Resplendent in deep purple, the immensely powerful diminutive lady who used to spit into both eyes of stifling odds needed the assistance of two muscular men this afternoon to ascend to the podium at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion because she is only about one farm worker field away from her 81st birthday, April 10.
[img]1140|left|Dolores Huerta||no_popup[/img]In her Hey, You! day, Dolores Huerta, the peppery professional partner of the late Cesar Chavez as co-founder of the United Farm Workers, would have leaped over anyone proffering help, planted herself before a defenseless microphone and sailed her Si Se Puede message — overcoming mountainous prejudice — around and through her desperately eager Hispanic audience of farm workers and their supporters.
Only Ms. Huerta’s limbs have become frail while her words still bulge with ambulance-like urgency to defeat inherent bias, especially against wretchedly poor (and often undocumented) Hispanics.
Hogan-Rowles’s Business
Ms. Huerta unfurled her steady, unbashful, megaphone-scorning voice today at what was dubbed a Power Luncheon to celebrate 19 years of community reinvestment, especially in small commerce, by the South L.A.-oriented Community Financial Resource Center headed by recent City Council candidate Forescee Hogan-Rowles.
On the eve of what would have been Mr. Chavez’s 84th birthday, Ms. Huerta said in her brief 9-minute keynote address that while broad progress has been made since she and Mr. Chavez birthed the National Farm Workers Assn. — the forerunner of UFW — 49 years ago, in 1962, there was and is too much resistance to rudimentary change to feel satisfied.
She was a single mother of seven and he was a married father of eight when they heroically linked up in common, and richly successful, cause to rescue what many Americans regarded as, shamefully, the country’s final slave culture, Hispanics, mainly Mexican, uneducated, entirely un-Anglicized, and ill-suited to join a workforce that uniformly looked down on them.
For years and with little attention initially, Ms. Huerta, and Mr. Chavez, who died 18 years ago, trooped up and down the largest state in the union, at first making a dent and then finally gaining the attention of the influential legislators by doing what the two of them were best at — inspiring and organizing.
Addressing a crowd of well-coiffed, business-suited bankers, attorneys and financial assistance executives on the fifth floor of the ornate Chandler Pavilion, she said her message never has needed to be modernized. “Everyone should realize that poor people, poor working people, create the wealth of the world, and they must be taken care of,” Ms. Heurta said.
Unhesitatingly, she spanked fellow Californians who have balked at Gov. Brown’s plea for new state taxes.
In the tiny and historic Central Valley community of Arvin, where she lives, just outside of Bakersfield, it is 98 percent Latino, the average income is $15,000 and unemployment is a whopping 30 percent, they are mature enough to understand the crucial role that taxes play, she said. In spite of their modest holdings, 71 percent of citizens voted for a 1-cent tax increase to benefit police and fire departments. Earlier 68 percent of voters backed a bond issue, which will cost all of the residents.
“This time of the year,” Ms. Huerta said, “I speak to many college students, and I like to ask them this question:
If you were going to a desert island and could only take one person with you, who would it be:
“An attorney or a farm worker?”
Her listeners responded with a nervous, possibly guilty, titter.
“People always react that way,” Ms. Huerta said, implying that audiences are unsure how to answer.
