The Dolores Huerta I’ll remember
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The rambunctious teenagers crammed into a lecture hall suddenly went quiet when a woman old enough to be their great-grandmother, and smaller in stature than many of them, approached the podium.
Dolores Huerta was about to speak.
At the summer conference for Latino high school students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the early 2010s, I was the keynote speaker, with a hell of an opener before me.
Huerta didn’t talk for long, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audience as mesmerized. She said little about her distinguished life. Nothing about her many awards, her decades fighting to improve conditions for farmworkers across the U.S., her unlikely trajectory from the daughter of a coal miner to one of this country’s premier labor leaders and a Latina civil rights titan with few peers.
No, Huerta focused on the young people before her. She challenged them to better themselves — that’s how communities improve, she argued. She made them laugh, she made them cheer, she brought tears to the eyes of some and concluded with the rebel chant long associated with her that we shouted in unison: Sí se puede. It can happen. The students gathered around her afterward for a group photo, and then she left as unceremoniously as she had arrived.
The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, Huerta attained singular stature as godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.
Afterward, I asked the organizers why they didn’t have Dolores — everyone in my world called her by her first name, even if we didn’t know her personally, because that’s how much she was a part of our lives — speak for a full hour, as I did. They said she had other things to do but wouldn’t miss a chance to talk to students, charging a pittance compared with her usual speaking fee, and nowhere near the $25,000 a prominent Latina author had demanded.
That is the Huerta so many are mourning after the news that she died of cancer Wednesday at age 96. Her legacy is secured in American history, but her daily calendar shows why she mattered so much to so many.
Latinos long respected Huerta’s career but didn’t truly embrace her until her señora era, when she became our collective matriarch, in addition to the mother of 14 children. At a moment in Huerta’s life when she could have faded into retirement and no one would have faulted her, she seemingly was everywhere all the time, because her work was nowhere near done. Because it never is.
I ran into her multiple times in the 15 years after we first met — at protests and rallies where she was a speaker, at talks she gave to college students and community groups. She’d appear unannounced at art galleries and movie screenings just to show support for up-and-coming artists and filmmakers. One time during the COVID years, cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, acting legend Cheech Marín and I were holding a tequila-fueled Zoom fundraiser for Marín’s Chicano art museum when Huerta popped on our screens to gently tell us to stop making pendejos of ourselves.
People couldn’t believe how approachable she was, how she never seemed to say no to an autograph, a photo request, a chance to hear the stories of others and to truly care about each and every admirer.
But giving so much of yourself inevitably comes with a cost. We all found out what Huerta personally lost when she revealed to the New York Times this year that her United Farm Workers co-founder César Chávez had raped her and fathered two of her children during the 1960s.
Huerta told the newspaper that she stayed quiet about the abuse for decades because she didn’t want to torpedo el movimiento that they had created. Latinos everywhere collectively mourned what she had endured and marveled that it didn’t stop her activism, which continued until very recently.
I wish I could have spoken to Dolores about the sacrifices she made in the name of all of us. But our relationship — never a personal one, but close enough that we greeted each other whenever we inevitably crossed paths — soured in later years. The last time we talked, she harangued me for having openly criticized Chávez’s opposition to illegal immigrants.
“You have it all wrong on César,” Huerta said over the phone while on a train heading to a conference, maintaining her stance even after I reminded her that UFW recordings showed her pushing back against the derogatory slurs against immigrants that he freely used.
She invited me to meet her in Bakersfield, where her nonprofit is located, to talk more about it, an offer I sadly never took up.
It was a reminder that Huerta was human and never perfect, like too many lionized leaders. She excused Chávez’s personal vendettas against critics for way too long and dismissed progressive Latino activists who criticized her for cozying up to establishment Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
But that won’t be the Dolores I’ll remember. The Dolores who always will be in my mind is from that high school conference so long ago.
I’ll always remember her smile as wide as the brim of her hat, happy that young people wanted to do better, proud that she was able to help them — and ready to do more, because we all can.
Sí se puede.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- Arellano remembers Huerta less for her public honors than for how she used her influence: showing up for students, community groups and emerging artists, and urging young people to improve their communities. Her brief address to high school students, capped by “sí se puede,” embodies the legacy the column puts first.
- The column portrays Huerta’s accessibility and continued activism as central to her bond with Latino communities. Even late in life, it says, she made time for supporters and kept working because, in her view, the work of social change was never finished.
- Arellano also describes the personal cost of that commitment. Huerta said she had kept quiet for decades about César Chávez’s sexual abuse because she feared harming the farmworker movement they built; the column admires her continued activism while acknowledging the burden of that silence.
- The piece does not present Huerta as flawless: it faults her for defending Chávez against criticism and for dismissing progressive Latino activists who objected to her ties to establishment Democrats. Still, Arellano says those shortcomings do not displace the memory of her encouragement, warmth and dedication to young people.
Different views on the topic
- Some critics viewed Huerta’s political alliances as too close to the Democratic establishment. In 2016, after Huerta endorsed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, actor Rosario Dawson called her “an instrument of the establishment,” a criticism that contrasts with Arellano’s emphasis on Huerta’s community presence and enduring activism.[4]
- Other accounts and tributes put greater emphasis on Huerta’s institutional and political achievements: helping farmworkers win contracts and benefits, advancing collective bargaining rights, and building labor and civil-rights power. That framing presents her legacy chiefly through the movement’s lasting gains, rather than the personal contradictions foregrounded in Arellano’s column.[1][2]
- The column stresses the consequences of Huerta’s long silence about Chávez’s abuse and her defense of him. By contrast, some public tributes focus on her own decades of organizing and describe her as a mentor and inspiration, keeping attention on her independent contributions to workers’ and civil rights.[2][3]
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