When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish - people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people - and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.
— Dolores Huerta
My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.
Racism and sexism, misogyny and homophobia, they're so visible. They're out in the open. When they're visible, it's a lot easier to deal with them.
If people don't vote, everything stays the same. You can protest until the sky turns yellow or the moon turns blue, and it's not going to change anything if you don't vote.
We do need women in civic life. We do need women to run for office, to be in political office. We need a feminist to be at the table when decisions are being made so that the right decisions will be made.
The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time - 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn't have toilets in the fields; they didn't have cold drinking water. They didn't have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.
My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.
My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that's an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.
If you haven't forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.
People were asleep, but I think they're waking up now. Trump has given everybody a good kick, and people are waking up and realizing they've got to get involved.
I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.
I always thought it was wrong for me to take credit for the work that I did. I don't think that anymore.
I always saw my role as getting LGBT to support the immigrant rights movement - which they did - and getting Latino organizations to support the women's movement, for reproductive rights. So that's kind of the work that I've always been doing.
I think that's something that all mothers have to deal with, especially single mothers. We work, and we have to leave the kids behind. And I think that's one of the reasons that we, not only as women but as families, we have to advocate for early childhood education for all of our children.
Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.
I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.
My mother was a very wonderful woman. When she and my dad divorced, she moved to California and worked two jobs in the cannery at night and as a waitress during the day. But she saved enough money to establish a restaurant.
When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it's an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.
The leaders come up from the volunteers that do the work, and it's amazing because then they do these incredible things in their community that they never thought they had the power to make that happen.
It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was 'dragon lady' or something like it.
Let's teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.
I started really noticing, more and more, how men will plagiarize and take credit for women's work... I've noticed that it just happens a lot.
We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.
My mother was a dominant force in our family. And I always saw her as the leader. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.
Professional farmworkers who know how to do a number of different jobs, whether it be pruning or picking or crafting, they see themselves as professionals, and they take a lot of pride in that work. They don't see themselves as doing work that is demeaning.
I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.
