Astonishing

"Dolores Huerta is born in 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico.

After her parents divorce, she moves with her mother and siblings to Stockton, California, where her grandfather often looks after the kids while her mother works long hours running a restaurant and hotel.

Dolores earns a teaching credential and becomes an elementary school teacher, raising her own 2 children while teaching other people's.

In the classroom, Dolores keeps noticing the same thing, many of her students are the children of migrant farmworkers, and they show up hungry, in worn-out clothes, sometimes without shoes.

She starts to feel like teaching alone isn't enough - that whatever is happening to these families needs to be fixed at the source.

She leaves teaching and throws herself into community organizing, eventually working with Fred Ross at the Community Service Organization in Stockton, registering voters and pushing for better services in Mexican American neighborhoods.

There, she meets Cesar Chavez, another organizer with the same conviction: farmworkers deserve better than what they're getting.

September 30, 1962. Dolores and Cesar found the National Farm Workers Association in Delano, California. By now, Dolores has remarried and is raising a total of 11 children, even as she takes on a national organizing role.

The conditions they're organizing against are brutal. Farmworkers in California's fields are earning as little as 70 cents an hour. As Dolores later puts it, "They didn't have toilets in the fields, they didn't have cold drinking water."

1965. Filipino farmworkers with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong, launch a strike across the grape fields of Delano.

Dolores's organization joins them, and the two groups eventually merge to form the United Farm Workers. To build national pressure, the union calls for a boycott of table grapes.

Dolores moves to New York for 4 years to lead the East Coast side of the boycott - starting with small grocery stores before taking on chains like Safeway.

Here's what makes it worse, even within her own movement, Dolores has to fight for basic recognition.

At the union's first convention, when nobody nominates her for vice president, she has to ask someone to nominate her herself. Politicians and reporters sometimes refer to her publicly as Cesar Chavez's "sidekick."

1970. After 5 years, the grape boycott forces growers to the table. The resulting contracts include the first health and benefit plans ever negotiated for farmworkers - with Dolores serving as the union's lead contract negotiator.

1975. California passes the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law in the country recognizing farmworkers' right to organize and bargain collectively.

Throughout these decades, Dolores is arrested 22 times for nonviolent protest. The worst incident comes in 1988, when she is 58 years old. During a peaceful demonstration in San Francisco, police beat her so severely that several of her ribs are broken, requiring emergency surgery.

The assault is caught on camera, leads to a financial settlement, and prompts the police department to change its crowd-control policies.

1998. President Bill Clinton gives Dolores the inaugural Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights.

2012. President Barack Obama awards her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Of her relentless drive, Cesar Chavez once said, "No march is too long, no task too hard for Dolores Huerta."

The rallying cry she helped popularize, "¡Sí, se puede!" - Yes, we can - outlived the grape boycott, the strikes, and the broken ribs, becoming a phrase chanted by movements far beyond the fields where it started.

Decades later, Dolores founds the Dolores Huerta Foundation, training a new generation of community organizers in the same Central Valley towns where she once taught school.

The schoolteacher who couldn't ignore hungry, barefoot kids in her classroom spent the next six decades making sure fewer kids had to be.

Share this with someone who needs to know - sometimes the person changing everything is the one nobody thought to put on the ballot."

Let this story reach more hearts.....
💙💙"
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