The rambunctious teenagers crammed into a lecture hall suddenly went quiet when a woman old enough to be their great-grandmother, and smaller in stature than many of them, approached the podium.
Dolores Huerta was about to speak.
At the summer conference for Latino high school students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the early 2010s, I was the keynote speaker, with a hell of an opener before me.
Huerta didn’t talk for long, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audience as mesmerized. She said little about her distinguished life. Nothing about her many awards, her decades fighting to improve conditions for farm workers across the U.S., her unlikely trajectory from the daughter of a coal miner to one of this country’s premier labor leaders and a Latina civil rights titan with few peers.
No, Huerta focused on the young people before her. She challenged them to better themselves — that’s how communities improve, she argued. She made them laugh, she made them cheer, she brought tears to the eyes of some and concluded with the rebel chant long associated with her that we shouted in unison — sí se puede. It can happen. The students gathered around her afterward for a group photo, and then she left as unceremoniously as she had arrived.
Afterward, I asked the organizers why they didn’t have Dolores — everyone in my world called her by her first name, even if we didn’t know her personally, because that’s how much she was a part of our lives — speak for a full hour, as I did. They said she had other things to do but wouldn’t miss out on a chance to talk to students, charging a pittance compared to her usual speaking fee, and nowhere near the $25,000 a prominent Latina author had demanded.
That is the Huerta so many are mourning after the news that she died of cancer on Wednesday at age 96. Her legacy is secured in American history, but her daily calendar shows why she mattered so much to so many.
Latinos long respected Huerta’s career but didn’t truly embrace her until her señora era, when she became our collective matriarch, in addition to the mother of 14 children. At a moment in Huerta’s life when she could have faded into retirement and no one would have faulted her, she was seemingly everywhere all the time, because her work was nowhere near done. Because it never is.
I ran into her multiple times in the 15 years after we first met — at protests and rallies where she was a speaker, at talks she gave to college students and community groups. She’d appear unannounced at art galleries and movie screenings just to show support for up-and-coming artists and filmmakers. One time during the COVID years, cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, acting legend Cheech Marín and I were holding a tequila-fueled Zoom fundraiser for Marín’s Chicano art museum when Huerta popped on our screens to gently tell us to stop making pendejos of ourselves.
People couldn’t believe how approachable she was, how she never seemed to say no to an autograph, a photo request, a chance to hear the stories of others and to truly care about each and every admirer.
But giving so much of yourself inevitably comes with a cost. We all found out what Huerta personally lost when she revealed to the New York Times earlier this year that her United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez had raped her and fathered two of her children during the 1960s.
Huerta told the newspaper that she stayed quiet about the abuse when it happened, and for decades afterward, because she didn’t want to torpedo el movimiento that the two of them had created. Latinos everywhere collectively mourned what she had endured and marveled that it didn’t stop her activism, which continued until very recently.
I wish I could have spoken to Dolores about the sacrifices she made in the name of all of us. But our relationship — never a personal one, but close enough that we greeted each other whenever we inevitably ran into each other — soured in later years. The last time we talked, she harangued me for having openly criticized Chavez’s opposition to illegal immigrants.
“You have it all wrong on Cesar,” Huerta said over the phone while on a train heading to a conference, maintaining her stance even after I reminded her that UFW recordings showed her pushing back against the derogatory slurs against immigrants that he freely used.
She invited me to meet her in Bakersfield, where her nonprofit is located, to talk more about it, an offer I sadly never took up.
It was a reminder that Huerta was human and never perfect, like too many lionized leaders. She excused Chavez’s personal vendettas against critics for way too long and dismissed progressive Latino activists who criticized her for cozying up to establishment Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
But that won’t be the Dolores I’ll remember. The Dolores who will always be in my mind is from that high school conference so long ago.
I’ll always remember her smile as wide as the brim of her hat, happy that young people wanted to do better, proud that she was able to help them — and ready to do more, because we all can.
Sí se puede.
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