In a packed Cal State LA ballroom in 2018, Dolores Huerta reminded students that Los Angeles, specifically Boyle Heights, was the birthplace of the United Farm Workers.
Huerta recalled how César Chávez called her from his Boyle Heights home on Folsom and Fickett streets with an urgent idea: “We have to start a union,” he said.
“Part of the history of mine and César’s connection with Los Angeles is sometimes really not known or respected,” Huerta shared at the celebration honoring her and commemorating Cal State LA’s 50 years of Chicano studies. “It was actually here in the city of Los Angeles where the Chicano movement started.”
(J. Emilio Flores/Cal State LA)
Huerta’s early days as an organizer brought her to the Eastside, where she worked as a lobbyist under Chávez’s direction at the LA headquarters of the Community Service Organization, commonly known as CSO. The Boyle Heights-based organization — which to this day remains active — is heralded as a training ground for many young leaders who helped establish the UFW, including Huerta and Chávez.
Huerta died Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield. Here in LA, elected and civic leaders honored her legacy as a dedicated advocate for workers’ and women’s rights. LA Mayor Karen Bass and LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis called Huerta a friend and credited her as a source of inspiration in their work. State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo described Huerta as “the moral compass of our labor movement.” Councilmember Ysabel Jurado shared a memory of Huerta swearing her into office.
Her Eastside legacy was memorialized seven years ago with a city square named after her at the intersection of East 1st and Chicago streets, where the former site of CSO’s LA chapter was located. The 1924-built Chicago building at the Southeast corner now houses Boyle Heights City Hall, where Centro CSO continues to meet.
Local historian Shmuel Gonzales visited the intersection on Wednesday to pay his respects to Huerta, whom he regarded as a “tremendous force in this neighborhood and in barrio communities like this.” Huerta, Gonzales noted, “expanded on the labor and the civil rights movement across the country and the world from here.”
During her time with CSO, Huerta was known as a commanding communicator and advocate, according to an excerpt featured in “A Dolores Huerta Reader,” a book edited by Mario T. Garcia and dubbed as the first to focus on the civil rights icon. “Everybody knows her,” Chavez was quoted as saying in an article by Margaret Rose following a trip to the state capitol in the early 1960s, adding that “the usual remark is that she is a fighter.”
The book — a collection of articles and book excerpts written about Huerta that also features her own writings and speeches — covers the challenges that Huerta encountered working in unionizing roles traditionally held by men. It notes Chavez’s objection to Huerta’s lobbying efforts because it took her away from field organizing, but there also appeared to be some resentment in the attention she was receiving.
The book traces Huerta, in the mid-1950s, meeting liberal activist and CSO head Fred Ross, who saw potential in her becoming a significant community organizer in the Mexican American community. By then, the organization had already been successful helping elect Edward Roybal, the first Latino member of the LA City Council. Soon after joining CSO, Huerta emerged as a key leader on voter registration, education, health care and police abuse.
“As she entered the world of the 1950s, she held to an important belief: that in any endeavor, ‘women have one advantage over men, their egos aren’t so involved,’” according to an article written by Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. García that was featured in the book. “As she put it: ‘I think women are particularly good negotiators and organizers because we have a lot of patience, and no ego trips to overcome.’”
Now, women, largely Chicana women and mothers, are leading in the organization where Huerta got her start.
“Women are always going to be at the forefront of the fight, and whether we get credit for it or not, we’re always going to be there because mujeres, we don’t just think about ourselves. We think about the collective,” said Karina Lopez, co-chair of Centro CSO’s executive committee, previously told Boyle Heights Beat.
In the past year, the organization launched a petition calling for Adventist Health White Memorial to bar U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making medical decisions for patients. It helped patrol outside First Street Elementary during a cluster of immigration raids in Boyle Heights, called for police accountability and protested alongside the family of Jeremy Flores, who was shot and killed by police in the neighborhood.
After sexual abuse allegations against Chávez surfaced, Centro CSO issued a statement condemning all forms of sexual violence and expressing solidarity with survivors. The organization noted Chávez’s and Huerta’s roots with CSO and highlighted that the historic fight waged by the UFW paved the way for the Chicano movement and made Chávez famous, “not the other way around.”
“When we’re fighting for justice and for our liberation, we have to always think about gender-based violence, gender issues and equality. Women need to be there to highlight whenever these things are not being addressed. We will be the ones to challenge the culture to change for the better for everyone, not just for women,” Lopez said.
