“We soon recognized that my mother really didn’t belong to us,” Emilio Huerta said in the 2017 documentary “Dolores.” He said it with pain and with deep love for a woman who belonged to all of us. She belonged to the farmworker movement she led and to the fight for social justice she worked at every day of her 96 years. Those of us blessed to walk alongside her found it hard to keep up. She was tireless. Working a campaign, speaking at a rally, talking to young students: She thrived in all of it.
The last time I saw Dolores was Aug. 14, at a private screening of an upcoming Los Lobos documentary. She celebrated Chicano culture, both for what it gave the movement and for the well-deserved joy it brings us. In June, at her 96th birthday party in LA, I got to introduce her to several of our journalists. She talked about her organizing days at Centro CSO, the Community Service Organization, in Boyle Heights and told us she’d love to walk the Eastside with us. I never imagined it wouldn’t happen.
Beautiful tributes will try to capture her impact on American history and the fight for the rights of workers, Latinos, immigrants and women. They will still fall short. In LA, she was a force of power. She was the endorsement every politician sought and a steady voice of justice for workers, families and women. She described the movement this way: “You have to love the people.” And love us she did. She sacrificed everything for us. She went to jail. She was beaten by police. She was raped. Her contributions were sometimes erased; Texas’ school board removed her from the elementary curriculum. Nothing stopped her or stripped away her dignity. When she gave her farewell to the union she built, she said she was grateful for “the privilege of saying goodbye.”
The way we honor her is to love our community and to remember that for Dolores, love was never just a feeling. It was the knock on the door, the rally, the call to the governor. On her 95th birthday party, the day the federal immigration raids began in Los Angeles, she told us the movement is never completely won and that every victory needs an army to defend it. She spent 96 years building that army. Every young person who asked her for a selfie got a question back: What are you doing for the movement?
That question belongs to all of us now. The biggest lesson I took from her is that you achieve the impossible because you love the people, and loving them means working for the dignity and justice they deserve.
We won’t get to walk Boyle Heights with her. But we will keep walking it, block by block, to tell the stories of the communities we love.
¡Dolores, presente!
