‘When you see people who need help, you should help them. You shouldn’t wait for people to ask.’ When I learned organizing skills, I had an obligation to teach people to come together to fight for what they need.”2
DID YOU KNOW?
Chicano/Chicana, Latino/Latina, Mexican American, or Hispanic? Many people get confused about which term to use to describe people in the United States who are of Spanish-speaking descent—and about whether such labeling is necessary at all. Definitions and how they are received vary, depending on what sources are consulted. “Chicano” refers to someone of Mexican origin who was born in the United States, like Dolores. While some people view the term negatively, because it was first used as an insult, others take pride in the term, noting the work of the Chicano Movement, or La Causa, for its fight for civil rights and better treatment of its people. “Latino” refers to geographical origins, particularly of those countries that were under Roman rule long ago. “Hispanic” usually refers to immigrants from countries that speak Spanish, including Mexico and many other places in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean islands. Both “Latino” and “Hispanic” bother some people, too. And to some, “Mexican American” implies a split identity. More often, someone whose native language is Spanish prefers to be identified by their country of origin, such as Mexican or Peruvian, rather than to be lumped under one vast regional or ethnic term.
TWO
TILLING THE SOIL
Born to Speak Out
BOTH PARENTS OF Dolores Fernández Huerta were born in the United States but with different family backgrounds. Her father, Juan Fernández, came from Dawson, a mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Juan’s parents had arrived from Mexico not long before he was born. On Dolores’s mother’s side, the family’s roots in the area extended back to the 1600s.
Both families lived and worked in the New Mexico region. There Alicia, Dolores’s mother, met Juan. Their only daughter was born on April 10, 1930. The young couple named the baby Dolores, which means “pain” or “suffering” in Spanish. After she married, Dolores took the last name Huerta, which means “garden” or “orchard.” Together, these names fit her well. Dolores’s future would be tied to the land and the people who toiled to produce its crops. Almost seventy years later, in his speech honoring Dolores with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights, President Bill Clinton stated, “But if Dolores Huerta has her way, her name will be the only sorrowful orchard left in America.”1
Dolores, her older brother, Juan, and her younger brother, Marshall, were all born in Dawson. Their father and other relatives mined coal in that small town of about nine thousand people. Dolores’s birth came during the Great Depression, a national economic downturn that strained the ability of many families to earn a living. Between 1929 and 1939, this recession worsened, becoming the deepest and longest financial depression in the western world. Factories, businesses, and mines closed, leaving several million workers without jobs—including Juan.
To supplement the family’s reduced income, Juan picked vegetables. As family finances worsened, Juan migrated to Wyoming and Nebraska, as did many other poor workers. They followed the harvests and picked different crops as they ripened.
There seemed no end in sight for the poor economy, so the entire family packed up and followed Juan as he moved from place to place. They lived in tarpaper shacks, learning firsthand how difficult the life of a poor farmworker family could be. For the first time, they faced the sting of racism, being targeted because they were Mexican Americans.
Juan was smart and hard working, and he was growing angrier about their situation. Poor living and working conditions and related daily hardships strained the relationship between Juan and Alicia. They divorced when Dolores was about five years old.
Alicia eventually moved her children to Stockton, California, where she had other family. The port of Stockton sat alongside rich farmland in the north-central San Joaquin Valley. Originally a Native American settlement, then land owned by Mexico, Stockton transformed into a commercial center after the discovery of gold in 1848. Gold seekers arrived from every continent, creating a town with a very mixed population. When the gold fever subsided, the region’s economy shifted to agriculture. After Chinese immigrants helped lay train tracks connecting Stockton to the rest of the state and the country, it became an important transportation hub for agricultural products. Several communities of farmworkers developed.
A farmworker in the open fields
UFW Collection, 335
LIFE AS A FARMWORKER
Picking fruits and vegetables could be brutal work. Days started at sunup when workers boarded rickety buses to travel into the fields. Pickers stayed in the fields until sundown, working under a blistering sun with few breaks and little water. Sometimes, foremen provided only a single soda can of water for an entire truckload of workers to drink. Once the can was emptied, it was not refilled. Growers rarely provided toilets or shelter from the sun. Workers were allowed no privacy, and they had nowhere to go. They were trapped in the middle of fields that sometimes stretched for twenty miles.
Growers often preferred to hire immigrants. Being new to the United States, their understanding of English was poor, so they were unable to organize or complain. In addition, many of these workers were in the country illegally and could lose their jobs and be deported if they were discovered. Bosses would use this threat to keep their crews in line.2
People had to work quickly to earn a decent day’s wage, which was usually based on the weight or number of fruits or vegetables picked. Because dishonest farm owners could keep their wage records secret, workers often received less pay than they deserved. Without access to records, workers would have difficulty proving their loss, especially if they didn’t speak English very well.
To pick low-growing crops, like strawberries, workers had to bend over, kneel, and sometimes crawl from plant to plant. If plants required digging, short-handled hoes forced workers to stoop down, which made the task even more backbreaking. Farmworkers became as physically fit as athletes or dancers, but the brutal picking speed and constant bending over could make farmworkers aged thirty look like they were forty.3
As an adult, Dolores told journalist Studs Terkel that she believed this system of degrading workers affected them more than the backbreaking labor itself. Some growers thought that their workers were inferior and humiliated them. Others were greedy or simply indifferent to what foremen did. “No one should have to endure this deliberate subhuman treatment designed to keep farmworker families down,” Dolores said. “This kind of treatment kills the spirit.”4
GROWING UP IN FARM COUNTRY
Dolores’s widowed grandfather, Herculana Chávez, helped watch Alicia’s children so she could find work. Herculana became an important figure in Dolores’s life. He encouraged his smart, chatty granddaughter, giving her the nickname “seven tongues” because she talked so much.5 Dolores learned early that speaking her mind and arguing about things that were important were good skills to cultivate.
Even with family to help her, Alicia found supporting her children difficult during the long depression. She needed to be especially clever and hardworking. She took two jobs just to put enough food on the table and build a small savings. She waited tables during the day and worked in a cannery by night. “My mother had a good head for business,” Dolores remembered later, “so she worked a couple of jobs and managed to open up a small business.”6
Farmworkers using short-handled hoes to harvest crops
UFW Collection, 244
Alicia treated her sons and daughter