Dolores Huerta, activist and co-found of the United Farm Worker’s Union recently spoke to NPR about the new documentary chronicling her contributions to labor reform. For Huerta, community is key to social justice and change, “[M]y message was that we have to get back down to basics. We have to start organizing at the neighborhood level to get people educated to vote. There’s just so many facets, I think, of the ignorance in our society that have to be corrected if we’re really going to have a democratic society and a society that is just and that respects all of the members of this society regardless of who they are, what color they may be, what sexual orientation that they have or what gender, you know, they happen to be.”
She also noted that women’s roles in civil rights struggles tend to be diminished in favor of a “great man” version of history, “Well, I do believe they call it his story — history. And so, you know, that’s, I think, the case of many aspects of the civil rights movement where men were really given most of the attention of the work that was being done, even though we had very many women that were at the forefront of the struggle and at the forefront of the movement.
Huerta hope the film will spark other to action on behalf of farm workers and other victims of injustice, “I hope that this movie will inspire people when they see that farm workers who were the most discriminated and the most poverty-stricken people in our country, you know, had the courage to stand up and to fight for their rights, to organize. That way we’ll inspire other people to say, hey, if those poorest of the poor could do it, then maybe we could do something great also.”
