Dolores Huerta
speaker
102 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 20 Mar
Dolores Huerta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yes, I took him to the welfare office and tried to make an application, and they would not let him make an application. And when I went back to the office and I told Fred Ross Sr. that he said, you go back to that office right now and you demand to see a supervisor. Now, he did not say, I'm going to call them ahead of time. I'm going to give you a note to take to them.
No, he said, you go down there. And I thought, I can do that? And he said, yes, you can do that. All public officials are paid by our tax dollars. And you can make demands of them. So I went back to the welfare office and I got all my courage together. And I said, I want to see a supervisor. And the supervisor came out. I thought, whoa, I could do that. And to me, that was a moment of empowerment.
But the way that Mr. Ross did that, you know, to make sure that I had the courage. Yes, that's right. Exactly. Yeah, that was a big lesson. That's a big lesson. Yeah, that's a lesson that we have to say to people. You do not have to be a victim. You can be the hero of your own story. And that's what we did when we organized farm workers to say, you can be the heroes of this story.
And we had to go up against big ag, big oil, big banks, you know, President Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and we won.
I think you explained the process perfectly. In my thinking, if I don't do it, then it's not going to happen. If I don't get out there and help organize farm workers, they're never going to have a union. I quit my teaching job. in Stockton to go to Delano to start the union because I had been given that gift of knowledge of organizing that I can do this.
And if I don't do it, then farm workers are always going to have to live in the same type of miserable conditions that they're working and living in. My mother used to say that. to us growing up. If you can help someone, if you have the ability, then you have an obligation and responsibility to do that. And so that has sort of been my mantra throughout my whole life.
Well, we knew that Senator Robert Kennedy, he was a champion for poor people. for people in Appalachia, for people in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and that we had lost someone that would really stand up and speak for us. But at the same time, we knew that we had to continue because if Senator Robert Kennedy would have continued living, this is what he would have wanted us to do.
So there was no way that we could stop the work. We had to do it in his honor.
Absolutely. And I think that's a good lesson for our nation. Again, if they try to kill our democracy, you know, that we have, we're the ones that have the responsibility to fight for it. And that means each and every person. And democracy, the foundation of democracy is voting.
Absolutely. Yeah, many people thought that I would stop my activism at that point in time. But I knew that actually we espoused the whole idea. nonviolent actions, then the way that we have to respond to violence is by showing that we can continue and that we're not going to let acts of violence stop us. Because if we do that, that means that the opposition would win. And we can't let that happen.
Yeah, the response was overwhelming. We had so many flowers. We had flowers for everybody in the hospital. Really? Were you able to share them with other people? Yeah, we were able to share them with everybody. That's nice. And the people in the hospital were so kind, and they were allowing press people to come in. It was pretty overwhelming. But again, it kind of showed the support that we had.
It gave me more determination to continue.
Yeah, my mother set the values for our family. I mean, she was a great devotee of St. Francis of Xavier. And St. Francis of Assisi, and she's the one that taught us that you, as I mentioned, that you have to help people if you possibly can. And actually, my mother had a business. She had a restaurant. But one of her friends, who was Japanese, was interned after World War II.
And my mother's friend, she asked my mother if she would take over her business, which is a hotel. My mother gave up her own business to help her friend and took over her hotel while she was in the internment camps. I hope that her friend was able to return. Yes, she did. They were able to return. Unfortunately, my mother... We had the business, but we didn't have the building.
And the people that owned the building refused to give it back to the Japanese owner. But when it was able to help them start a whole new business, they started a jewelry store.
Well, I think women, we are more compassionate. We believe in sharing. We believe in cooperation and not competition. We are definitely against wars because we do not want to see our husbands, brothers, our children killed. We don't want to see our children killed. We don't want to see other people's children get killed.
And so this is why we have to do whatever we can to get more feminists elected. And when we say the word feminist, we include men, of course, that share the same values. And, you know, we want to end all of the discrimination that we've mentioned before. We can have a peaceful world. We have, you know, our world has so many resources.
And if we just shared the resources, and then we could think again of sharing and not competition. But I think it is going to take women taking power to make all of this happen.
Well, I think men always want to—I shouldn't say always. No, not always. I know. Not always. But men, they like to take over. They like to be in charge, you know. And it's kind of difficult for them to defer to women in leadership often. I think I've been fortunate in my life because I did work with Fred Ross Sr., who I believe was the first feminist man that I ever met in my life.
With Cesar, I was able to challenge him when it came to the issues of having women in power. And he would listen to my arguments because Often I was correct and he wasn't. So, you know, but I think it's so important that we have women, but often also to make women understand that they can use their power, that they have power, that they don't have to defer to others.
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