SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
A civil rights titan, Dolores Huerta, has died. She was 96 years old and died at her home in Bakersfield, California, of cancer. In the 1960s, Huerta co-founded with Cesar Chavez the union that would become the United Farm Workers, fighting for better conditions for agricultural field workers. NPR's Adrian Florido has this remembrance.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: California farm owners detested Dolores Huerta - the way she'd show up at their grape fields with a bullhorn and urge their workers to join the picket line, like during this strike in the 1960s.
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DOLORES HUERTA: Come on up, brothers. We are waiting for you. You will earn more money today because the workers here were not on strike on September the 9. And they are still not on strike. This is...
FLORIDO: She was 5 feet tall, but could energize a crowd like no other leader of the farmworker movement.
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HUERTA: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Shouting in non-English language).
HUERTA: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Shouting in non-English language).
FLORIDO: She was born in New Mexico, but raised in California's Central Valley. As a teenager, she picked onions and cherries there. She later told an interviewer at Cal State, Northridge why she started organizing.
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HUERTA: When you look and you see the homes of farmworkers and you see how they're struggling just to survive, or you know the children who have been poisoned with pesticides and you know that they died, all of that injustice, that's what makes one really angry to know that these workers who are feeding the nation are having to suffer this kind of hardship and this kind of poverty, you know?
FLORIDO: Through the work, she met another young organizer, Cesar Chavez. In the early '60s, they formed a union. He became president - it's charismatic public face. She was vice president, a driving force pressuring farm owners to offer better pay and working conditions.
YOLANDA BARRERA: She was so successful in getting people to walk out of the fields.
FLORIDO: Yolanda Barrera was a teenage farmworker back then. She'd never seen a Mexican American woman command so much respect.
BARRERA: She was beautiful. She was smart. She was aggressive. She stood her ground.
FLORIDO: In 1965, the union joined Filipino farmworkers in a boycott of table grapes. The two groups merged and became the United Farm Workers. Their boycott led millions of Americans to stop buying grapes. Huerta later recalled the night, five years after it began, that a major grower called to throw in the towel.
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HUERTA: And he says, you beat me. He told us. He says, you beat me. The next day, by 12 o'clock, noon, we had all the growers together in a big meeting, and we started negotiations.
FLORIDO: Huerta helped lead contract negotiations that won pay increases, healthcare and safety improvements. She later reflected on how the movement galvanized broader Mexican American activism.
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HUERTA: It was everybody came alive because once the people see that farmworkers were the most oppressed, the least educated, that has the least political power. So if they can make changes, and I think it inspires other people to do that.
FLORIDO: In the mid-1970s, though, maneuvering by growers and infighting at the union diminished its influence. Chavez and Huerta started kicking people out who disagreed with them. Cesar Chavez died in 1993. Huerta left the union a decade later, but she took on new causes like immigrant rights. She also encouraged young people to take up activism, as President Obama noted when he awarded her the Medal of Freedom in 2012.
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BARACK OBAMA: Don't wait to be invited, she says, step in there. And on a personal note, Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, si se puede - yes, we can.
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OBAMA: Knowing her, I'm pleased that she let me off easy 'cause Dolores does not play.
FLORIDO: Earlier this year, Huerta - then 95 - made a startling revelation. She told The New York Times that in the 1960s, Cesar Chavez had raped her in a grape field. She said she had kept the secret for decades to protect her life's work, but said she finally spoke out to support other women coming forward with their own abuse accusations against Chavez. The reckoning continues to this day. Across the country, murals of Chavez have been painted over. Many of them have been replaced with images of Dolores Huerta.
Adrian Florido, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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