Research Guides: Dolores Huerta Day: Biography

Dolores Huerta (Born on April 10, 1930)

In the late 1950s Huerta became interested in the conditions of farmworkers and met Cesar Chavez, a CSO official who shared that interest. Their attempts to focus the CSO's attention on the inequities plaguing rural workers failed, and both eventually left that organization. By 1962 they had cofounded the National Farm Workers Association, forerunner of the United Farm Workers (UFW), an influential union whose grape boycott in the late 1960s forced grape producers to improve working conditions for migrant farmworkers. As coordinator of nationwide lettuce, grape, and Gallo wine boycotts in the 1970s, Huerta helped create the national climate that led to the passage in 1975 of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law recognizing the rights of California farmworkers to bargain collectively. Continue . . .

Source: “Huerta, Dolores.” Britannica Biographies, Mar. 2012, p. 1. From Academic Search Complete database.

Quotes

eBook Collection

¡Sí, Ella Puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy Of Dolores Huerta And The United Farm Workers

Book Collection

Resources

Dolores Huerta Foundation Our mission is to create a network of organized healthy communities pursuing social justice through systemic and structural transformation.
Governor Brown Declares April 10th Dolores Huerta Day in California! In July 18, 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 2644, designating April 10th as Dolores Huerta Day. The bill was introduced by Assemblymember Eloise Reyes (AD-47). Civil rights leader and community organizer, Dolores Huerta, is the first and only living person to hold this honor. Dolores Huerta Day is not a state holiday. Instead, this day is designated day to recognize Dolores’s lifelong work as a civil rights activist and community organizer, her role as the co-founder and vice president of the United Farm Workers union, and her current work as president and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. The state law encourages schools to teach their students about Dolores Huerta and her life.
Dolores Huerta & the Presidential Medal of Freedom In this official White House video, Dolores discusses her work and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Balancing Mystery and Identification: Dolores Huerta's Shifting Transcendent Persona The present analysis explores Dolores Huerta's use of a shifting transcendent persona to balance the sense of mystery surrounding her accomplishments with a performance of normalcy and audience identification. We find, first, that Huerta leveraged her borderland experiences and ideology as rhetorical resources that functioned to facilitate the amalgamation of personae exemplifying her advocacy, and, second, that her shifting transcendent persona's balance of mystery and identification hinged as much upon the manner in which she positioned audience members to perceive themselves as it did upon the manner in which she positioned them to perceive her own exceptional normalcy.
Rhetorical Agency as Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness Through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta's Rhetoric This study explores the rhetoric of Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers of America, and expands theoretical understandings of rhetorical agency as a negotiation of the intersectional aspects of gender, ethnicity, race, and class. Huerta's rhetoric illustrates how rhetorical agency can function through what Gloria Anzaldúa calls haciendo caras [making face, making soul] and what Chela Sandoval calls differential consciousness. Using these rhetorical caras, Huerta embodies collaborative agency through rhetorical styles of emotionality, familia [family], egalitarianism, and optimism, using factors from social and material dispositions relating to ethnicity, gender, and class, that both enable and constrain her sense of rhetorical agency. Ultimately, Huerta's caras and negotiation of habitus shape rhetorical agency through optimism, resistance, and transformation.
Labor of Love: Activist Dolores Huerta still fighting for change Dolores Huerta has been speaking up for social justice and workers' rights for 50 years. Michelle Miller reports.
Dolores Huerta - Labor Movement Leader Voces Vivas is an original short film series featuring interviews with a broad spectrum of Mexican Americans. Intimate, opinionated, and provocative, these films personalize the Mexican American experience through the individual stories of the interview subjects, enriching the understanding of Mexican and Latino American history and culture in the United States. Voces Vivas was conceived and directed by award-winning filmmaker Pedro Pablo Celedón and produced by Barefoot Productions (www.bareprod.com). The pilot program, "Sandra Romero- I could Do Something About This", won a Silver Remi Award at the 2011 Houston International Film Festival.
Dolores: Conversation and Q&A A conversation with Dolores Huerta, following a special screening of 'Dolores,' the Independent Lens documentary about her life and work as one of the most defiant feminists of the 20th century. With discussion moderated by John Valadez of the Documentary Film Lab at Michigan State University. Presented by WKAR Public Media, Independent Lens, and MSU partners. Start and end times are approximate.

From Films On Demand database:

“Born-Again Feminist:” Dolores Huerta In the 1960s, labor leader and civil rights activist, Dolores Huerta organized in the fields, spearheading a national boycott of grapes and lettuce and making decent pay and working conditions a reality for thousands of farm workers. After receiving a Medal of Freedom at the White House in May 2012, Huerta spoke with NewsHour’s Ray Suarez. Original broadcast date: May 30, 2012.
Bracero Program Dolores Huerta quit her teaching job to work with CSO and Chavez. The bracero program, brought in cheap laborers from Mexico but banned them from organizing. Distributed by PBS Distribution.