Delores Huerta - Advocate for All People
Delores Huerta is the co-founder of the United Field Workers (UFW) Union and worked tirelessly for more than 40 years to raise wages and secure health and dignity concessions from monopolistic California, Arizona and Texas based agri-corporations. She was the person Cesar Chavez chose to start the union with and she continued to guide the work even after he passed. She negotiated alliances with the Black Power Movement and the Women’s Power Movement of the 60’s and the 70’s. She led the Chicano movement into strikes and alliances with many a like minded union and change agent. She knows people, has a vision of justice and is untiring in her pursuit of freedom.
Her demeanor is so focused, driven, unrelenting that one can see why her members drew strength from her leadership and why she was a threat to the employers unwilling to provide humane services to the field workers. Near the end of his life, Cesar Chavez thanked Ms. Huerta for “keeping him honest all these years”. In one of her famous house trainings, she said “this may sound sort of sappy, but you really have to love people”.
The documentary “Delores” pulls from an amazing amount of historic footage of the UFW movement. It unfolds as a meta-linear story line of His-Story and takes time to make a deeper dive into the personal cost to Delores and her family. A true firebrand, she gives everything to achieving human rights for her people. The time spent in resistance scarred the relationships with her husbands and her kids. In all this vulnerability, the power of a mother’s love is ever present, if perhaps spread thin.
In one interview, taken when Delores is maybe 35 and she is by then a mother of at least seven children (she had eleven total), she is asked “If you were given $5,000, just for you, what would you do with it. Would you, like many women, want a new dress or go to a spa?”
She answered promptly ”I think new clothes or a spa would be a waste of money. I would give it to the union. It is my life work. I think that would help my children and my community.” It was one of many displays of conviction and sacrifice captured in this fluent and provocative film, and one that provoked and perhaps split the audience. Was she a saint or a mirage?
When the real-life, in-person Delores took her seat in the after-screening panel, the audience was star struck. This five foot tall, eighty five year old civil rights giant, had something on her mind. She quickly dismissed the sentimentality around any idea of sacrifice and instead asked her new found fans whether we were comfortable in our current situation?
Without mentioning 45’s name, she reasserted her long held view that injustice to any person is unacceptable. She praised the efforts of the North Carolina Moral Movement and calculated that it was at a tipping point and asked all the people in the audience to push. She closed her remarks by directing us to write “thousands of letters” to our Senators.
Her volunteer staff then passed out old school tri-fold pamphlets introducing us to the Delores Huerta Foundation, her home after the UFW. Here she invests valuable space to reinforce her credo:
The film shows the sad saga of her being pushed out of the leadership of the UFW in 2002. Delores felt the union should continue the house-meeting approach to building relationships and raising leaders. The men who came after Cesar Chavez felt they could lead from the top down and thrive by collecting dues, deploying lawyers and lobbyists and staying in their offices.
She never looked back. Through her Foundation, her team has been hosting and training activists in the art of house meetings. They have adopted hard hit communities in and around our agriculture heartlands. Methodically participants are trained to collectively prioritize their needs and engage public officials to advocate for their rights. Her movement keeps advancing.
They get people registered to vote, work together on healthy environments free of toxins, racism, discrimination and hatred. They are disrupting the school to prison pipeline and advocating that public funds are invested in schools and not incarceration. Their mission is to create networks of healthy organized communities pursuing social justice through systemic and structural transformation.
Ms. Huerta's focus is clear. White male supremacy driving unbridled corporate greed creates harm to people and must be resisted and ultimately stopped. Everyone is potentially a part of the solution. It is a calling to help all people see how things can be better.
Delores does not play, as President Obama pointed out when he awarded her the United States highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. Her resume so far includes starting a union from scratch, leading a ten year strike that launched the first environmental movement in our country, instigating the economic conditions that outlawed DDT and made it illegal to spray farm workers —- like there needed to be a law —- all while she birthed eleven children and “drug them to meetings and rallies” (her words not mine) and never looked back.
At the reception after the film I asked a Latina activist, Theresa Mendoza from Charlotte, NC if she would label Delores ‘unusual, special, one-in-a-million, or a saint”. hesitated and then gave a small nod. “But, what choice did she have?” If it only were so simple for each of us.
The documentary “Delores” pulls from an amazing amount of historic footage of the UFW movement. It unfolds as a meta-linear story line of His-Story and takes time to make a deeper dive into the personal cost to Delores and her family. A true firebrand, she gives everything to achieving human rights for her people. The time spent in resistance scarred the relationships with her husbands and her kids. In all this vulnerability, the power of a mother’s love is ever present, if perhaps spread thin.
In one interview, taken when Delores is maybe 35 and she is by then a mother of at least seven children (she had eleven total), she is asked “If you were given $5,000, just for you, what would you do with it. Would you, like many women, want a new dress or go to a spa?”
She answered promptly ”I think new clothes or a spa would be a waste of money. I would give it to the union. It is my life work. I think that would help my children and my community.” It was one of many displays of conviction and sacrifice captured in this fluent and provocative film, and one that provoked and perhaps split the audience. Was she a saint or a mirage?
When the real-life, in-person Delores took her seat in the after-screening panel, the audience was star struck. This five foot tall, eighty five year old civil rights giant, had something on her mind. She quickly dismissed the sentimentality around any idea of sacrifice and instead asked her new found fans whether we were comfortable in our current situation?
Without mentioning 45’s name, she reasserted her long held view that injustice to any person is unacceptable. She praised the efforts of the North Carolina Moral Movement and calculated that it was at a tipping point and asked all the people in the audience to push. She closed her remarks by directing us to write “thousands of letters” to our Senators.
Her volunteer staff then passed out old school tri-fold pamphlets introducing us to the Delores Huerta Foundation, her home after the UFW. Here she invests valuable space to reinforce her credo:
“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.”
Her approach to building power is embedded in “every person is a potential activist.”The film shows the sad saga of her being pushed out of the leadership of the UFW in 2002. Delores felt the union should continue the house-meeting approach to building relationships and raising leaders. The men who came after Cesar Chavez felt they could lead from the top down and thrive by collecting dues, deploying lawyers and lobbyists and staying in their offices.
She never looked back. Through her Foundation, her team has been hosting and training activists in the art of house meetings. They have adopted hard hit communities in and around our agriculture heartlands. Methodically participants are trained to collectively prioritize their needs and engage public officials to advocate for their rights. Her movement keeps advancing.
They get people registered to vote, work together on healthy environments free of toxins, racism, discrimination and hatred. They are disrupting the school to prison pipeline and advocating that public funds are invested in schools and not incarceration. Their mission is to create networks of healthy organized communities pursuing social justice through systemic and structural transformation.
Ms. Huerta's focus is clear. White male supremacy driving unbridled corporate greed creates harm to people and must be resisted and ultimately stopped. Everyone is potentially a part of the solution. It is a calling to help all people see how things can be better.
At the reception after the film I asked a Latina activist, Theresa Mendoza from Charlotte, NC if she would label Delores ‘unusual, special, one-in-a-million, or a saint”. hesitated and then gave a small nod. “But, what choice did she have?” If it only were so simple for each of us.
Comments
Post a Comment