Dolores Huerta, the United Farm Workers, and people power: Rhetorical participation in Latina/o/x suffrage and social movements

ABSTRACT

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, was and still is involved in a number of social justice causes, including voter participation. Since her days working at the Community Service Organization in the 1950s, she has long advocated for registering and organizing voters as part of a broader strategy to enfranchise Mexican, Mexican American, and other historically marginalized groups. This essay explores a few brief examples of her calls to get out the vote and participate in social movements more broadly to address the deep-seated problems of “citizenship excess” that face Mexican, Mexican American, and other immigrant communities (as well as many others) in the United States. In addition, Huerta has strongly advocated for “people power” as a way to get marginalized people into activism, especially those with intersectional identities related to race, ethnicity, gender, class standing, sexuality, and political orientations.

KEYWORDS:

• Dolores Huerta
• United Farm Workers
• Latina/o/x rhetoric
• citizenship excess
• people power

Notes

1 In 1962, the UFW was originally called the Farm Workers Association. My book details that history as well as Dolores Huerta’s life and rhetorical legacy more fully: Stacey K. Sowards, ¡Sí, Ella Puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2019). See also Stacey K. Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency as Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness Through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta’s Rhetoric,” Communication Theory 20, no. 2 (2010): 223–47, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01361.x; Stacey K. Sowards, “Rhetorical Functions of Letter Writing: Dialogic Collaboration, Affirmation, and Catharsis in Dolores Huerta’s Letters,” Communication Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2012): 295–315, https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2012.669341.

2 Hector Amaya, Citizenship Excess: Latina/os, Media, and the Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

3 Margaret Rose, “Dolores Huerta: The United Farm Workers Union,” in The Human Tradition in American Labor History, ed. E. Arnesen (Wilmington: SR Books, 2004), 211–29.

4 M. Frank, “Dolores Huerta: ‘Sí, se puede—We Can Do It,’” Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1987; Alicia Chávez, “Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers,” in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 240–54.

5 Rose, “Dolores Huerta,” 218.

6 Amaya, Citizenship Excess, 2.

7 Natalia Molina, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 2.

8 Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal, “Mobilizing for National Inclusion: The Discursivity of Whiteness Among Texas Mexicans’ Arguments for Desegregation,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 98.

9 Dolores Huerta, “Reflections on UFW Experience,” July/August 1985, UCSD Miller Archives, https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/essays/essays/MillerArchive/063A%20Reflections%20on%20UFW%20Experience.pdf.

10 Dolores Huerta, Transcript of speech at Stanford University, UFW Office of the President, Cesar Chavez, Part 2 (Box 46, Folder 12), Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, May 1974, 3–4.

11 Huerta, Transcript, 1974, 8.

12 Dolores Huerta, “Testimony of the United Farm Workers AFL–CIO,” Dolores Huerta (Box 2), Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1973.

13 Dolores Huerta Foundation, “About the Foundation,” http://doloreshuerta.org/about-the-foundation/.

14 For more detail on the 2006 immigration protests, see Richard D. Pineda and Stacey K. Sowards, “Flag Waving as Visual Argument: 2006 Immigration Demonstrations and Cultural Citizenship,” Argumentation and Advocacy 43, no. 3–4 (2007): 164–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2007.11821672.

15 Dolores Huerta, “Speech at The University of Texas at El Paso,” speech, El Paso, TX, April 2006.

16 Dolores Huerta, “Descúbrete: Empowerment through Wings of Knowledge,” speech, El Paso, TX, October 16, 2013.

17 Sowards, ¡Sí, Ella Puede!, 84–93.

18 Huerta, “Descúbrete,” 2013.

19 Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 224, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310902856105.