Former UFW Organizer Dolores Huerta Weighs in on Leadership, Immigration and Society

[Omaha Steve]

http://thewip.net/contributors/2008/07/former_ufw_organizer_dolores_h.html

Like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. before them, when Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez organized California’s exploited and marginalized farm workers into the United Farmworkers of America (UFW) in the 1960s they built a nonviolent movement that empowered poor and disenfranchised people to help themselves.


• Dolores Huerta, circa 1968. Photograph courtesy of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.


Since the 1900s, organizers had tried and failed to help California’s farmworkers get fair pay and safe working conditions. The UFW’s successful 1965 Delano grape strike was lead by and for farmworkers, winning them industry-wide contracts for the first time in history. These contracts provided decent pay, restrooms in the fields, clean drinking water, and an end to the crippling short-handled hoe.

During her career with the UFW, Huerta organized field strikes, directed boycotts, and negotiated and administered agreements. Huerta also was one of the first to speak out against pesticides that harm farm workers, consumers, and the environment. Five years ago she left the UFW and started the Dolores Huerta Foundation to teach community organizing. She still works as an advocate for farmworkers, whose pay and working conditions have worsened in recent years.

I spoke with Huerta at Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, California.

What concerns you most about society today?

Our educational system. If we look at the San Joaquin Valley where we did so much community work with the UFW, what do we see? Since 1965 there’s been one university built, the University of California Merced, and 17 prisons. And we know who are in those prisons; it’s the African American youth, Latino youth and poor white kids. I think this is something that everybody has got to get involved in. We cannot let Governor Schwarzenegger get away with saying he’s going to cut $4 billion from the education budget.

FULL story at link.