Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta was born in 1930 in New Mexico. When she was three, her parents got divorced and her mother took her and her brothers to Stockton, California. There, her mother worked in a farming community very hard to provide her children a good education.During World War II, her mother ran a restaurant and the family's economic situation was improved little by little. Dolores did not lose her relationship with her father, who became an union activist. He and her mother were a clear inspiration for her.

Dolores was a good student, but she suffered from the racism against Mexicans and Mexican Americans: she was bullied at school for her ethnic origin.

After graduating, she changed of job many times until she decided to obtain a teaching degree. She worked as an elementary school teacher until she resigned due to the poor conditions of many of her students, who were farm workers’ children.

She decided to help:

• In 1955, she started the Stockton chapter of the Community Services Organisation (CSO),which fought against segregation, police brutality and discrimination and worked for the improvement of economic and working conditions of farm workers.
• In 1960, she started the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA) to lobby the politicians to allow migrant workers to receive public assistance and pensions and to provide them voting ballots and driver’s tests in Spanish. Meanwhile, she met a CSO official called Cesar Chavez, who with she collaborated to lobby the CSO to make it help also farm workers, but the Organisation was focused just on urban issues. That is why they left the CSO and started the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA).
• The NFWA and the AWA combined to become the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in 1965 and, after five years, the UFW signed an historic agreement with 26 grape growers to improve working conditions for the farm workers (reduction of the use of harmful pesticides, unemployment and healthcare benefits, and so on).
• During the 1970s, Dolores Huerta helped to create the political climate to arrive in 1975 to the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which recognized the right of farm workers to bargain collectively.
• During the 1980s, she was the vice president of the UFW and co-fundated the UFW’s radio station.

Today, she is still being honored for her entire life of work for the rights of the farm workers and against the racism. She received many prizes and she started the  Dolores Huerta Foundation, in which she is still working by lecturing and speaking out on social issues as immigration, incoming inequality and the rights of women and Latino-American people.

Here we can see many videos of her life and labor: http://www.makers.com/dolores-huerta

Webgraphy:

http://www.makers.com/dolores-huerta
http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/sp/07.html
http://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/
http://www.biography.com/people/dolores-huerta-188850#early-life-and-career

The Bus Boycott

Once upon a night, Rosa Parks, who was a black American woman living in Alabama, was tired because she spent her day working on a tailor department store. She was so exhausted that she just wanted to take a seat on the bus and to arrive soon at home. But, something happened to her.

A white man asked her for her seat on the bus but she refused to move.  When a bus became full, it was usually to give white passengers the seats in which black people were sat.

Thus, the bus driver ordered Parks and three other African Americans seated nearby to move to the back of the bus. But, Rosa Parks didn’t move and she was arrested and fined $10 for violating a city ordinance, and this dared act began a movement that ended legal segregation in America.

Rosa Parks

 

We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.

Rosa Parks was born in Alabama. At the age of 11 she enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal-minded women from the northern United States. The school’s philosophy was “take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were”.

Therefore, the bus incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The main aim of this association was to call for a boycott of the city-owned bus company.

A Supreme Court Decision struck down the ordinance under Mrs. Parks had been fined and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

In 50s, Black people were discriminated because of racism. They were bad treated, they had bad conditions at work and there was segregation in schools, restaurants even in public transports such as the bus. Surprisingly, the bus accident would have positive consequences and all this situation would change. 

Webgraphy:

http://www.ushistory.org/us/54b.asp

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/par0bio-1

Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile. Her early life was traumatic. She was brought up by her mother, after her father left the family when she was 3 years old. When she was 17, she met and fell in love with Romeo Ureta. However, three years later he committed suicide. More tragedy was to strike later, when a nephew also committed suicide.


Despite these tragedies, Gabriela Mistral became a great poet and an international renowned figure in literature and education. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She played an important role in the educational systems of Mexico and Chile, was active in cultural committees of the League of Nations, and was Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, and Lisbon. She taught Spanish literature in the United States at Columbia University, Middlebury College, Vassar College, and at the University of Puerto Rico.


She was the first female Latin American poet to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. Mistral's works deal with the basic passion of love as seen in the various relationships of mother and offspring, man and woman, individual and humankind, soul and God.

                           


Moreover, Gabriela Mistral was a brave and determined who defended the rights of children, women, and the poor; the freedoms of democracy; and the need for peace in times of social, political, and ideological conflicts, not only in Latin America but in the whole world. She was a good example to people, a talented and clever woman.

With regard to her work, Mistral's writings are highly emotional. In her poems speak the abandoned woman and the jealous lover, the mother in a trance of joy and fear because of her delicate child, the teacher, the woman who tries to bring to others the comfort of compassion, the enthusiastic singer of hymns to America's natural richness, the storyteller, the mad poet possessed by the spirit of beauty and transcendence.

The love poems in memory of the dead, Sonetos de la muerte (1914), made her known throughout Latin America, but her first great collection of poems, Desolación (Despair), was not published until 1922. Her complete poetry was published in 1958.

Here we can see some of her poems: http://www.poemhunter.com/gabriela-mistral/poems/

A short documentary of Gabriela Mistral’s life: https://vimeo.com/7603796

Webgraphy:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1945/mistral-bio.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gabriela-mistral
http://www.biographyonline.net/poets/gabriela_mistral.html