Granting Standpoint as a Strategy for Promoting Social Justice Activism: An Analysis of Dolores Huerta’s Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

This article examines three texts in which Dolores Huerta, a highly influential yet understudied social justice activist, addressed privileged audiences of potential allies to the United Farm Workers movement. I argue that Huerta constructed farm workers as holding standpoint – privileged knowledge of power structures acquired through oppression – as a strategy for inciting audience action. Accepting farm workers as having standpoint served as a precondition for Huerta’s audience members to embody her constructed second rather than third persona. This analysis illustrates standpoint as rhetorically and politically valuable to social justice efforts while contributing to extant scholarship on Dolores Huerta’s rhetoric.

KEYWORDS:

• Standpoint
• epistemology
• rhetoric
• persona
• Dolores Huerta

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Benjamin Bates and the anonymous reviewers for their assistance in improving this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Following de Onís (2015) and others, I use the @ symbol rather than a/o in attempt to “undo the troubling, rigid, normative binaries demarcating sexuality and gender” (p. 14).

2. Here, I draw on Anzaldúa’s, 2007) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza as does Condit (2019) does in her essay wherein she develops a relational theory of ethos.