Dolores Huerta was fearless about everything except her own flaws

The first time I met Dolores Huerta, she refused to shake my hand. In 2015, Cal State Bakersfield had invited me to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the grape strike that led to the formation of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta — who died Wednesday at age 96 —

had been among a group of former UFW leaders who protested my invitation because I had dared to publish a book that told the union’s tragic rise and fall story, in which she played a starring role. When she could not persuade the university president to rescind his invitation, she insisted that she be invited to share the stage with me. That day, as I approached her, I extended my hand, which she rejected with a scowl and a heel turn. In her address, she spent most of her time recounting her contributions to the farm workers and how they made possible a movement that both needed her and defined her. Absent was any admission of mistakes, regrets or failures.

That moment, for me, perfectly encapsulates a complicated woman who always fought to control her image and story. Her passing will evoke memories of this spring when she announced she was a survivor of sexual assault by Cesar Chavez, who also preyed on adolescent girls in the 1970s. While important, this version of Huerta conceals the woman I remember most from the movement I document in my book.

The child of a father who belonged to the United Mine Workers, Huerta as a potential leader of a diverse farm worker movement flowed mostly from her mother, Alicia. After divorcing Huerta’s father, Alicia eventually landed in Stockton, where she owned and operated a restaurant and hotel in the Filipino community with her new husband, James Richards. At a young age, Huerta became familiar with Alicia’s Filipino clientele, who had long expressed their discontent with exploitation in the fields where they worked. Alicia’s marriage to Richards ended, but she held on to the hotel, where Huerta worked and became friends with many of the Filipino farm workers who rented rooms. This fact would be consequential once Filipinos and Mexicans realized their shared destiny under one union.

Living in Stockton in 1960, Huerta first saw the virtue of participating in a new civil rights group dominated by Mexican Americans known as the Community Service Organization. It was Chavez who convinced her, Gilbert Padilla and others to join to swing its organizational capacity to address the needs of farm worker communities. When Chavez determined that they could realize that goal by breaking away to form a new organization, Huerta was among the first to go with him. In 1965, when the Chavez-led effort began to converge with the more assertive labor actions by Filipinos well known to Huerta, it was she who helped bridge the cultural and linguistic divide between Mexicans and Filipinos. When the new union initiated the first grape strike in 1965, it was Huerta who stood atop a car with her outstretched arms holding the sign emblazoned with “Huelga” (Strike, in Spanish) that became one of the iconic symbols of the movement.

And it was Huerta who figured out the keys to the movement’s success in the years that followed, particularly her innovation with the boycott. She had been among the first to try out the tactic in the winter between 1965 and 1966, when she, Padilla and others went to Los Angeles to appeal to unionized dock workers not to unload products made with grapes from farms where the union had set up picket lines. In the months and years that followed, she helped evolve the tactic from targeting finished products like wine that had a long shelf-life to perishable grapes that became less valuable the longer they sat on the docks or in grocery stores. She was in New York City in 1968 when growers successfully pursued an injunction against the Seafarers Union to stop them from collaborating with Huerta to block the shipment of grapes from New Jersey to Manhattan.

Like a quarterback calling an audible, Huerta responded by telling volunteers to relocate from the wharves to storefronts to ask consumers to support farm workers by not buying grapes. These moments show Huerta at her best, when she skillfully adapted to the conditions of the battle. Many volunteers, like Elaine Elinson, who trained under Huerta in New York, admired her flexibility and later applied her lessons elsewhere. Elinson, for example, used the same strategy in Europe, where she interpreted labor laws, the will of union leaders and the sympathy of consumers to determine which version of the boycott to employ. By 1970, these tactics delivered the first labor contracts to farm workers in California.

Huerta’s creativity waned as the movement increasingly became institutionalized and men, especially Chavez, assigned her necessary but sometimes thankless jobs. As a contract negotiator, Huerta frequently struck fear in the hearts of growers when she applied her considerable communication skills to achieving the best deal possible for workers. Just as often, however, people within and outside of the UFW judged her for leaving her children with other families or being too outspoken, revealing a double standard that existed for men and women’s behavior in the union and society at large. When Chavez began to make tactical errors or instituted controversial programs like a group encounter therapy known as “The Game” that broke the esprit de corps at La Paz, he demanded that Huerta co-sign these decisions and enforce his will. This included her participation in the purging of valuable volunteers from the union and eventually close friends and fellow founders like Padilla and Philip Vera Cruz in the 1970s.

Huerta, I believe, understood the contradictions of her choices but chose not to confront them — not on that day in September 2015 nor later. How could she not understand the contradictions, given her disclosure that she, too, suffered from the unchecked power of Cesar Chavez? In the last few months, I became more hopeful that she might ultimately reconcile these inconsistencies in her life. Would she finally recognize the pain she caused others by participating in their expulsion? Might she use her celebrity to draw attention to the other, lesser-known survivors? Sadly, these things never came to pass. Still, the record of her accomplishments and her testimony of sacrifice convey the extraordinary barriers we know she had to overcome and leave us to wonder what we still do not know about a union that fell short not because of her labor but in spite of it.

Matt Garcia is a professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies, history and human relations at Dartmouth College. He is the author of “From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement.”