While Helen broke no cultural mold and offended no 1950s sensibilities, offending sensibilities was the specialty of the other female member of the original founding four, Dolores Huerta. Ms. Huerta, a true Ms. before the term came into use, turned the cultural norm of supportive wife and nurturing mother inside out, though less out of rebellion than as an extension of her upbringing by a mother who, like so many others, lived outside the supposedly standard female roles of her time. Alicia, Dolores’ mother, a second-generation New Mexican Hispanic who was twice divorced and thrice married, was often the breadwinner of her family, while her relatives, especially Dolores’s grandfather, became her children’s primary caretakers.
The fortunes of mother and children fluctuated widely. Alicia grew up comfortably as the daughter of a coal miner turned store owner in the booming coal town of Dawson, New Mexico, and graduated from high school, which was unusual for a Hispanic woman in the 1920s. Against her father’s wishes, she moved down in class and status by marrying a first-generation Mexican coal miner, Juan Fernández, who fathered her first three children (Dolores was the second). The marriage broke up in the early thirties when Alicia was in her third pregnancy, and like many others she left the slumping boom town of Dawson and took off for California. She and her three children settled in Stockton, where her father, no longer well off, soon joined them. The Depression years were tough on the family. Alicia worked as a waitress during the day and sometimes did a double shift at night in the canneries. During World War II, her class trajectory pitched upward again with her marriage to James Richards, the new owner of a skid row hotel bought at a bargain price after its original owners, Japanese Americans, had been interned. Alicia managed the hotel, had a child by Richards, and then divorced him, but kept the hotel and soon leased another. By her third marriage, to Juan Silva, she had become a successful Stockton businesswoman, living in an integrated, relatively well-off neighborhood. Dolores, thoroughly bilingual and bicultural, enjoyed some of the accoutrements of American middle-class life—dancing, piano, and violin lessons—and a spot in the Stockton High School orchestra, with the prized position of majorette.
Dolores’s high school graduation was followed by two years at Stockton Junior College, marriage to an Anglo high school classmate, two children, clerical work, separation, divorce, and return to her mother’s home. Mother and daughter remained close. They participated in various Mexican American social service projects and belonged to the women’s division of El Comité Honorifico, helping to plan community celebrations of Mexican holidays. With her mother’s support, Dolores returned to college for a teaching credential. She met her second husband, Ventura Huerta, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, while doing community work. They were married in 1955 and had five children—the last arrived just as they were getting divorced. Both continued to be active in community affairs, but the extent of Dolores’s activity disturbed her husband. He disapproved of her haphazard child-care arrangements but was unwilling to do extensive child care himself. Despite his harsh reproaches, Dolores found more things to do outside the family, and her public commitments shifted away from conventional female community work. She joined the Stockton chapter of CSO and threw herself into its two main activities: citizenship classes and voter registration drives. She then worked with the Mission Band’s Agricultural Workers Association, but she never was completely comfortable there, because Father McCullough focused his efforts on male farm workers and didn’t think that farm worker organizing was a proper role for a woman. When the AWA shut down in favor of AWOC, she joined the latter’s paid staff, but didn’t last long there, either.
As she moved from one organization to another, her knowledge of politics and joy in public life deepened. In 1959, after she left AWOC, Fred Ross, who had brought her into the Stockton CSO four years earlier, added her to the short list of paid CSO staff. In a brilliant move, he hired her to be the CSO lobbyist in Sacramento. She was a pioneer in the state capital, for there were no other Mexican American women lobbyists. By the age of thirty, Huerta had found her vocation. She mastered the intricacies of the legislative process. As she testified at hearings and committee meetings for extending old-age benefits to noncitizens, disability insurance to farm workers, and against the abuses of the Bracero Program, she sharpened her sense of social injustice while maintaining her basic middle-class optimism about the possibilities of social change. She remembered, and reconsidered, the poverty of her early youth and the systematic discrimination against Mexican Americans and African Americans at Stockton High School. She also remembered the example of her mother and the relative lack of gender discrimination in her upbringing. When asked to tell her own story later, she rarely failed to mention that her mother never made her cook for or take care of her brothers, and that from a young age she was taught to assume that women were just as capable and valuable as men. When looking back at childhood for examples of injustice, she typically told a story about high school that combined both anger at the racist and sexist assumptions of her teachers and pride in her own abilities and powers: a teacher had said that her essays were so good that he did not believe she could have written them by herself.
She had not been cheating then, and she was not cheating now as she talked before the state legislators. She was just being herself, and it was exciting and worthwhile. Her only problem was she had all those children, didn’t have a wife like Helen, and her husband was unwilling to become one. Soon, she and her husband were together only off and on. Dolores made child-care arrangements with relatives and friends, hired babysitters, and managed the best she could. Even though she had the help and example of her mother, she was still torn by the conflicting obligations of family and public life. “My biggest problem was not to feel guilty about it,” she said in 1974. “I don’t any more, but then everybody used to lay these guilt trips on me, about what a bad mother I was, neglecting my children.”20 One person who didn’t guilt-trip her was Cesar Chavez, who became national director of CSO while Huerta was working in Sacramento. Chavez respected her dedication and accepted her unusual choices. Here was a will to match his own. “When it comes to organizing all the farm workers, I’m a fanatic,” he told Jacques Levy, “and I look for other fanatics, the ones who really want to get the job done. The desire to win has got to be very strong, or else you can’t do it.” 21
Those were the words, that was the idea, that Huerta needed. Here was a way not only to make sense of her internal struggles but to resolve them. Rather than urging her to cut back on her public life, Chavez asked her to give more. When Chavez left the CSO and moved to Delano, Huerta continued to collect her CSO paycheck but spent much of her time talking to farm workers about the FWA. Combining the two activities soon proved impossible, but rather than stick with the substantial employment possibilities provided by her class background, college degrees, speaking skills, political experience, and teaching credential, she quit her job with the CSO and moved deeper into poverty, working as a unpaid volunteer for the barely surviving FWA. Living on child-support payments from the fathers of her children and unemployment insurance, she worked at organizing the Farm Workers Association in the area around Stockton and in the northern Central Valley. It was a terribly difficult time, with neither a reliable car nor regular child care, but with Chavez’s encouragement and support (they exchanged frequent letters and work reports), she continued. Finally in 1964 she left Stockton and moved to Delano, joining the small, relatively isolated FWA family. Although she earned only $5 a week there, her child-care problems would become a collective responsibility. Helen’s sister Petra virtually adopted Peanuts, Dolores’s youngest child. Laurie Head, Dolores’s eldest child, took major responsibility for her younger siblings with significant help from Virginia Hirsch, Doug Adair, and other FWA volunteers. With the association helping to raise her kids, and with Chavez’s ideas about sacrifice easing her mind, her decision to bet everything on Chavez and the FWA eventually led her to a series of monumental