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