Dolores

I'm going to bring her out here right now.

Dolores.

While the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Was leading the charge in the South,

one California woman was fighting on the front lines

for workers' rights.

And while her name is rarely mentioned in the history books,

she may just be

the most vocal activist you've never heard of.

Come along, brothers. We are waiting for you!

Dolores Huerta helped lead a worldwide grape boycott

that forced growers to agree

to some of the country's first farmworker contracts.

Viva la cause!

Viva la huelgal.

She's the first general that I followed into war.

The workers are on the rise.

Dolores Huerta, who is an old friend of mine...

What she is, she's an insult to the farmworker.

Why are the growers and the teamsters so against her?

Because they're threatened.

We're never giving up.

Dolores is an icon.

Dolores Huerta has said

Republicans hate Latinos.

She also writes

the alternative to capitalism is democratic socialism.

She's not afraid

to speak truth to power.

She's a clown.

We thank you for all you have done

and all you still do

to promote the dignity and human rights

of America's family.

She's a civil rights hero.

She's been beaten up and she's gone to jail.

She's a very volatile individual.

We always like to say

that we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.

The FBI knew

how dangerous Dolores was.

Conservatives on the Texas Board of Education

removed the legendary farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta

from the state social studies curriculum.

I got to tell you, I never heard of this woman.

We've really got

to set the record straight.

I mean, women cannot be written out of history.

You were a young girl,

growing up in America in the '40s.

You must have had a dream.

I guess my only dream was just to be accepted.

I think that's what a lot of young children feel,

just to be accepted for what you are and that's not possible.

Tell me when you were first aware

of having a social conscience.

I think that I felt it very deeply

as a teenager and it was mostly because of the police brutality

against Mexicans and blacks,

the kids that I grew up with,

and you find out that the justice, it's not there.

The equality isn't there.

If you were coming of age in the 19505

in California in the San Joaquin Valley,

you were coming of age in a time of conformity.

Everybody was being fit into a mold,

and if you were Dolores Huerta,

there was no mold.

My mom, she grew up in the '40s,

you know, like the dances, the bebop, the big band,

the swing, you know.

She's an American girl, you know.

Back in those days, all of the Latina women

got married very young... 15,16,17 years old.

My first husband, we had a lot in common.

We were both into jazz,

but I don't think that we were ready for marriage yet.

Then my second husband, we had kind of a culture clash

because of the way that I grew up

and the way that he grew up.

My mother was a single parent, she was a businesswoman,

and like her, I worked all the time.

You know, my mother-in-law could never understand why

I didn't just stay home with the children.

And so, Dolores talks about her life as a young mother

and as a married woman

and not feeling that was quite enough,

that she needed to do more than that.

That's when she met Fred Ross.

When I met Fred Ross and he talked to me

about how people could get together

in an organization and really start changing things,

to me it was just a revelation.

LORI de LEON: Fred Ross was a community organizer

with the Community Service Organization

who developed house meetings.

You're on the ground,

identifying individuals who are willing, you know,

to do the work to make the communities better.

I still remember my first house meeting.

Fred showed us pictures of the improvements

that they had done in East Los Angeles,

like bringing in street lights and sidewalks,

bringing in health clinics.

But the one that really hooked me

was when he showed us press clippings of police

that they had sent to prison

for beating up Mexican-American kids.

And I thought, any organization that can do that,

I want to belong to that organization.

I think that my mom experienced

enough of that injustice or discrimination to where

she just could not keep it down.

She could not keep quiet.

In 1959, I became the political director

for the Community Service Organization,

and helped draft a lot of the legislation

that we ultimately got approved in Sacramento.

I was only 25 at this time, or 26 years old.

I was very young.

There were very, very few Latinos-

and I'm talking about men...

In the legislature in California in the '50s and '60s.

It was all white men,

and here you have someone

like Dolores Huerta, that was just...

People just didn't do that in those days.

We had one piece of legislation to take away the requirement

that you had to be a U.S. citizen

to get public assistance.

I took parents whose kids had served in World War II

to this one senator who was key for us to get that legislation,

sat them in his office

with the pictures of their kids in uniform.

They couldn't speak English,

Senator Kolbe couldn't speak Spanish, but I told them,

"Just stay here until he says yes,

that he'll vote on that bill."

What kind of a lobbyist is she?

Oh, she's a great lobbyist.

She's indefatigable.

She's unorthodox.

You know, Dolores will bring in hundreds of people

and they'll camp outside your office.

So when Dolores is in Sacramento,

everybody knows she's in Sacramento.

Fred Ross was always talking about

this great organizer, Cesar Chavez,

so Fred introduced us.

Cesar was very shy.

I remember one time

that he was sitting down by himself at a table

and so I rushed over and sat down

and started trying to talk to him

and he immediately got up and walked away.

Fred would always tell Cesar how he met this woman,

she's dynamite, great organizer.

He was a little bit jealous

when Fred would talk to him about her.

He was a little bit jealous about that.

I gave my report on the legislative work

that we were doing up in Sacramento.

He and Fred Ross came over and invited me

to have lunch with them

so I was very thrilled, because I thought,

"Oh my, Cesar's finally paying attention to what I'm doing."

They were having a meeting and they needed a Chicano legislator

to do some things and he was arguing why it couldn't be done.

And it was when my mother began telling him

all the reasons why he needed to get done

that Cesar took a step back and he goes,

"Now I see what Fred was talking about."

All this work that we were doing,

Cesar organizing the farmworkers in Oxnard,

my organizing farmworkers in Stockton,

was under the auspices of the Community Service Organization.

But when it came time then to make it a union,

the CS0 decided not to support us.

That's when Cesar called me to come over to his house

and he said, "We have to organize a union."

He put it this way, he said, "Unless you and I do it,

it's never going to happen."

And then he said in the next breath,

"But we will not see a national union in our lifetime

"because the growers are too rich, they're too powerful,

and they're too racist."

One of the really tragic contradictions

about the United States of America is that

it has presented itself before the world

as a beacon of independence and liberty and human rights.

Of course,

the real stain on this mythology is slavery

and with it, the potential for the enslavement of others.

This was a very real threat for all Mexicans

living in California.

After 1848,

it was a continuing threat for all of the immigrants

that came from China, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam.

Racism has been endemic to American history.

The feudal wage slavery of agribusiness