By Audrey Mcavoy
Associated Press
Dolores Huerta and the late César Chavez are both labor rights icons credited with leading a movement that pushed growers to negotiate for better wages and working conditions for farmworkers.
Their legacies are getting new attention after allegations emerged that Chavez, who died in 1993, sexually abused Huerta and other women and girls. Several celebrations honoring Chavez planned around the country for later this month have been canceled.
Chavez and Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which became the United Farm Workers of America a few years later when it merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.
The rise of the movement is one of the most important events in U.S. history and is the most important event in U.S. Latino history, said Paul Ortiz, a Cornell University labor history professor. United Farm Workers made the most important sustained changes in the working conditions of agricultural workers in the nation’s history, he said.
Agricultural workers “from Hawaii to Florida to New York to Southern California had tried to organize to improve their wages and working conditions, literally for centuries, going back to slavery times,” Ortiz said. “And almost every effort failed, some catastrophically.”
Chavez and Huerta are credited with efforts that prompted California to pass the first state law recognizing farmworkers’ right to collective bargaining.
Both have streets and schools named after them. Several states have designated March 31, Chavez’s birthday, as a day to commemorate him, and former President Barack Obama declared it a federal commemorative holiday in 2014.
Here’s a look at their lives and legacies:
César Chavez
Chavez is known for his early organizing in the fields, a hunger strike, a grape boycott and eventual victory in getting growers to negotiate with farmworkers for better wages and working conditions.
Born in Yuma, Arizona, Chavez grew up in a Mexican American family that traveled around California picking lettuce, grapes, cotton and other seasonal crops.
Chavez protested poor pay and often-miserable working conditions. There were no toilets in the fields for workers and they had to weed fields with short-handled hoes that forced them to bend over for hours at a time.
The farmworker movement lifted worker wages, banned short-handed hoes and established state-mandated clean drinking water and restrooms in the fields, according to a National Park Service document supporting the creation of a national monument in Chavez’s honor.
In 1966, he led a march that started with a few activists in Delano, California, and ended in Sacramento with 10,000 people, according to Obama’s 2014 proclamation. Some 17 million people joined a boycott of grapes, which forced growers to accept some of the first farmworker contracts in history, the proclamation said.
Chavez began the first credit union for farmworkers, health clinics, daycare centers and job-training programs, the Cesar Chavez Foundation said on its website.
“He was, for his own people, a Moses figure,” then-President Bill Clinton said in 1994 when posthumously awarding Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Chavez died the year before in California at age 66.
Dolores Huerta
The labor and civil rights leader secured higher wages, health benefits, pensions and pesticide protections for farmworkers during her decades of organizing and advocacy on their behalf.
Now 95, Huerta helped organize the 1965 Delano strike of 5,000 grape workers and was the lead negotiator in the workers contract that followed, according to the National Women’s History Museum.
A single mother, Huerta gave up a stable teaching career to organize. She was jailed over 20 times for protests and seriously injured in 1988 while demonstrating. She later championed women’s rights, encouraged Latinas to run for office and founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation to combat discrimination, poverty and inequality.
She coined the iconic slogan “Sí, se puede” — meaning “Yes, we can” — in 1972 while rallying Arizona farmworkers against a law banning boycotts and strikes. She defied claims it was impossible to organize there.
Huerta received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and in 1993 became the first Latina inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan and Fernanda Figueroa contributed to this report.