Dolores Huerta is actively involved in communities in Kern County, California, including the foundation’s cleanup sponsorship of this 2-mile stretch of road in Lamont. 

Dolores Huerta responded to life’s call to community organize and Cesar Chavez collaborator

 

By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place

BAKERSFIELD, California — Dolores Huerta is among the revered leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, now in its twenty-fourth decade. That movement is inclusive of immigration rights and at the epicenter are Spanish-speaking people from Latin America. Catalytic elements for social justice are needed and change still coming from community organizing, teaching community and communities marching.

“I call myself an addicted organizer,” Huerta said. “I have seen the changes we make.”

Encounters with Huerta were in her office in downtown Bakersfield, five days later in Weedpatch and Lamont and nine days from then in Phoenix. In between, she traveled to Durham, North Carolina to keynote the 2010 Martin Luther King Day events at Duke University.

Huerta is a popular campus speaker and gets invitations to speak from all over the country, including Utah Valley University in Orem, where she was the 2008 Martin Luther King Commemoration speaker. Her speech was during campaign season and Huerta proudly wore a big button promoting Hillary for President.

In Utah, she spoke about immigrant rights and the need for the nation to come up with an immigration policy. Two years later, the elements of the same conservation was spoken at Duke, where the question of new comers to the community and history of American struggle came up.

“People have to show them how to organize and connect with the African-American community because they are already established,” Huerta told an interviewer. “It’s important for them to reach out for help and get educated about the Civil Rights Movement because the immigration movement is just an extension of the larger movement.

“When I was last in North Carolina working on Obama’s election campaign, I visited the cultural center for the Latino community,” she said. “There were all these beautiful services but not many people participating. Recent immigrants often don’t know the struggle or understand what it took to get where we are at. It’s important to educate the Latino community about our common struggle with other minority groups because there are forces that are trying to make a division between us.”

Huerta’s efforts were instrumental in passing the Immigration Act of 1985, whose amnesty provisions are more than likely to be revisited when the Congress resolves to political will and addresses immigration in the generation since Reagan.

Still, years after President Ronald Reagan signed legislation granting undocumented immigrants amnesty, Huerta remains tirelessly active, practicing tenets applied over a lifetime of socio-economic activism; bedrock which is grassroots community organizing.

For sure, immigration issues in America remain unresolved. This was evident again on Saturday, January 16, 2010 in Phoenix, where there were more than a few mentions of “ground zero.”

Huerta, Linda Ronstadt and Maricopa County Board of Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox were joined by thousands. Some came from California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, Florida, Utah and Washington, D.C., during the 3-mile march from Falcon Park on the Westside of Phoenix to Tent City. It is the infamous outdoor annex of the Maricopa County Jail, where inmates are made to wear pink underwear.

Huerta is a darling dear. Spiritual power eases the bond with her, leaps from the pages of history, newspaper clips found in the library and Web sites postings. The first inclination is to humble to her maternal bearing. Another son has come to lend ear to the fount of history, perpetuation of the movement, asking what’s now and what lies ahead?

Fred Ross Sr., who founded the Community Service Organization in 1948, organizing Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and later in San Jose, gave Chavez and Huerta their first training in community organizing.

“As important as Gandhi, Cesar and King were to the movement, Fred Ross Sr. was the guy who taught us how to organize,” she said.

Huerta is contemplative in the manner in which she vets. The process is two way with both listening for spoken codes. One clearly thinks, her sitting at her desk in the downtown Bakersfield office, she is just as iconic over a lifetime as Angela Davis.

In the African American church experience, sons embrace mothers and mothers embrace sons in trusting alliances and spiritual kinship. Though unspoken, that mores fills up this moment.

You offer her praise, thankful that she stood and continues to stand for people weighted with a sense of powerlessness and forced into the margins. That weight won’t allow them to stand up for themselves. This is not so with Huerta, who has been an organizer of farm workers since 1955, collective bargaining representative and the big table with wealthy growers. She was the boycott organizer of California grapes, lettuce and table wine.

Most of all she embarked upon Ross’s lessons and holds up the banner as a teacher. Her substance is wide as it is deep.

“When you look at farm workers, you see they are willing to take stands,” Huerta said. “Some are afraid of retaliation. Some don’t speak English. Some may be illegal aliens, but they have the guts to make change. I like to see that leadership develop.”

Years quantified have given Huerta the wisdom of our mothers that only time can allow. (In her presence, the sense and respect that comes with being Church Mother doesn’t go away.) The same was with Angela Davis and any number of women, some come and gone by now, who were righteous and sanctified, if not sacrificial.

Huerta was born in 1930 in Stockton, California, not far from Bakersfield in the Central Valley, where she has made her residence for years, raised eleven children and co-led a movement that changed the world. She is well-positioned in U.S. history books. Schools are named for her across the country.

Nowadays Huerta continues to work for the rights of farm workers, immigrants and women from her perch as president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, 1527 19th St. Suite 418, Bakersfield. The foundation had recently relocated offices to downtown Bakersfield. There is plenty of classroom space.

“The reason I started the foundation is to teach,” Huerta said. “The process is time consuming, but you develop leadership from the grassroots. I hope a lasting legacy will be one that we were able to continue to build community with this foundation. We know that things don’t last forever, but as long as it last, I hope this foundation is a model for community organizing.

“It can work in Africa and many other places in the world,” she said. “The power is in the individual person. They have to take responsibility. They can only do it if they work together and take direct, nonviolent action.”
 

Alicia Huerta, the sixth of her eleven children, and Danette Johnson are staff members of the foundation. Both are pleasant, if not sweet, offering Christmas chocolates just days into the New Year.

What it was like growing up, she was asked?

“It was hard,” Alicia said. “We were impoverished. Cesar and Dolores were in the workers’ camps and then got caught up in the strike. We didn’t have a lot of food. Everybody around us was poor, so it didn’t seem like we were poor.

“Christmas came from donations. That was good because that was the only Christmas we knew. It’s good that my mother is still around and receives the appreciations because it wasn’t like that around the movement.”

What was experienced has become a practice. Again for Christmas 2009, as in years past, the Dolores Huerta Foundation collected more than two thousand gifts and distributed them among children in three communities in Kern County.

Now Alicia’s lasting gift was being there and being a witness.

“It was great to meet Cesar Chavez and Walter Reuther,” she said. “All the labor movements started with people standing up and making sacrifices.”

Dolores Huerta is among those leaders.

“She’s my mom,” Alicia said. “I am proud of her. She is fearless and brave. She has the courage to speak her mind and speak from her heart. She does not accept the word ‘no.’”

The conservation with Huerta, in her office in Bakersfield, starts with the importance of community organizing?

“It’s critical,” she said. “This next year we need to be empowered. We have seen how much trouble the President is having with his agenda. We don’t have the necessary troops on the ground to support him.”

In her Congressional District, when Rep. Jim Costa, a Democrat, was wavering on supporting the public option in the health bill being drafted, Huerta and a group picketed one of his fundraisers.

“We picketed two big forums where doctors came to present,” she said. “I held a forty-eight hour fast that finally cracked him. He called Secretary (Herb) Schultz and said, ‘Get Dolores off my back.’” 

Community work in Bakersfield and all across the United States mark contributions of Huerta
 

A third foundation staff member, Lilly Catalan, would drive us around Lamont and Weedpatch, after meeting at the library, 8304 Segrue Road, to see community organizing projects that the foundation has made accomplishments, projects at work, and the need to bring people out to get things done.

For instance, twenty-seven recently purchased houses in Weedpatch, septic tanks filling up, need to be hooked up to the sewer line. The houses were bought out of foreclosure for upwards of $25,000 by first-time homebuyers. The Public Utilities District Board in Lamont wants to access the new homeowners $10,000 to $25,000 to connect to the sewer line.

Huerta leads demonstrations at the homes of water board commissioners, protesting the high sewer connection fees on people who cannot afford to pay. Of course, the protest made, among others, Channel 17 News.

Protesters hadn’t demonstrated yet at the home of board member Tony Cuellar, but he knew they were coming. He complained on camera of having post-traumatic stress disorder and not being able to handle crowds well.

“I’ve got a gun,” Cuellar told 17 News. “I've got rocks, I’ve got sticks.

“But you know what? I don’t (let) them get me to that point where . . . because some of these people have no respect. I don’t want nothing happening to my house, break a window, mess with my trucks,” said Cuellar.

Huerta rebuffed there would be an exchange of violence.

“I should hope he will not respond in a violent way,” she told Channel 17 News. “And if he does, I can assure you that nobody will respond in a violent way in return.”

The scenario of resistance is common to Huerta and is steeped in what the Dolores Huerta Foundation does programmatically with “Vecinos Unidos (Neighbors United). Community Organizing aims “to inspire and motivate people to organize sustainable communities to attain social justice.”

Huerta said, “The importance of community organizing is that you can make miracles happen. That’s what I have learned over 50 years as a community organizer. Change comes from the bottom up and not the top down. People come together to make change happen.”

The foundation also offers the “Dolores Huerta Community Organizing Institute,” “Policies of Conscience” and the “Dolores Huerta Popular Education Program.”

The drive to Weedpatch allowed for photo opportunities. Winter fog is usually heavy in Bakersfield. Today is no exception.

Recent campaigns led by the foundation helped citizens in Arvin pass a bond issue to build a gym, post streets signs in Weedpatch to mark a neighborhood where improvements needed to be made and could be more easily found by the Department of Public Works.

The area has corporate farms that lead the world in carrot production, vineyards that played such a large part in the farm workers’ labor movement and working poor.

This is the same Weedpatch that desperate migrant workers came to fleeing the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. As described in “The Grapes of Wrath,” the John Steinbeck novel, Weedpatch Camp is where the Tom Joad family struggled to find work.

Again, years quantified always allow for assessment.

“I think our world is in crisis,” Huerta said. “It’s not going to get any better unless we get involved and take responsibility. It’s not that hard. You can write a letter or send an email. The miracle of getting Obama elected will fade. If we don’t do the advocacy, nothing will happen. We just can’t feel bad about it. We have to go out there and do the work.”

What’s in crisis, she was asked?

“Where do we start?” Huerta said. “Working people are not getting their fair shake. The minimum wage is not where it should be. It takes $25 to $30 an hour to live. Working people are having a hard time.

“Corporations and people who have money are calling the shots,” she said. “These corporations are ruining the whole world. We have to get some democracy in action.”

Huerta, as mentioned before, endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. She placed Clinton’s name in nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Beyond the convention, there was not a moment of lag time in shifting her support to Obama.

“Obama, who has been criticized on the left and right, has been great on women’s issues,” she said. “I do think it is great he got elected. People hit the streets to make it happen. Obama can’t do it alone. We have to get out and do the work.

“Like a lot of people, I’m worried,” Huerta said. “Our government is not leading the way we should be leading in the world. Climate control is one issue that we are not leading on. Corporations control everything. It’s hard to make anything happen.”

Of course, the people whom she admires — responding to a question — Huerta offers praise with reasons why.

“Cesar was very strong, committed, humble, very focused,” she said. “He was a very hard worker — tireless. Eleanor Smeal, I call her the Cesar of the women’s movement. She has done so much, but doesn’t get a lot of attention because she is not out there promoting herself.”

Smeal is the former president of the National Organization of Women, president and founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

“I admire the people who are protesting directly like Danny Glover and George Lopez, with his mad, crazy self. George Lopez says, ‘You don’t have to dye your hair blond to have fun. You can be who you are.’

“Carlos Santana is another person I admire a lot,” Huerta said. “I admire Sal Rosselli (former president). He just broke off from (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West. He felt like what they were doing wasn’t right.”

She also mentions Maria Elena Durazo, first woman elected to lead the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor; Karen Bass, who recently ended a term as Speaker of the California State Assembly; and newly elected speaker John Perez.

“He not only Latino, but is the first gay speaker of the Assembly,” Huerta said.

Some, including musician Carlos Santana, actress Eva Longoria Parker and Culture Clash, a Latino/Chicano troupe founded in 1984 in San Francisco, are organizing an 80th birthday tribute to benefit the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Her birthday is April 10.

That tribute, Huerta hopes, will be broadcast nationally and streamed over the Internet in August 2010.

Alicia Huerta, right, and Danette Johnson are staff members of the Dolores Huerta Foundation at office located in downtown Bakersfield, California.