The Community College Association recognizes and honors Dolores Huerta’s nearly eight decades of dedication to the power of education and organizing for unionism and collective action as the most powerful ways to achieve labor rights, justice for immigrants, and the dignity that all workers deserve: The ability to support oneself and one’s family and to shape a society where equality and freedom from want and oppression are truly universal.
While a teacher in Stockton, she saw farmworkers’ children arrive at school hungry and without shoes and understood that she could do more for those students by organizing their parents. In 1960 she helped found the Agricultural Workers Association, and in 1962 she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Her belief in collective action produced concrete victories. As lead negotiator during the Delano grape strike and national boycott, she secured the first major union contracts for farmworkers in the United States, including improved wages and protections from pesticide exposure. And she took the fight to the legislature, lobbying for the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, giving farmworkers the legal right to bargain collectively. Her advocacy extended beyond the fields: She fought to secure disability insurance and public assistance for immigrant and farmworker families, and she helped coin the rallying cry “¡Sí, se puede!” which has since been a motto for social movements around the world.
Her sacrifices were considerable. She was arrested more than 25 times. In 1988, she suffered broken ribs and a ruptured spleen when she was beaten by a San Francisco police officer at a political demonstration. She kept organizing. In 2002 she founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which trains community members, especially in low-income and rural areas, in leadership, civic engagement, and organizing. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world,” she said. Let us all honor those words by always keeping in the forefront of our actions the objective of creating positive change, of improving the living conditions of the poor, and of teaching those who follow about the heroic work their lives are built upon.
— Jonathan Ausubel, President, Community College Association