Unerasing true stories of a movement: Watching Dolores Huerta
Yesterday I attended the final day of the Nevada Women’s Film Festival, an annual event honoring female directors, writers, and producers in Nevada and uplifting narratives about women. The featured film for this last day was Dolores, a PBS documentary about union activist Dolores Huerta.
When I bought my ticket, I had never heard of Dolores Huerta before. I only knew what was advertised in the movie, that she was a feminist activist from the 1970s.
Having watched the film, I am now kinda embarrassed to have written that sentence.
If you’re not familiar with her (and I don’t blame you if you’re not — see the rest of this article), Dolores Huerta is the co-founder of United Farm Workers of America, the union famously led by Cesar Chavez up until his death in 1993.
Of course, many of us have heard of Cesar Chavez. You may have even celebrated his work on March 31, Cesar Chavez Day. You may have marched down the street in a protest, shouting, ‘Si, se puede!’ — ‘Yes, we can!’, the slogan that is so famously attributed to him.
But it was actually Dolores who came up with that slogan.
Dolores came up with a lot of other things, things that activists in many fields probably take for granted, for common knowledge, today. Dolores pioneered the idea of home meetings, of community outreach, of doing door-to-door footwork, of one-on-one voter outreach and registration. Dolores drew the link between environmental degradation and the oppression of poor people and people of color, specifically the Mexican and Latino farmworkers she sought to help. A lot of the things we (or at least I) associate with a new wokeness springing forth from the youth of today: intersectionality, the idea that people should be the architects of their own emancipation, that activists should speak with people and not for them, that activism should empower people to claim their own agency — these are all things that Dolores actively practiced along with Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and other activists.
But let’s backtrack a bit and recap the plot. In the 1950s, Dolores was a young wife with an all-American lifestyle, complete with suburban home and coifed hair. Then she decided to leave her comfortable life to live with and advocate for Mexican farmworkers in Delano, California.
As you can imagine, these workers were living and working under conditions that can only be described as serf-like. They had no vacation time, no sick days, a horrific working environment, no legal protections, and no way out. The companies they worked for made them live on their land, so that insubordination ran the risk of not just a loss of livelihood, but also of homelessness.
Dolores’ work initially focused on helping farmworkers and their families understand their rights under the law. She then meet Chavez and established the UFW, and this is where things really start to pick up. A burst of activism followed — protests, marches, strikes, and eventually a national campaign to boycott grapes, the primary food produced by the workers. Then success! Big agriculture businesses are forced to the negotiating table and workers get better wages, insurance benefits, healthcare. But the contract runs out, the businesses seek to reestablish their control, and the fight for workers’ rights continues, with Dolores at the helm.
The movie’s synopsis describes Dolores as the least known activist in history, and boy howdy does that hit the nail right on the head. The sheer amount of work she did, organizing, picketing, protesting, bringing up workers to the California Senate, confronting lawmakers over the course of what now, 60 years almost? Just watching it all was draining. But as we get closer and closer to the present day, the movie’s pace slows down as we begin to uncover why and how Dolores has been all but erased from activist history.
Dolores was the only woman serving on the board of the UFW during Chavez’s presidency. (Today, if you’re wondering, there are three women serving on the nine-person board). She had also been divorced twice and had 11 children over the course of three relationships, something one person (who, in fairness, just doesn’t like her in general) calls “an insult” to the socially conservative culture and religion she shared with the people she worked with and advocated for. Combined with a spate of bad publicity, her own reticence to take credit for her tireless work, and (I think) the fact that Chavez had a cult of personality thing going that made anyone standing next to him fade into the background, these factors relegated her to a footnote in the labor movement’s history — she’s been often described as Chavez’s “sidekick.”
The last third or so of the movie focuses on this theme, on how Dolores was systematically erased from history at least in part because she is a woman. We see her call out the sexism she faced on the board of UFW, her embracing of feminism and the pro-choice movement, and her founding of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Her daughters talk about what her example has meant for them (they are all activists and attorneys), and why it is important for young Latina women to see someone who looks like them working, advocating, and producing change in the political system.
This is an ongoing struggle that the documentary is not only reacting to, but is also a part of. I found the idea as presented to be a little incomplete, and I pondered that feeling on the drive home. Later that day, I caught the tail-end of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, specifically, the scene where the president of the American magical community is trying to stop the Obscurial’s path of destruction. Those of you who saw the movie may remember that the president is a black woman. That feeling of incompleteness, even of discomfort, resurfaced, and now I realize why:
Fantastic Beasts is set in the 1920s. The idea of a female president is, at this point in history, preposterous. Women couldn’t even vote until a few years before. This is also 40 years before the Civil Rights Act, so it’s not like black people are doing much better; in fact, they are doing much, much worse. The magical community is not exactly a paragon of equality and high moral thought either: the American community specifically forbids anything other than superficial contact with No-Majs, so clearly discrimination is not a foreign concept. The idea that this community would elect a black woman to lead them just doesn’t make sense.
Now, I am immediately uncomfortable with this unbidden thought because ‘it’s not realistic’ is the war cry of closeted racist fanboys everywhere. But it’s not realistic. And yet, we want to celebrate women and people of color and women of color, we want to push them forward and say, ‘see, we can lead. We can do amazing things.’ And like Dolores, Fantastic Beasts is doing just that. Right?
No, not right. Very wrong, in fact. Because Dolores is not just celebrating a woman of color. It is celebrating her struggle, her work, her fight, every beating she took, every insult thrown at her, every time she left her kids behind to go fight the good fight. When we say that Dolores was erased from history, what we’re saying is that her work, her contributions, and her accomplishments in the movement have been erased. If you’re determined to find Latina women activists from history, a few well-targeted Google searches will lead you to her. She’s there. But she is pulled out of the context, and that is what the documentary is fighting against. Whereas Fantastic Beasts’ president (whose name I don’t remember and refuse to Google, because that is my whole point) pushes forward the person but erases the context. Her role erases the endemic sexism and racism of the time and the very real people who fought and struggled and died to secure their rights and their dignity, and the rights and dignity of all of us.
Dolores’ daughters are right: we do need to know more about the women who have shaped our country’s history. We need to learn not just about them as individuals, but about their work and what it did and does for our communities and our country. There are plenty of stories we can tell where women of color lead the fight, stories that tell us how and why we have the rights and freedoms we have today, and that push us to continue that fight. Because, in the words of Dolores herself, whom I am honored to have heard speak, “Si, se puede.”
Oh, and P.S., you can watch Dolores on PBS tomorrow at 9 p.m., or streaming starting Wednesday, March 28, through to April 22.
