Dolores Huerta’s Legacy Lives On in the Activists She Inspired
By Christian Paiz, Guest Commentary
The only time I’ve ever been arrested, I was sitting beside Dolores Huerta.
It was 2004, and I was a 21-year-old intern with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, known as HERE, which was working to organize employees at the Agua Caliente Casino and Resort in Palm Springs. The workers were asking for things that should never have been controversial: a living wage, health coverage, protection from harassment on the job, and some basic dignity in how they were treated.
When the casino pushed back, the union turned to civil disobedience. We gathered a crowd, alerted local reporters, and watched as 25 people walked into the street in front of the casino and sat down, blocking traffic until police moved in to arrest them.
Right in the middle of that group was Huerta, then 74 years old, sitting cross-legged on sun-baked asphalt and singing “We Shall Overcome.”
By that point, Huerta — who died this week at her home in Bakersfield — had already spent half a century fighting for the rights of California’s laborers. Born in 1930, she earned a college degree at a time when few Mexican American students even finished high school, as many were instead pushed into field work as children. In the 1950s, she became a key figure in the Community Service Organization, an organization that shaped California’s civil rights movement. Then, in 1962, she settled in Delano and helped found the National Farm Worker Association, the organization that would eventually grow into the United Farm Workers.
Over the following decades, Huerta wore many hats within the movement — contract negotiator, boycott coordinator, strategist, fundraiser, spokesperson and fierce opponent of growers who resisted change. Much like HERE’s campaign in Palm Springs, the UFW fought for improvements that ranged from the basic — clean bathrooms and drinking water in the fields — to the transformative, giving farmworkers a sense that their lives and labor mattered.
That spirit was deeply felt here in the Coachella Valley. Amalia Uribe Deaztlan joined the UFW in 1968, not yet 20 years old, and spent years picketing fields, attending boycott rallies and taking legal action against growers over dangerous pesticide use. Around the same time, Lupe Crespo left Los Angeles to join the UFW’s headquarters, later relocating to the Coachella Valley in the late 1970s, where she and her husband continued organizing farmworkers and supporting progressive causes in the region.
Huerta was the guiding force behind both of their journeys — a leader whose example shaped an entire generation of organizers, even as those very organizers helped build the movement that made her a household name.
I don’t know what Huerta might have recalled about the valley I once called home, though she surely understood its deep divide — a largely immigrant, Latino, farmworking population to the east, and an affluent, resort-driven economy to the west. Whatever she was thinking that day, she showed up, using her own body to stand with workers fighting for what was rightfully theirs, just as she had in decade after decade before.
It was a lifetime devoted to labor — and to a vision of what fairness could look like.
That legacy felt especially present during the UFW’s 2024 National Convention in Bakersfield, where hotel workers from Los Angeles’ UNITE-HERE Local 11 came to thank the UFW for its support during recent contract negotiations. Some spoke hopefully of a future where hotels serve only union-grown produce, and where California workers — in a state that prides itself on progressive values even as a quarter of its children go hungry — finally receive the respect they’re owed, both from employers and consumers.
I will remember Dolores Huerta as a tireless organizer whose career spanned nearly a century and helped build the largest farmworker movement in American history — a movement that, despite its flaws, inspired generations of activists and helped sustain the labor movement during some of its most uncertain moments.
I will also remember her as a Latina leader who, in the final months of her life, spoke publicly about being sexually assaulted by Cesar Chavez, lending strength and credibility to other survivors and forcing a long-overdue reckoning with the protection too often given to powerful men.
And I will remember her as a sharp, uncompromising political thinker. The phrase “Sí, Se Puede,” often credited to her, isn’t simply words of comfort — it’s a challenge. It insists that passivity has no excuse, no matter how hopeless things may seem.
Rest in peace, Dolores Huerta. May your movement continue, and may we one day build the world you fought so hard to bring into being.
Original source: CalMatters
