE responded with civil disobedience. The union rallied a crowd and invited local reporters, whose stories it hoped to leverage. Twenty-five people walked into the street facing the casino and sat down to block traffic and provoke arrests.

At the center was a 74-year-old Dolores Huerta, cross-legged on desert-hot asphalt, singing, “We Shall Overcome.”

By then, Huerta, who died this week at her home in Bakersfield, had spent half a century fighting for labor rights in California. Born in 1930, she earned a college degree when few Mexican Americans graduated from high school, most being funneled into labor as children. In the 1950s, she was a leader of the Community Service Organization, a critical force in California’s civil and political rights history. And then, in 1962, she moved to Delano, where she was co-founder of the National Farm Worker Association, a precursor to the United Farm Worker movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the next three decades, Huerta played a range of leadership roles — from contract negotiator to boycott organizer; from strategist to fundraiser; from media speaker to grower antagonist.

Like HERE, the UFW fought to improve worker life — from the viscerally mundane, like clean toilets and cold water in work fields, to the existential: For many, the union inspired a new sense of possibility. And like most unions, the UFW drew strength from its many members and allies.

This was certainly the case in the Coachella Valley, where Palm Springs is located. Amalia Uribe Deaztlan, for instance, joined the UFW in 1968 when she was not yet 20, picketing fields, traveling to boycott rallies and suing growers for their poisoning pesticides. Similarly, Lupe Crespo moved from Los Angeles to the UFW headquarters, where she found an eclectic group of organizers. In the late 1970s, she moved to the Coachella Valley, where she and her husband continued to unionize farmworkers and support progressive forces.

For both women, Huerta was an inspirational role model, a militant who named and shaped our world. In turn, both contributed to the movement that made Huerta a household name. 

I do not know what Huerta in 2004 remembered of my previous home, though I can imagine that she was aware of the region’s stark geographic inequalities: an eastern half of poor, immigrant and Mexican farmworker families and a western half of wealthy white families living on a resort-based economy. Whatever her thoughts, she was there, on that asphalt, using her body to help workers gain what was rightfully theirs — as she had done in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

A lifetime of labor, in short, and a lifetime of vision.

It seemed fitting to me, then, that during the UFW’s 2024 National Convention in Bakersfield, hotel workers from Los Angeles’s UNITE-HERE Local 11 came to share their gratitude for the UFW’s aid in recent contract battles. Some spoke of a future when hotel unions demand union produce for their hotel kitchens, and when workers in California — a state that flatters itself with progressive politics while a quarter of its children remain hungry — can say their labor is respected by employers and consumers alike. 

I remember Dolores Huerta as a labor organizer who spanned nearly a century of mobilizations and, without exaggeration, helped build the largest farmworker movement in U.S. history. That movement, with all its shortcomings, inspired and sprouted organizers across the country and helped keep unions alive when their existence (like today) was in question.

I also remember Dolores Huerta as a Latina leader, who, in her last months of life, spoke of her sexual assault by Cesar Chavez, thereby bulwarking the testimonies of other survivors and compelling an overdue confrontation with widespread male impunity.

Lastly, I remember her as a political thinker of steely resoluteness. The ‘Si Se Puede’ chant credited to her is less a reassurance — as it is often understood — and more a cutting demand for action: You cannot hide your passivity, it says, under the claim of pessimism. 

May Ms. Huerta rest in peace, may her movement continue, and may we one day see the world you envisioned so long ago.