artin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy. All giants in the American civil rights movement. All men of courage who valued the truth above their own lives. But there is another name, a woman's name: Dolores Huerta. In Spanish, the name Dolores means sorrow. Huerta means orchard. "The literal translation of my name," Huerta says, "is sorrow in the orchards." The name foretold her life.

She stepped into history in l965 on a grape strike line in Delano. The strike gave birth to the union Huerta co-founded with Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO. But in a sense the strike transcended a mere labor management dispute, giving birth to a social and political movement for the Latino community all over America.

"We created confidence and pride and hope in an entire people's ability to create the future," said Chavez in a 1984 address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. "The union's survival, its very existence, sent out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity, that we were challenging and overcoming injustice, that we were empowering the least educated among us, the poorest among us. The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm."

"Dolores Huerta has been a great champion of human rights and social justice," says Coretta Scott King, "not only for America's farm workers, but for African Americans and working people of all races. She is a woman of extraordinary courage and dedication, who provides a superb role model for women in civil rights. I hold her in the highest esteem and I am very proud to call her my friend."

Huerta is, as former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos put it so aptly, "a historic person in our midst." She was there again on a platform with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he won the 1968 California primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. In an impromptu speech from the heart, he thanked Huerta and Chavez, who had‹as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. says in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times ‹"registered Chicanos as never before." Moments later Kennedy took a shortcut through the hotel kitchen to get to a press conference‹a shortcut that ended his life and changed a nation's.

"Dolores Huerta has always stood up for the oppressed. Her courage and leadership was crucial in the long fight to establish the United Farm Workers and to bring humane working conditions and basic rights to migrant farm workers. She has always been a champion of civil rights and she was an especially valued friend to my brother Bobby and to all the members of our family," says Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

"Whenever I read history, I've always wondered about people who performed heroic acts of citizen courage to eliminate discrimination and injustice. I wonder what someone like Susan B. Anthony would have been like," says Art Agnos, now the secretary's representative for Housing and Urban Development in San Francisco. "Whenever I'm around Dolores Huerta, I know what it would have been like," Agnos says.

A small, petite woman who celebrated her 65th birthday this April, Huerta's energy and stamina are legendary. She works day and night for the union doing what has to be done. Sleeping and eating are secondary to her. "She'll probably die organizing," says her son, Fidel Huerta.

The shoulder-length, dark brown hair shows no trace of gray. It frames a proud face. Strong, with lines of living etched in her bronze skin, her soft brown eyes light up with humor at a moment's notice. "I went through all of the trials by fire over the last 30 years," says Huerta. One glance at her face and you know it's true. Huerta is a storyteller, and perhaps it's her own stories that best illustrate who she is and what she's about.

"If you talk about any single event, it was the constant discrimination against young people and other Latinos," says Huerta reflecting back on her teen-age years. "It crushed me." A friend of her mother's had a storefront with ping pong tables and a jukebox, where she and other kids hung out, played and had jitterbug contests. "The police shut it down," says Huerta. "They told us they didn't want to see all those white kids playing around with all these niggers, Filipinos and Mexicans‹it was a first awakening for me."

A third-generation American of mixed Mexican, Spanish and French descent, Huerta was born in New Mexico but grew up in downtown Stockton, the second of five children. Her mother ran a 70-room hotel, where she often housed farm worker families at no cost. "We saw a lot of life out our windows," says Huerta's sister Alicia Arong.

From her mother she got her faith. She taught Huerta to look to her own inner strength and her own heart for guidance. "I pretty much follow that," Huerta says.

Like her mother, Huerta has been married three times. She says the most difficult times of her life were when she was married. "Just having to live in the role of an oppressed woman‹that I found very difficult." Huerta says she fought with each of her husbands over the usual stuff women have to go through. Her daughter Juanita Chavez says, "It was difficult for them with the life she chose to lead. Her marriage has been to her work."

"You have to be very determined to do this kind of work," says Huerta. "When I remember the day I broke up with Mr. Huerta, it was horrible. We had this big fight at 5 o'clock in the morning, and the next day I had this big meeting that I had organized in Contra Costa County. I didn't sleep all night and I just got in the car to go to the meeting," Huerta says. "The work drives me."

Huerta says she was a "choice" mother who would do it all over again and have 11 children. But she admits the picture that emerges is a difficult and painful one. Of a mother who was gone for long periods of time, sometimes as much as three or four months at a time. Of kids who lost their childhoods very quickly, sometimes split up among different households of family, friends and supporters.

"When I first decided to do this, one of my daughters was having confirmation and I didn't have any money to buy her shoes," Huerta says. "When she came down the aisle to be confirmed, she had her little white tennis shoes on with the holes in them. Well, in that same group of children walking down, there were other children who had shoes like my daughter. I knew I had made the right decision because these were the children of farm workers who were coming down that aisle with raggedy tennis shoes just like my daughter."

"I'll tell you a story," says Lori deLeon, Huerta's second eldest daughter. "When I was going to turn 13, we had been in Delano for a year. My mother was going to Florida, to take on Coca Cola. I was upset; it was going to be my birthday. I was at the office and I said, 'We don't even see you, my birthday is coming, why can't you be with me?' My mother said, 'Your birthday is important, I understand what you are saying. But you have to understand there are thousands and thousands of farm worker children out there who don't get to celebrate their birthdays. You can help me by sacrificing your birthday.' I never forgot this," says deLeon. "All of us knew that the work was more important."

Huerta traded sparring with children (she was a school teacher before she started organizing) for wrangling with labor attorneys over contracts.

"She's not my favorite person," says Terry O'Connor, an attorney for Western Legal Associates representing some of the largest growers in the state. "She reminds me of one of those creatures you've seen on Mayan temples." O'Connor calls Huerta a "cruise missile" who only sees her side in negotiations. "If you challenge her, you're either a capitalist or a racist," says Rob Roy, chairman of the American Bar Association's subcommittee on state agricultural labor law developments.

Sounding more and more like they were playing a game of cat and mouse, O'Connor and Roy offer conflicting views on Huerta's role in the union. "The reason the union is moving forward is because Cesar died and Dolores has been pushed in the background," says O'Connor. "Art (Arturo Rodriguez, the president of the United Farm Workers) is more willing to cut deals with employers." But according to Roy, Huerta has "come back into the limelight ever since Art took over."

"Women are never taken seriously, regardless of what they do," says Huerta. "I point out racist remarks to them. I tell them there are no clean toilets for workers, that they have not had any real wage increases since the l970s, that they work all day in the hot sun. They don't want to hear this."

Roy is quick to discount the union's clout, pointing to the large gap between union membership and total agricultural laborers in California.

Roy's expert of choice, Dr. Philip Martin, professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, agrees that the ratio between UFW membership‹which his surveys show to be between 20,000 and 26,000‹and the 800,000 laborers who work for wages sometimes during the year in agriculture in California, is wide.

But, says Martin, "I think the UFW has enormous influence‹I call it the fear factor." According to him, the union sets the standard, causing the growers to increase their wages and benefits to keep the unions out.

Arnold Myers, a 30-year veteran agricultural labor lawyer in the Salinas Valley where the UFW influence is the strongest, has negotiated with both Huerta and Chavez over the years. "She has very, very strong views about what she wants in contracts," says Myers. He called Huerta a tough and good opponent by his standards‹tough because she protects her clients' interests, and good because she always keeps her perspective. "She's not afraid to say what she thinks."

Huerta says she is torn between negotiating labor contracts four days a week and a "burning" desire to do community organizing. "Without community involvement you can't have a democracy."

Representing the union hasn't made Huerta rich. Her lifetime pension comes not from the union, but from a record settlement approved by city officials in San Francisco. Huerta suffered six broken ribs and a ruptured spleen when she was beaten by police wielding batons during a demonstration in l988 in front of the St. Francis Hotel where then Vice President George Bush was holding a fund-raiser. The incident may have changed San Francisco politics forever.

San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan was police chief at the time. "It's a well-known fact," says his brother Jack, then deputy police chief, confirming that his brother forced him to resign over the incident in order to save his own political skin. Jack Jordan, who has not spoken to his brother since, says he is convinced Frank had political designs for his future even then.

"It may well have been the beginning of a resentment on Frank Jordan's part towards me," says former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, who says he had to force the police department to overhaul their crowd-control methods. "Two years later he ran against me for Mayor."

Huerta is in charge of legislation for the union. She lobbied heavily for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The special agricultural provisions of the act provided amnesty to about 900,000 agricultural workers according to Harold Ezell, the former western regional Immigration and Naturalization Services commissioner. Huerta claims a Seattle INS official told her California Proposition 187‹which denies public education, health and social services to illegal aliens‹was primarily aimed at the families of the agricultural workers who received amnesty under IRCA.

"In my mind, IRCA wasn't a major factor in the development of Proposition 187," says Alan Nelson, head of the INS under the Reagan administration, and one of the three co-writers of the ballot measure, "but it may have been for some of the others involved."

Ezell, who co-wrote the ballot measure with Nelson, called the agricultural workers' amnesty "the curse of IRCA," and claimed that more than 80 percent of those cases were fraudulent while still denying it motivated him to write Proposition 187.

Huerta's road has not always been an easy one to travel. She has been arrested 22 times, but never convicted for union activity. "She's been hospitalized three times," says her son, Fidel Huerta, a physician, "twice for dehydration and exhaustion, and the third time for the accident in San Francisco."

Huerta prays a lot, reads Ghandi and St. Francis, eats no red meat, and sometimes fasts. "The day I got beaten up in San Francisco," says Huerta, "I had not eaten anything that day."

"My mother has not only suffered oppression in her marriages, but she has suffered oppression by male leadership in the union and elsewhere," says her daughter Lori deLeon, summing up the struggle that has been her mother's life. "She has had to fight her way‹not only to fight the oppression caused by growers and politicians. It is not easy for Latino men to have a woman as a leader. She has not only had to earn her way, but fight her way. Her competence, commitment and intelligence frighten a lot of people. Her road has been harder than any of ours because of what she had to go through."

The Saturday before Chavez died, he told Huerta someone had told him that he treated her a bit differently. "Do you know what it is?" Huerta says he asked her. "And I said, 'Yes, Cesar, it's male chauvinism.' He laughed and laughed. He giggled and laughed so hard," says Huerta smiling. But her face becomes serious very quickly. "What it is, is that was his indirect way of apologizing to me. That was his way of apologizing," she says.

"If I do something, I want to be recognized for what I do, not for what I don't do," says Huerta. "I want to see women‹like the women who do the work in the movement‹I want to see them get recognized," Huerta says. "I feel this way: If I'm not given the recognition, then that means that the other women in the organization are not getting the recognition. If I can be slighted, then that means they can be slighted. It's a personal thing, but I think it's a thing that I owe to women in general."

"It was very difficult," says Huerta. "Sometimes I think you have to be either a fool or a hero to do what I've done."

Joseph Campbell, who was the ultimate authority on heroes and myths, talked about heroes in an interview with Bill Moyers before he died. Campbell said the ultimate trials for heroes lie in losing themselves to some higher end. "When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness," said Campbell. If this is what a hero is, then Dolores Huerta is surely a heroine for our times.

"You ask me how I want to be remembered, what I want on my tombstone," Huerta says, "Si se puede ‹it can be done!"

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MAIL PRISM (prism@sfsu.edu)     
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