Huerta, Dolores C. (1930–)

Her Early History

Huerta was born to Juan Fernandez and Alicia Chávez Fernandez on April 10, 1930, during the Great Depression, in Dawson, a small mining town in the northern part of New Mexico. She met challenges early in life. When she was three years old, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother and two brothers to Stockton, California. Huerta's mother, after remarrying and having two more daughters, eventually pulled herself out of her own personal financial depression and was able to buy both a restaurant and a small twenty-room hotel, which Huerta and her two brothers helped her to run. Although physically separated from her father, Huerta maintained contact with him and was inspired by his rise from coal miner and farm laborer to labor organizer as well as by his acquisition of a college degree. He went on to hold office as a state legislator in New Mexico, where he worked to enact laws that protect laborers.

Huerta drew inspiration from the success of both her parents, and after graduating from high school she went on to attend Delta College of the University of the Pacific. Although there is some debate over whether she actually graduated, she went on to teach grammar school for a short time. Many of the students she taught were from families of farmworkers, and she expressed her frustration in seeing children come into her classroom without decent shoes or enough to eat. Huerta believed that she could do more by working with the farm workers to organize than by teaching their children.

Leaving teaching, she became a founding member of the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a grassroots organization that was founded to battle segregation, lead voter registration drives, and fight to enact new legislation that affected Mexican Americans. Through this organization, Huerta saw firsthand the problems that the migrant farmworkers faced, and this inspired her to organize and found the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA) in 1960.

Through her work with the CSO, she lobbied in Sacramento for both voting and driver's license examinations in Spanish and in Washington, D.C., for an end to the Bracero program, a temporary contract labor program between the United States and Mexico. Through her work with the CSO, she met César Chávez. Both recognized the need to organize farmworkers, and when they were unable to convince others in the CSO to take on this task, they both resigned in 1962. Huerta moved with her seven children to Delano, California, to be near Chávez and his family, and together they formed the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). This organization was formed in response to the lack of support from the union leadership to the idea of organizing farmworkers comprised primarily of Filipinos and Latinos. Working with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), they organized a grape strike that, over the course of five years, had more than 5,000 grape workers who walked out on their jobs and worked successfully toward the first contract between a wine company and its workers in U.S. history. This event garnered national attention and heralded the merger of the AWOC and the NFWA into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), which officially became UFW, AFL-CIO after the success of the strike.

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