Rebel. Activist. Feminist. Mother. Civil Rights Icon. Dolores Huerta is living history – she has been a full-throated champion for human rights for a better part of her 87 years. Whether it was fighting for better working conditions for farmworkers or going head-to-head with the Teamsters in her days leading the United Farm Workers (UFW), she makes us believers in grassroots people-power to make change, epitomized in the UFW’s history-making message of hope: Si se puede (“Yes we can!”).
If that sounds like a sure-fire political slogan, that’s because it is – President Obama used it to inspire the nation in 2012, and he was sure to pay his proper branding respects when he awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, her empowering work with immigrant and agricultural communities, as well as political strategizing for state and national elections, persists with no sign of letting up.
In Peter Bratt’s new documentary – Dolores – audiences can sift through the many layers of Huerta through stories, interviews and autobiographical accounts of more than a lifetime going to war for social and economic justice on the picket line and on Capitol Hill. The doc covers each stage of her life, from her childhood experiences as a girl of Mexican descent in California’s agricultural Central Valley to her leading role in one of the largest and most successful boycotts in American history. At one point, more than 17 million people had chosen not to buy grapes in the hopes for better farmworker contracts and labor safety protections.
As she tells NPR, “The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time...They didn't have toilets in the fields, they didn't have cold drinking water. They didn't have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.”
Her career as a changemaker and social justice warrior formally began in her mid-20s when she was named the political director of the Community Service Organization, where she would go on to meet famed and future UFW partner Cesar Chavez. They joined forces in 1962 to fight for improved wages and working conditions for what were mostly Mexican-American workers, but being a dark-skinned woman with eleven children, Huerta faced a good deal of violence, racism and sexism as the country’s core values of equality and justice found themselves under the cultural microscope. And as recent uprisings like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have demonstrated, challenges and changes in our society are almost always responded to with cynical backlash by those benefitting from the status quo.
“We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur. And then we had violence by the Teamsters union with the goons that they hired at that time,” she says.
Although the narrative exists that Huerta was some sort of “sidekick” to Chavez, this film proves otherwise: In many high-profile political and legal offices in California, she was known as the “dragon lady” due to her reputation as a hardline negotiator and fierce defender of human rights. She was as much a leader in the farmworker movement as anyone, and to this very day, Huerta remains an outspoken advocate for policies that replace greed and corruption with justice for all.
If you need any further convincing to check it out, the doc has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Just be ready, because once you watch, you’ll wonder how you can honor an icon of such powerful service and defense of humanity – because we can. Visit Dolores The Movie for information on screenings and showtimes near you, but only after you check out the trailer below...
